Does the current electoral system need to be changed?
The electoral system of voting for the president was created in 1787 as an easier way to tally the vote of the Americans. Due to the lack of modern technology, and the abundance of people who could not vote. Originally, Congress were going to be the ones to elect the president. Although this system of voting worked back then, much has changed in the world since 1787. There are ways to more accurately tally the vote, and popular vote can be counted, so why do we stick with the electoral system?
The electoral system gives more power and independence to the individual states. If all a candidate cared about were individual votes, and not a states electoral votes, then states with lower populations, such as Wyoming, would not be given as much attention. Swing states would not be given as much attention, since a candidate no longer needs the majority of votes from that state in order to gain the votes of the people who voted for them. States like New Hampshire could be forgotten.
The contrary to this argument is that states with higher electoral votes and higher populations already have more attention anyway. Florida, which is already a swing state, would still continue to receive massive amounts of attention from candidates. Candidates may even focus their time on even more states, as it does not matter if the majority of the votes in Texas are Republican or the majority of the votes in California are Democrat. The 'losing' candidate will still gain a large number of votes from these highly populated areas anyway, and they may do more campaigning there. No electoral vote would mean that every single vote would matter. Sure, candidates would put the majority of their time toward states with higher populations, since they would gain more votes there, but that does not mean the votes in other states would not be important, as they would pile up and could eventually decide the race for a candidate. Every vote would be equal and count, which is not true currently. Wyoming, which is the state with the lowest population, has 3 electoral votes, the same as the states Alaska, Delaware, District of Columbia*, Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, and Vermont, all of which have a higher population than Wyoming. This means that a vote in Wyoming is worth more than a vote in any of these other states under the electoral system.
The electoral may be around for many more years, or it may end soon. The push to get it removed comes after Hillary Clinton's recent loss in the election, where she lost the electoral vote, but is winning by nearly 1.5 million votes at the time this article is being written.
