Welcome to the United States of America, a democratic nation where your vote for the next president counts more or less than other citizens depending on where you live. The electoral college system was put in place by our Founding Fathers and, by and large, has failed immensely ever since its inception. From tiebreakers to unequal value of votes, it’s time for our nation to abandon this dated method and adopt a system when our president is chosen directly by the people, for the people.
Your vote is not as equal as others.
In a true democracy, every citizen’s vote should count equally; however, this is not the case with the electoral college. The electoral college is made up of 538 “votes” that are theoretically distributed proportionally per the population of the state. Each state gets a minimum of 3 electoral votes, and then obtain more based on their population. States then, by theory, should receive 1 electoral vote for approximately every 565,000 people. This does not occur, however, due to the 3 vote minimum per state. Let’s take California and Wyoming for example; the highest and lowest populated states, respectively. In 2008, California had an estimated population of 36,756,666 compared to Wyoming’s 532,668. If solely distributed by population, California should have received 65 electoral votes, but was instead only granted 55. On the contrary, Wyoming was given their minimum 3 votes while they only should have had 1. This means that every vote cast in the 2008 election by a citizen of Wyoming had a relative value of 318% compared to California’s meager 85%. Likewise, in 2008, 36 of the 50 states + DC had their vote count for more than that of the other 15 states (fairvote.org).Nominees spend a majority of their time in battleground states.
Let’s face it, if you don’t live in one of the estimated 10 swing states, chances are you won’t be receiving a single visit from Clinton or Trump this election season; yet this is the case during most election cycles. In the 2012 election, Obama and Romney paid visits to only 12 states following the Democratic National Convention; 8 of which were visited more than 5 times. However, the 4 states with the most visits, Ohio, Florida, Virginia, and Iowa, made up a significant 70% of visits made by the candidates. The electoral college forces candidates to ignore states where they pull votes with big margins and focus their attention on the few swing states that will ultimately be the deciding factor in the election.
You can become president by receiving fewer votes than your challenger.
3 times in American history has the electoral college produced a winning nominee who didn’t win the popular vote of the nation. It most recently occurred in the infamous 2000 election where George W. Bush won the electoral college, courtesy of the Bush v. Gore Supreme Court ruling, but fell approximately 500,000 votes short in the popular vote to challenger Al Gore.Candidates can tie or not receive a majority of the votes.
If you already think the electoral college system is remarkably disproportionate, just wait until you hear how a president is selected in a tiebreaker situation. Because the electoral college has an even amount of votes at 538, it is possible that an election can end in a tie; although highly improbable, there is still a solution to the potential issue. The same system is followed if no candidate reaches the 270 votes required to secure the presidency due to a popular third-party candidate. If either of these 2 situations arises in an election, the House of Representatives then selects the next president. However, not every representative in the House receives a vote, rather each of the 50 states receives a single vote. This means that all representatives within a given state vote for a candidate, and whichever candidate gets a majority vote from the state’s representatives receives the 1 vote granted to that state. It should also be noted that DC does not get to participate in this vote and therefore could create a 25-25 vote tie in the House. This tiebreaker system is extremely flawed not only because it can also end in a tie, but 435 people out of the 322 million living in the USA decide who becomes the next president; that’s about 0.000135% of the population. Now here is where things get even more perplexing: in a tied electoral college, the Senate then decides on the future vice president. Unlike the House, though, each Senator receives a single, personal vote; and if you do the math, this can also and in a 50-50 vote tie. This also means that the House can choose a republican president while the Senate picks a Democratic VP, and vice-versa. So ultimately in a tied electoral college, the next president and vice president would most likely be selected merely on what party holds the majority in that house of government.
Why is it that a democratic nation has such an undemocratic, and frankly baffling, way to elect a president? The electoral college is an archaic and confusing process to choose a new leader. By ditching this system for a simple popular vote, every citizen’s vote will count equally, candidates can pay visits to more than just the battleground states, and it would be virtually impossible to end in a tie. In a nation where the streets are paved in gold, it’s time to adopt a voting system that leaves no grey area.
