An Outdated System
The Electoral College Has to Go
When a person can still become the President of the United States despite loosing the popular vote by millions it is time for the system to come under intense scrutiny. That is exactly what happened in 2016 when President Donald Trump won the Presidential Election but lost the popular vote by OVER 2,000,000 votes. He is not the ONLY president to assume office despite a loss in the popular vote, though. He is only the most recent to accomplish this feat.
The Electoral College has been in existence since the United States became a country. It was created as a compromise between a vote by Congress and a popular vote by the people in true democratic fashion. I do not think the Founding Fathers ever intended it to be a way to completely bypass the popular vote in such glaring ways as it has in recent history, but that is what has happened at least five times in American History. John Quincy Adams, Rutherford B, Hayes, Grover Cleveland, George W. Bush, and Donald Trump have all lost the popular vote but still managed to win the Electoral College, and thus the Presidency.
It is my view the Electoral College is an outdated system that circumvents the will of the people and should be done away with entirely. Simply count the votes and let the man or woman who won the most votes take the office of the Presidency. Obviously, this is far easier said than done since abolishing a system that has been in place since the inception of our Nation is a complex matter. The system has the weight of tradition and history in its favor, but sometimes traditions need to be broken. We also need to learn lessons from history in order to advance to a better future.
Both times a Republican President has sat in the oval office this century came from elections they lost the popular vote and won the electoral vote. George W. Bush lost the popular vote by 500,000 votes, and Donald Trump lost by an astounding 2.8 million votes and still became President because he won the right states. That is the crux of my problem with the Electoral College. It only requires a candidate to win a handful of states with a large number of electors and basically negates the vote of the entire rest of the country. That is unacceptable. Here is the breakdown of Electoral votes by state. Some states have as few as 3 votes while others have as many as 40. That disenfranchises the voters in these underrepresented states entirely.
There have been many efforts to do away with the Electoral College or at least modify how it operates to resemble how Nebraska and Maine function where the Elector’s Votes more closely resemble the sentiment of all the voters. Personally, going with a straight popular vote would be my preference, but I would settle for the ability to split the votes by percentages or individual districts. This begs the question, why don’t both parties support a system where the popular vote is the determination of victory? The answer is very simple. Republicans have not won a popular election since before the turn of the century. In fact, they tend to loose the election with strong voter turnout.
There is no benefit for the Republican party to agree to do away with the system that has allowed their party to win two presidential elections, one of them when their candidate lost the popular vote by ALMOST three million votes. The Republican party has been filing cases in multiple states to make it harder for people to vote at all, so why would they agree to overturn a facet of the system that still holds some use for them? Right now they are in the process of trying to force Nebraska to adopt the all or nothing method of casting Electoral College votes instead of the system they currently have. Why? Because while the Republican party generally wins the majority of the Electoral Votes in Nebraska there is one district in specific that tends to vote Democratic Party and that gives ONE vote to the Democratic Candidate. The Republican party wants to try and make sure they get ALL the votes they can. They know this is going to be a tight race decided by the thinnest of margins, and they want to stack the deck in their favor as much as possible.
We are told our votes matter as we grow up. We are told one man or woman, one vote, and that’s how it works. That is a system I genuinely believe in, and believe should be the law of the land. Everyone’s vote should have equal weight regardless of what state they come from, what party they are voting for, and what candidate they are voting for. I do not care for Trump, nor do I support him in this election BUT I will not try to deny those who support him their right for their votes to count. That is not how a democracy should function. The Electoral College is a system that is too easily manipulated to negate the popular vote, and it is open to too much manipulation. We only need to turn our eyes back to the 2000 election where George W. Bush won. It came down to just under 600 votes in Florida, which has 30 Electoral votes. It went to the courts of Florida to decide in a complex case involving potentially uncounted votes. In the end, the courts ruled in Bush’s favor and he became President despite the fact he lost the popular vote by half a million votes. We don’t want our elections determined in the courts. We want them determined by the people. Of the people, for the people, and BY the people - that’s what the United States says it was founded on. It is time to truly be OF and FOR the people.