Every four years we see the same few states in the news consistently. States like Ohio, Michigan, Florida and a few others are considered swing states during elections. I don’t have to describe what these are, but these states are the ones who essential chose who becomes the president. The Electoral College is a system that unfairly determines the president and needs to be abolished.
This system was put into place to create an election that was more than just a mixture of a popular vote and where Congress selects the president. This is the system that the Founding Fathers put into place in the late 1700s and has no place in America today.
The Electoral College probably worked great at that time, but as America developed and expanded it became increasingly clear how this system doesn’t work. The Electoral College puts more value in some people’s votes than others and can deter people from going out to vote.
The best example of the Electoral College being unfair is how people in Wyoming have more voting power than people in California. In Wyoming, which had 230,230 registered voters, they have three electoral votes. This means there is one electoral vote for every 76,743 people.
Compare this to California who has over 22 million registered voters but only 55 electoral votes. This means one electoral vote for 400,000 people. So, someone in Wyoming’s vote has more meaning to their state’s electoral votes than a voter in California.
This is just one example of something that happens in many other states. This system puts more value in a voter who lives in a smaller population, more rural states, than it does to those living in higher population areas.
This clearly isn’t fair, it’s also a system that discourages voting due to the all-or-nothing nature of the Electoral College. All of a state’s electoral votes go to whoever wins that state, whether it be by one point or 10. That can deter those who are the minority party of the state.
This was proven in the 2016 election. Voters in swing states had a 12% higher turnout rate than the national average. This means that in states where people’s votes for president matter, they are more likely to vote.
Our election system should be one designed to promote voting, not discourage it. While the issue of voting is a whole separate topic, the current system does not promote it, but it should.
The one criticism that people have with abolishing the Electoral College is the idea that this puts more power into bigger cities and lets them choose the president. Ignoring the fact that our current system does the opposite of this, this idea just isn’t true.
If you took the entire population of the 10 biggest cities in America, you still only get 14% of the entirety of registered voters in the U.S. This means there would still be a lot of power in the rural communities. Presidential candidates would have to campaign across the whole country, not just focus their resources on the same few states.
I don’t see the Electoral College being abolished anytime soon, but I really think that it is something that needs to be discussed more. While there are a lot of other problems with America’s political system, I really think that this change would be a welcome one and one step closer to fixing the system.
Mark Warren can be reached at [email protected] or on Twitter @MarkWarren1832