OPINION: The electoral college is oppressive and outdated

American politics are far from perfect. Plenty of governmental processes that were established decades or even hundreds of years ago continue to cause strife for American citizens to this day. Quite possibly the most relevant and controversial of them all is the electoral college. 

Each presidential election year, the topic of the electoral college is called into the minds of those voting. This process acts as one of two that ultimately decide the nation’s next president, alongside the popular vote. While the popular vote describes the voting decisions of everyday people across the nation, the electoral college consists of chosen members who ultimately decide which candidate a state will choose. There are 538 electors nationwide, meaning a candidate needs 270 votes to win the election.  

Originally established in 1787, the electoral college was created by the Founding Fathers as a compromise between allowing the nation to choose with a popular vote and allowing Congress to make the ultimate decision. A compromise is typically meant to minimize controversy, so what exactly is the issue?  

The problem therein lies with the way the system is set up—when all is said and done, those 538 electors have more voting power than every other American—and that 270 majority is the final deciding factor in who becomes the nation’s next president. This means it’s possible for a candidate to lose the popular vote but win the electoral college vote.  

While this event has occurred only a handful of times in United States history, we more recently saw the popular candidate lose the electoral vote twice. The first was in 2000 when George W. Bush narrowly beat Al Gore and the second in the infamous 2016 election with Donald Trump receiving the electoral vote over Hillary Clinton.  

For a country that was built on the ideals of democracy, the electoral college is a decidedly undemocratic method of choosing the president. The idea that the voices of American voters can be completely undermined by an extremely small handful of people is oppressive and dictatorial.  

Not only is the electoral college contradictory to the principles of this country, the true intentions behind the creation of the process back in the 18th century are questionable and problematic. While it’s true that the Founding Fathers were interested in a compromise between Congress and the American citizens, an additional concern came from states with high levels of institutionalized slavery.  

With higher populations of enslaved Black people (about 40% of the South’s total population at the time according to CBS), southern states wanted to ensure they had the same level of power as their northern counterparts. Because Black people could not vote at the time, the “three-fifths compromise” and the electoral college were proposed to ensure the South wouldn’t be at a severe disadvantage when it came to voting power.  

The “three-fifths compromise” refers to the decision to allow slave-owning states to count every three out of five of their enslaved people when determining census numbers for legislative representation. 

The electoral college may have made more sense in 1787, back when life was far more localized and knowledge surrounding politics wasn’t necessarily widespread. However, in modern times, the voting system is illogical and absurd in terms of the wellbeing of America as a country and its citizens. And it’s safe to say that much of anything that came to be from slavery is probably something we should take a closer look at through the lens of the present day.