The Electoral College is an outdated mess that needs significant rearranging if it will ever truly reflect the country’s thoughts on a presidential candidate.
There are 538 electors that comprise the Electoral College, each of whom vote for the majority presidential candidate.
The respective states’ 270 votes are needed for the candidate to earn the presidency.
In the current system, the winner of California, which has 55 electoral votes, receives all of those votes.
The number of electoral votes each state gets is based on its population.
There are only two avenues of change that can feasibly affect the system for the better: nixing the system altogether, or removing the winner-take-all rule.
Removing the Electoral College system means the vote for the nation’s presidency would solely rely on the popular vote.
Five of the 44 presidents in America’s history have been elected despite the outcome of the popular vote, just over 11% and the likelihood of it continuing to happen will assuredly increase.
In the 1800s, presidents John Quincy Adams, Rutherford B. Hayes and Benjamin Harrison all lost the popular vote but found themselves in the oval office regardless.
In more recent times, the same occurred with President George W. Bush in 2000 and President Donald Trump in 2016 each losing the popular vote to Al Gore and Hillary Clinton, respectively.
A problem that will show itself even more, thanks to a federal appeals court ruling last month, is electoral voters voting for whichever candidate they choose, regardless of whether that candidate was favored in that state or not.
The role of the electoral voter, in theory, is to vote in accordance with the state’s popular chosen candidate. This ruling throws that right out of the window and means that electoral voters can now choose whichever candidate they like.
The electors put in place should not have the freedom to be able to choose the candidate they prefer and completely defy the candidate their state wanted. It renders the entire system pointless.
Electoral voters that vote against their public’s choice, known as faithless electors, have made headlines before.
In 2016, Colorado’s democratic elector Michael Baca wrote in Republican John Kasich for his vote despite Hillary Clinton having the voting edge in the state, according to a New York Times article.
Baca was eventually replaced with a different elector that voted for Clinton, but the latest ruling will make the choices of future faithless electors stand.
Faithless electors aside, the biggest problem of the Electoral College as a whole is the candidate that wins the popular vote in a state receives all of the electoral votes in that state.
Due to partisan loyalty, presidential candidates tend to only oppose their campaigning will onto swing states, which are states that have historically been nonpartisan when selecting presidential candidates.
In the 2016 election, Clinton nearly doubled the amount of votes Trump received in California, but he still collected about
4.5 million votes.
Texas, second in the country with 38 electoral votes, went to Trump, despite Clinton earning more than 3.8 million votes.
This winner-take-all rule is not actually in the constitution, it’s a decision that was made by the states. Two states, Nebraska and Maine, do not abide by the winner-take-all model.
Maine, for example, has the ability to “award one electoral vote per congressional district and two by the state-wide ‘at-large’ vote,” according to the U.S. Electoral College website.
Because of its low number of electoral votes, Maine will most likely never swing an election by itself, but if California decided to forgo the winner-take-all formula, then that would affect the outcome of elections.
While there is no perfect solution to the Electoral College problem, removing it entirely or requiring every state to be rid of it’s winner-take-all style is the closest we will come to the people of this country having the most say in who wins the presidency.
