Let Me Explain The Electoral College (And Why It Sucks)

The Electoral College could very well be classified as one of the most unintentionally stupid ideas to ever have been created. I won't bore you with an intro today, as I don't have the patience. Instead, I'll just describe the absolute abomination that it is. Use your brain from here on out.

Say there's two candidates running for president. If a certain presidential candidate wins a state, then they get all of the state's electoral votes. The number of votes they receive is proportional to population: for example, California, being the absolute population juggernaut it is, gets 54 votes. Almost uninhabited Wyoming gets 3.

(No offense to you, Wyomingians).

If you work out the actual math, though, California should get 52 votes, and Wyoming should get 1. Why is there a two-vote surplus? Because the creators of the Electoral College were concerned about large states having a lot of power compared to small ones, so they added two votes to every state to give smaller states comparatively more power.

It still doesn't work though, because California's 54 votes is still enough to knock Wyoming's three out of the park. California will still have more voting power; this policy doesn't fix anything.

Now, though, Wyoming has 3 times the amount of votes it should, and every Wyomingian's vote is worth about three times a Californian's vote if you do the math.

Sincere question: Where is the democracy? Did it decide to take a vacation?! Is it disappearing into the void?

On to the other problem: the winner-takes-all part of things.

The disgusting abomination that is winner-takes-all means that it doesn't matter whether you win a state by one vote or by a million; you still win every electoral vote. Because of this, candidates often focus all of their campaigning on just a few swing states, because they just don't care about the states they know they're definitely going to win.

Say that in one of these "certainty states", around 40% of people really don't want a particular policy of the candidate, but voters in another swing state do want that policy. The candidate will endorse that policy, because they don't care if they lose that 40% in the certainty state.

There could potentially be six states that support a policy while forty-four don't, and the candidate will still endorse it. The Electoral College incentivizes the swing states to bully all the other ones.

So, how do we fix it?

One option, probably the most explosive and simply sooooo horrifying one for US politicians, is to simply use the popular vote like almost every other country choosing its president. Revolutionary, right?! It would mean that politicians now have to fight for the votes of dissenters all around the country, even in states that they know they will win.

A less nuclear option that might be more palatable to the really old, retirement-age, senile politicians out there, might be just to get rid of the winner-takes-all policy, and distribute electoral votes proportionally to how people actually voted in the state. Once again, politicians might actually have to fight for those votes, and listen to those voters for once.



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