Op-Ed: The Problem With The Electoral College
Arabella Rhodes, ‘24
Think back to the 2016 presidential election. Everyone was so sure Hilary was going to win the presidency and then...she didn’t. While Hilary won the popular vote by a margin of nearly 3 million votes, she lost the electoral one. But why is that possible? Why did the candidate that the majority of Americans voted for lose the election? The reason for this is the electoral college. But what is the electoral college and how does it work?
On the most basic level, the Electoral College is a group of 538 electors (these electors are mostly party leaders and members) who pick the president. The difference between the electoral college and you voting is that you don’t pick the president, the electors do. The way this works is when Americans vote, their votes are tallied into their states’ popular vote. Then, the electors from the state in which you voted in see the popular vote and cast all of your state's electoral votes into the popular vote for that state. To win the presidency a nominee has to win a majority of the electoral votes.
The origins of the Electoral College go back to when the Founding Fathers were writing the Constitution. Some states proposed that Congress should pick the president directly. However, many members of the Constitutional Convention didn’t like this idea as it allowed for corruption. Others wanted the people to vote for the presidentdirectly but the convention didn’t trust that the voter could make a correct decision. (which in all fairness, was the correct decision, at the time, considering the best form of long distance communication was a guy on a horse). Both sides compromised and the electoral college was born.
However, in 24 states (including New York) nothing forces the electoral vote to align with the popular vote, meaning state electors can vote against the interests of the people. This explains what happened in the 2016 presidential election, where Trump lost the popular vote but won the presidency. In fact, in 10 of the last 18 elections electors have cast their votes against the popular one. Another quirk in the system is how electoral votes are distributed among states. There are 538 electors because that’s how many people are in Congress. Each state starts with two, for their two Senators, then receives more electors based on the number of House representatives a state has. If all electoral votes were based on population, each vote would be worth roughly 614,000 people. However, because every state starts with two votes, smaller states have more electoral votes than they should, meaning the smaller the population of that state you voted in, the more your vote counts. An example of this would be Rhode Island, with a population of 1.1 million people, they should get two electoral votes, but they don't, they get four. In other words, Rhode Island gets one electoral vote per every 275,000 people, almost half of what it should be. However, these two extra votes have to come from somewhere and that somewhere is states like New York. New York has a population of about 20 million people, meaning it should get 33 votes, but it doesn’t, it gets 29, New York is short 4 votes. Unlike Rhode Island whose votes are per low hundred thousand, New Yorks are per high hundred thousand (690,000). This is an extremely unfair system.
Upon seeing this proponents of the Electoral College say that it protects the small states from the big states, which is a legitimate concern except, that that is the way it should be. If your state's population makes up less of America it should have less of a say in what America does. People vote, not places.
While the easiest way to fix the Electoral College is to abolish it altogether, this is extremely unlikely to ever happen. There have been many attempts to abolish the Electoral College before however, all of them have either died in committee or have been filibustered out of existence. This is where the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact has come into play (NaPoVoInnterCo). This bill doesn’t abolish the Electoral College but renders it useless in elections. It works like this, a state signs the bill and nothing happens at least until enough states sign onto it to make up one-half of the Electoral College (270 votes) then the bill requires all the states that have signed onto the bill to vote for the national popular candidate. This would mean that the Electoral College could, literally never, elect a candidate that didn’t win the popular vote. As of right now, 16 states are signed onto this bill (Maryland, New Jersey, Illinois, Hawaii, Washington, Massachusetts, DC, Vermont, California, Rhode Island, New York, Connecticut, Colorado, Delaware, New Mexico, and Oregon) and makeup 196 votes or 36.4% of the electoral college. The bill is also pending in 5 more states (Ohio, Virginia, South Carolina, Pennsylvania, and New Hampshire) and if every state it’s pending in signs onto it then it would make up 260 votes or 48.3% of the college.
The electoral college is a system that was created by the elites, that includes the elites, and picks a president that represents their interests. This is not democracy, this is tyranny and that is the problem with the electoral college.
While the actual electors are politicians you can lobby them, although many of the lobbying efforts are made by democrats. It’s also worth noting that many of these electors are fairly rich too, which is why many voted for Trump against popular interests.
This idea failed spectacularly.
John Adams took advantage of this when he ran against Thomas Jefferson and paid a newspaper to report that Jefferson had died. This worked considerably well but he never saw a second term.