I hate the Electoral College

I remember being a young lad sitting in my social studies class, listening to my teacher espouse the virtues of democracy.  This was by far my favorite hour of the day, I couldn’t wait to breach the threshold of that classroom.  The origin story of America is trumped by nothing. It’s a delicious cocktail of independence, romance, strength, destiny, fortitude and imagination.  It’s simply beautiful, unless you’re a native but that’s a post for another day. 

We hear the word democracy, and we a trained to pivot toward “one man…one vote”.  In America we have a democracy in every election save ONE. That ONE is the presidential election.  Odd because it’s by far our most important election.  The presidential election is “representatively” democratic.  I learned in that social studies class that there is a thing called the ELECTORAL COLLEGE where the president is actually elected. In this ELECTORAL COLLEGE each state is given a proportional number of votes based on the population of the state, essentially creating voting blocks and making the individual ballot less valuable.

My teacher did a great job of explaining the necessity of the ELECTORAL COLLEGE in the 1700's.  At the time there were 13 colonies, they were independent primarily and unified secondarily.  Most areas had favorite son candidates that ran for president,  they having not the wherewithal to travel from state to state to campaign.  There was no mass communication apparatus or mass transit vehicle to facilitate awareness. So using a popular vote among several candidates didn’t feel like consensus.  There needed to be a way to broker these choices between the election in November, up and through the inauguration in January.  Creating an ELECTORAL COLLEGE was a genius idea for a burgeoning nation, and it was essential for the first 120 years of our union.

However in 1901 the national primary system was taking hold.  Candidates had the ability to move around. There were newpapers, telegraphs, and an emerging railroad system.  National candidates were entering the public arena, giving birth to a National Election of our president. So this all begs the question…why continue with the outdated ELECTORAL COLLEGE?

There are 538 electoral votes.  270 electoral votes are needed to win the presidency.  So as it stands mathematically a president would need only to win the 13 richest electoral states.  Imagine that? There are 50 states and by winning a mere 26% of the states a person could become president.  That doesn’t sound like democracy.  Sounds more like a rigged election.

There have been 4 presidential elections where the candidate that won the popular vote didn’t win the presidency, the last occurring in 2000. That means we've had 4 imperfect elections. 

An electoral map will show that there are states that are strongly democratic or strongly republican.  An unintended consequence is that a presidential election only occurs now in “swing states”.  These are states that have gone elephant and donkey in at least one election over the past 30 years.   

The states that currently elect a president are VA, NC, NH, OH, CO, FL, IA, NV, PA, MI, and MN.

Democracy lends itself to the myth that every vote counts but in reality it doesn’t.  If you’re a democrat in Texas your vote doesn’t count.  If you’re a republican in California your vote doesn’t count.  Some votes count, and the rest of us are "playing" democracy in presidential politics.  Many wonder why voter turn-out is underwhelming. It’s because people have figured it out.  In 39 states our presidential vote doesn’t matter.