THE IRRELEVANT ELECTORAL COLLEGE

Whether or not the electoral college is still necessary is a highly debatable topic.

More and more Americans believe that their votes do not count and because of that, only 55% of eligible voters voted in 2016. In fact, there hasn’t been a voter turnout of 60% or more since 1968.

As of October 2016, America had 200 million registered voters and yet the election is decided by the 538 electors regardless of the popular votes cast on the candidate. In America’s political history, five presidential candidates have become presidents without winning the popular vote, which brings people to ask the question, “Does my vote actually count?”

The electoral college was created by our Founding Fathers in order to appease the smaller states. The number of votes for each state was determined by its population and the minimum number of votes for a state is three.

Because of a lack of communication between the states at the time, the Founding Fathers did not believe the American people were well-informed enough to choose an appropriate president. But nowadays voters have immediate access to modern technology which gives them immediate information to create informed decisions in a way the Founding Fathers could have never predicted.

One major flaw of the electoral college is that it has given too much power to the swing states. With 35% of the total votes controlled by 6 states, only a handful of states can decide the outcome of an election.

The electoral college makes it harder, if not impossible, for a third party nominee to win. The last third party candidate to win a state was George Wallace in 1968, for the American Independent Party.

In 2016, Donald Trump won the presidential election with 304 electoral votes and 62,984,825 popular votes. Hillary Clinton received 65,853,516 popular votes. which means 2,868,691 more American’s voted for Hillary Clinton over Donald Trump. But because Trump campaigned more in the swing states he was still able to win the election. Since then he has received one of the lowest approval ratings in modern American history within the first six months of presidency, rivaled only by Gerald Ford and Bill Clinton.

President Trump, after winning the election in 2016, stated, “I would rather see it where you went with simple votes. You know, you get 100 million votes and somebody else gets 90 million votes and you win.” Even though in this case the electoral college played to his advantage, he agreed that it was no longer needed.

The College creates a greater possibility of a 269-269 tie vote. In this case, the president is chosen by the House of Representatives in a one-state, one-vote process. This occurred once in 1825 when John Quincy Adams was elected over Andrew Jackson.

89% of presidents win both the Electoral College vote and the Popular vote. Only two people in the last 100 years have won based solely on the Electoral College. We need to give the power back to the people.