Why the Electoral College Needs To Be Abolished

A map of the 2016 presidential election results by popular vote in each congressional district. Donald Trump won the election despite earning several million fewer total votes than his opponent, Hillary Clinton. Source

The idea of the electoral college was born out of a compromise between the popular election of the President and congressional selection: today it is a racist relic that inflates certain voters' importance while disenchfranching others.

The essential premise of the electoral college is that when a person votes for a presidential candidate, it goes to that statewide tally. In 48 states and Washington D.C., the winner gets all of that state’s electoral votes, while Maine and Nebraska use a proportional system. The candidate who surpasses 270 electoral college votes, more than half of all electors, wins the election.

The Constitution does not force electors to follow the state’s popular vote, but many state laws do require it.

The electoral college favors sparsely populated areas by design, but over the nation’s history this imbalance has become even more extreme. Votes from Wyoming carry over three times as much weight as a vote from California in determining presidential elections. 

This distortion is the result of many Americans moving into cities. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, urban populations increased by 12.1 percent from 2000 to 2010. This trend will likely persist, and if left in place, the electoral college will continue devaluing American votes.

There is also the issue of American’s living overseas — the approximately 4 million Americans who have no say in who is elected president. That number includes Americans living in Puerto Rico, which has a population larger than 21 states.

Furthermore, the electoral college is institutionally racist: it was constructed to protect the interests of slaveholding Southerners. It should then be no surprise that, in the first 36 years of the Constitution, a white slaveholding Virginian occupied the presidency. For example, in the election of 1800 between Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, Jefferson would not have won the presidency without the extra electoral votes generated by slavery.

Does changing the electoral college actually make a difference in elections? Yes.  There have been five times when a Presidential candidate won the popular vote and lost the election.

Without the electoral college, Al Gore would have been in office during the events of 9/11, and Hillary Clinton would have helmed our national pandemic  response. History might have gone very differently — the war on terror that displaced at least 37 million people might not have happened, and the United States might not have failed to control the spread of COVID-19.

The movement for getting rid of the electoral college has only gotten recent attention and has been endorsed by past presidential candidates such as Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and Pete Buttigieg. 

There is no excuse for the preservation of the electoral college when it undermines our democracy and serves as a relic of the racism that still pollutes this country. In order to preserve the legitimacy of our elections it is necessary for the United States to abolish the electoral college and switch to a direct national voting system