What the Electoral College Means in Modern-Day America

Some people may wonder why it is that I hold such a severe opinion, but to explain my position, I need to briefly go back to the origins of this political body, and explain how it works, and why it was there in the first place. After all, it must have been needed at some point, yes?

When the electoral college was established, it was a commonly held belief that only those wealthy enough to own land were educated enough to make an informed decision on who should be the next president. For proof of this, all one has to do is examine the U.S. Constitution. However, our burgeoning government faced another hurdle: the large amount of territory that needed to be covered, and the raw number of votes taken, was difficult to manage in those early days, and it was unclear as to how many ballots were lost, altered, fraudulent, and so forth. Therefore, it was reasoned, the popular vote was simply to be a guide; a benchmark if you will, to indicate who the populace at large wanted to be their next leader. The electoral college served the function of taking the popular vote from each state, and using the votes cast as a guide, voted directly to elect the next president. This was much easier to manage, since there were few enough people casting the votes that really mattered that they could all be assembled in one room, and there was no worry over votes being lost or the like.

However, since the popular vote had been established as strictly a guide for the electoral college, there is not, nor has there ever been, anything that requires the members of the College to follow the popular vote at all. In fact, there have been instances of individuals, and whole states, who deliberately cast their ballots against the popular opinion from their state.

Now, the electoral college did serve a useful purpose for a long time. However, in today's elections, it does nothing but make the individual citizen's vote mean less than it should. Why do I say this? The answer is simple. For the sake of demonstration, suppose you had only three states, all with 100 voters and 3 delegates to the electoral college. The votes come in: The Republicans won 73, 30, and 49 votes totaling 153. Democrats seized 22, 58, and 50 votes, totaling 130. Various third parties took 5, 12, and 1 respectively, totaling a meager 18. Now, by the popular vote, the winner should be the Republican candidate at 153 votes, beating the Democratic candidate who only had 130. However, since the Democratic candidate "won" two states and the Republican candidate only "won" in one state, the Democratic candidate wins.

It is these sort of "winner take all" policies that are steadily ensuring that the individual voter is less and less likely to actually go out and vote. Of course, since the electoral college is not required to follow the popular vote anyway, it really doesn't much matter what any of us decides to vote on anyway, it just so happens that there hasn't been an instance of the electoral college going against the popular vote of their state, at least in any amount that made a significant difference, since the dawn of electronic media. It is only a matter of time until it happens again however.

Although, I suppose the electoral college doesn't have too much power anyway, since precedent was set in the 2000 presidential election that the Supreme Court can intervene on the election process and appoint a candidate to the presidency. Our beloved democracy, reduced to nothing more than a handful of people in a small room deciding for us who should lead. I guess we've come full circle. After all, the original electoral college wasn't much more populous.