Electoral College Flaws

When the Founding Fathers created the Electoral College, it was not a time of the Internet and smartphones; colonists could not find information about a presidential candidate with the swipe of a finger. In fact, the eighteenth century version of CNN was a postman on horseback. Because colonists lacked access to political information, the founders felt voters could not be fully trusted with the duty of electing a president. However, this is where electors became a crucial aspect of the voting process (Mahler and Eder). In a time of advanced technology, voters today can be trusted to make their own choices. Over the past 240 years, America has made many technological and social advancements, yet our electoral system remains cemented in the past.

They may argue that it gives less populated areas a voice, leading to a unified country (Kimberling). William C. Kimberling notes, “Proponents argue that the Electoral College system contributes to the cohesiveness of the country by requiring a distribution of popular support to be elected president, without such a mechanism, they point out, president would be selected either through the domination of one populous region over the others or through the domination of large metropolitan areas over the rural ones.” When stated this way, one can see the benefits of the Electoral College. On the contrary, some believe it allows rural populations to have the upperhand (Kimberling). This is due to the fact that electoral votes are not determined by population size, but by the number of House and Senate members. The problem of disproportional electoral votes can be demonstrated by the election of 1988. In this particular election, the combined electoral votes of North Dakota, South Dakota, Vermont, Wyoming and Washington D.C. (twenty-one in total) equaled the the electoral votes of Florida. This is intriguing because the combined population of those five states was 3,119,000, whereas Florida’s was 9,614,000 (Kimberling). This shows how powerful a handful of rural states can be, especially the ones that tend to be overlooked by campaigning

Voters rank the presidential candidates from their least to most favorite. If a candidate wins more than half of the first choice votes, then that person wins the election. The process functions similarly when used in the Electoral College; the candidate that wins the majority vote in a state receives the electoral votes of that state. However, if no one wins the popular vote, the candidate with the least number of votes is removed from the ballot, and more than one person can be eliminated in this round (Best). Those that marked the eliminated candidate as their first choice will have their votes transferred to their second choice candidate. Finally, the process is repeated until a candidate receives over half of the total votes (“Ranked Choice Voting/Instant