The United States utilizes a fair, equally representative system to elect its president, right? Wrong. By examining the most basic criterion of evaluating elections, the classic “Everyone’s vote should count the same,” the United States, and more specifically the Electoral College, is doing an unequivocally terrible job representing its citizens in presidential elections. The Electoral College currently counts one Vermonter’s vote as equal to three Texans’, and one Wyomingite’s vote is worth four Californians’. Clearly this is unacceptable, and thankfully it can be changed. The Electoral College is flawed, and should be replaced with a direct, popular election utilizing the Alternative Vote. It is first worth examining both the status quo and how it came to be. The factors that led the Founding Fathers and Framers of the Constitution to the Electoral College are no longer relevant. The first was that it could take several weeks to transmit information from one end of the country to the other, making direct election impractical and a representative election more convenient. Now, in the digital era of near-instantaneous communication, this concern is no longer relevant. The …show more content…
The textbook definition for the monotonicity criterion is as follows: “A voter can’t harm a candidate's chances of winning by voting that candidate higher, or help a candidate by voting that candidate lower” (Electoral Politics Dictionary). This makes a lot of sense and ought to be preserved whenever possible. Those against the Alternative Vote (AV) say that because AV is not monotonic in every single case, it ought to be dismissed out of hand (Edwards 114). However, Dr. Crispin Allard, who holds a PhD in statistics from the University of Warwick, estimates the Alternative Vote will fail the monotonicity criterion at a chance of 0.03% per election, an acceptable rate, especially when weighed against the benefits of AV (Van der