e Democratic candidate for president could post a higher national aggregate vote total while failing to win a majority of electors in enough states to carry him or her to victory” (Roff 1-2). This happened in the 2016 election where New York senator Hillary Clinton lost to businessman Donald Trump despite receiving nearly three million more votes than him. All politics aside, this system directly contradicts the “one person, one vote” principle of democracy.. The electoral college also encourages gerrymandering. Although it may seem like candidates campaign in the entire country, “candidates target states based on whether they are among a decreasing pool of swing states that in the previous election demonstrated a relatively balanced partisanship” …show more content…
One American’s vote can be “more equal” than another based solely on their location. Presidential candidates ignore the majority of the country during their campaigns, and about half of the country’s states don’t even require their electors to vote as pledged, rendering their citizens votes virtually useless. Regardless of its problems, many people view the electoral college as a nuance of American politics, oblivious to its many obvious issues.. Slavery -- the main reason the system was created to begin with -- was also legal throughout most of human history. For most, it was simply a nuance of life, as it didn’t affect them in any meaningful way, but by the time the Civil War started, many anti-abolitionists were fully aware of it’s inhumanity but feared that abolishing it would have too significant of an impact on society (more specifically, the US economy). The “formality” aspect of the electoral college system that the Gale Encyclopedia of U.S. History hints at it the assertion that “Democratic reforms and the rise of the two-party system have turned it [The electoral college] into a mere formality” (“The Electoral College” 1) alone cause may be the reason so many otherwise reasonable Americans still defend the system. Recapitulating on the idea that what may seem normal and harmless can actually cause great injustice, many average Americans in the seventeenth century grew up with the idea that slaves were actually happy. All Americans must practice genuine moral introspection to identify the basic political issues in their country and the world in general in the present day, regardless of social and political