Obviously a thread from an American with a targeted audience of Americans, but the world stage is welcome to offer their views and perspectives.
For those who don't know what it is, the electoral college is basically the ~538 people who actually vote for the election. For example, my state has 16 electoral college members. Whichever candidate gets more votes in our state gets all 16 college votes. All but 2 states have it as all-or-nothing, where even if it's 51% and 49%, the 51% candidate gets all of the votes.
My first issue with the EC is just that, it doesn't portray the will of Americans, just the will of the states. What is a state except some partition of land that houses people? Why does a state get to completely invalidate the votes of the minority party in that state? A democratic election is based on the principle that every vote matters, and by having your vote effectively deleted because you live in a state that is majority the other party, it is inherently flawed.
Which brings me to my next point. The popular vote. Americans likely remember in 2016 when H. Clinton lost to Trump, despite having the popular vote. Hillary Clinton had 3 MILLION more votes than Donald Trump. Clearly, the will of the majority of Americans is that Hillary Clinton should've won. So why didn't she? Because the electoral college gives greater representation to states of smaller populations.
Curious on just how skewed it is, I decided to take each states population and electoral college votes and put it into excel, then divided the population by the votes. What I found was interesting. Texas is the one extreme, having 650544 people per EC, and Wyoming is the other, have 167080 people per EC. What this says to me is that the vote of people in Wyoming is 4 times greater than those of Texas. This is abysmal misrepresentation of Americans and the will of them.
I've heard arguments with regards to it before, saying that the electoral college gives the people in small states an "equal voice". But honestly, I don't know what mental gymnastics you have to do to figure "my vote means more so it's fair for me". It is very blatantly disproportional. Saying that electoral college helps equality and representation in any way is flawed thinking. True equality in an election would not care what part of America you are from, everyone gets 1 vote.
My last, and arguably least substantial point, is that the electoral college was created with racism in everyone's head. I'm no history buff, and this is my interpretation of about an hour of researching different historical pieces, but back when the system was created the north and south had approximately equal population, but 1/3 of the south's were slaves who weren't allowed to vote. Meaning, if a popular vote system was made, the south wouldn't have as much 'clout' as the north, and they threw a hissy fit. So, the very foundation of the EC, was the south saying "there's more of you than us, so it's not fair." But that's how democracy works. That's how democracy should work. If your idea is less popular than someone else's, and the votes say that, then it doesn't matter how many more of them there are, it's the will of the total population that needs to be fairly represented.
So that's my thoughts. Facts as well as opinions are welcome, just make sure you don't confuse the two.
Tldr: angry liberal mad that farmer get more representation in election than city folk.
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