Electoral Catastrophe

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Electoral Catastrophe

                The Electoral College was a good idea a couple hundred years ago, but in the modern world it is totally unnecessary and unreasonable, and should be dramatically altered or totally scrapped.  The way the Electoral College is that there are 538 seats in Congress, and each district throughout the country gets one Electoral vote.  Each state gets the same number of Electoral votes as it has seats in Congress, and Washington, D.C. also gets three votes.  However, in most states, whichever candidate wins the most Electoral votes in that states takes credit for all the Electoral votes in the state, thus ‘winning’ the entire state.  When votes had to be counted by hand, and there was a great deal of human error, intentional or unintentional, this was a better system create a buffer between the candidates and the public.  However, nowadays, votes can be made and counted electronically, so I believe it would make more sense for the public and the popular vote to have a greater impact on whom gets elected.

                Many people would argue that it’s not that big of a deal, because usually the candidate that wins the Electoral vote is the same one that wins the popular vote.  However, four times in history, most recently the election of 2000, the winner of the popular vote has lost the Electoral vote, and therefore lost the election.  This is nonsense, because as stated in the Declaration of Independence, Constitution and whatever else is that every man is created equal.  I take that to mean that every American citizen’s vote should be counted equally, meaning that the popular vote should be the decider of the election, as the greatest percentage of citizens wants it that way.  Many of the elections in our country’s history were pretty lopsided, especially during times of unipartisan domination, making the Electoral College a very efficient and easier alternative to counting every last vote.  However, as the last few elections have all been totally down to the wire, and the popular vote winner sometimes loses the election, the Electoral College simply isn’t acceptable any longer.

                I believe there are two ways to fix this.  The first way would be to simply base the election off the popular vote, as this would directly represent every voter equally.  The second would be to divide up each state’s Electoral votes, as is already somewhat the case in Maine and Nebraska.  I think this second way would also be an acceptable alternative.  If you couldn’t already guess, I wasn’t thrilled when George W. Bush defeated Al Gore, despite Al Gore winning the popular vote.  We wouldn’t be talking about things like the economy or Afghanistan if that wouldn’t have happened.