UM students who aren’t from Florida face a tricky decision this voting season: where to register to vote. This conundrum is largely because of the unique system of presidential election in this country, the Electoral College.
The Electoral College is a group of 538 delegates, called electors, who cast their vote for president. When citizens vote for a candidate, they are technically voting for a candidate’s preferred electors. The candidate who wins the popular vote in each state is awarded all of the electors in that state, except for Maine and Nebraska.
Because of this system, it is possible for a candidate to win the popular vote, which occurs when a majority of citizens across the country vote for said candidate, but lose the Electoral College, thus losing the election.
This has happened 5 times in U.S. history, most recently in the 2016 Presidential Election, where Republican Donald Trump beat Democrat Hillary Clinton with 304 electoral votes to 227, even though Clinton garnered 2.8 million more individual votes. This was largely due to Trump’s success in key swing states, including Michigan, Arizona and Pennsylvania.
The Electoral College undermines a truly fair and competitive election. For example, a republican vote in New York has virtually no impact on most elections, as that state hasn’t been won by a Republican since 1984. Similarly, a state like Kansas has committed all of its electoral votes to Republicans since 1968. However, for the several swing states that emerge in each election, each vote matters more.
In a smaller and simpler America, when the Constitution was created and people lacked resources to educate themselves on politics, the Electoral College was an ingenious compromise. However, nowadays, no matter how educated people choose to be, the idea that low-information voters should not be able to make choices is anti-democratic.
A democracy should always represent the will of the people, otherwise it ceases to serve its purpose. The Founding Fathers also had to appease the Southern states’ reliance on slavery, which is no longer an institution today. An Electoral College (with the Three-fifths Compromise) gave the South more influence than a potential popular vote.
The Electoral College is severely outdated, it is time to bury it and use a new system of the popular vote.
James Wilson, one of the Founding Fathers, believed that a popular election was the ideal voting method. He trusted the average American, claiming that they were naturally good and would selflessly pick the best leader.
The other Founding Fathers had a different idea. They thought that Americans would not have enough information to intelligently pick the best candidate, so they created the Electoral College, entrusting the final choice of the president to electors.
This is not the case today. We now live in an information age — everything is accessible at our fingertips. Social media and news sources relay breaking news that can even be less than minutes old. Access to information and becoming an informed voter is not a problem in our elections anymore and people make the choice if they want to be informed or not — a luxury many in the era of the Founding Fathers didn’t have.
When the Founding Fathers debated the ideal voting system, the Southerners objected to a popular vote as well, worrying they would have less power. About 40% of the South’s population were slaves who could not vote, and the number of free white men in the South was far less than in the North.
At the time, slave labor was the backbone of the economy in the South. As James Madison famously quoted, “The right of suffrage was much more diffusive in the Northern than the Southern States; and the latter could have no influence in the election on the score of the Negroes.”
This problem resulted in the Three-fifths Compromise, or for purposes of designating representatives and calculating taxes, slaves would count as 3/5 of a person.
We no longer live in a time of slavery. Since the structure of the Electoral College was based on numerous compromises regarding institutions that no longer exist — namely the Three-fifths Compromise — it is flawed and there is no need for it anymore.
On the other hand, a switch to a popular vote would drastically alter the dynamic of presidential campaigning. Candidates generally invest far more time, money, and effort into campaigning in certain swing states than in states that are solid blue or red. For example, in Pennsylvania, a swing state in the 2024 election, Donald Trump spent $132.1 million in advertisements (March to September 2024), compared to $31.2 million in the rest of the country.
With a popular vote, candidates are likely to visit densely populated areas, such as cities, in order to reach the most people at once. They are less likely to campaign in rural areas where there are fewer people, thus making residents of these areas feel underrepresented, but that is not the case. Rural areas and smaller states are actually overrepresented and switching to the popular vote would move everyone to an equal playing field.
The number of electors each state has is equal to the sum of their seats in the House plus Senate. The number of seats in Congress was decided by the Great Compromise of 1787, which created a bicameral national legislature: one that had an equal number of representatives (as requested by the smaller states) and one that had representatives proportional to its population (as requested by the larger states).
Therefore, the Electoral College gives residents of smaller states significantly more voting power than residents of large states. Due to the partition of electoral college votes, a singular electoral vote represents 195,000 people in Wyoming (the least populated US state), but more than 700,000 people in the most populous states of Texas, Florida, or California. In other words, a vote in Wyoming has 3.6 times more power than a vote in California.
How can all Americans be treated equally if the vote of one holds more significance than the vote of another? They can’t.
The Electoral College was an ingenious idea in the 1700s, however, it was made for a society that is far different than it is today. A better way to elect a president would be with a popular vote, equally valuing every American’s voice.