The Electoral College is the system used to determine the outcome of presidential elections and has been around since the beginning of America itself.
The way it works is each state has a certain number of votes: two for their seats in Congress and a vote for each seat they hold in the House of Representatives.
These votes are pledged to reflect the votes of the people in each state, so if half of the people in Illinois voted for the Republican candidate and the other half voted Democrat, half of the state’s electoral votes would go to each candidate.
However, in some states there is a winner-take-all rule that gives all electoral votes to whoever had the majority vote. And this, friends, is where we get into some trouble.
You see, the delegate system is like reducing fractions with a significant margin of error. If a state splits the electoral votes it has the potential to be more accurate, but there are still states who use the winner-takes-all rule, making the votes of delegates unrepresentative of the people.
Another issue that arises is when delegates vote for someone other than who they pledged to vote for. Delegates are just citizens and when they go into the polls they can cast their ballots for whomever they please.
There are penalties in some states for being an “unfaithful voter,” but not all states. This inconsistency further skews the accuracy of the electoral college.
People who favor the electoral college system typically do so because they believe basing elections off of a majority vote would be representative of people and not land. Because big cities like New York and Los Angeles have such high populations, they would have a large say in what happens in rural areas.
While more people would be represented by the vote, areas of land that have less population density would be subject to the laws determined by those in cities.
I think this is just plain dumb. Most notably in our last election, the majority vote did not win. This has happened a few other times in history and proves that the Electoral College is not actually representative of the people, and therefore should be discarded.
If you’ve made it this far into the article and are not at least a little confused, then way to go. But if you are, you’re with the majority of Americans who find the system altogether hard to understand. It makes it seem as though our votes doesn’t count as much as we anticipated, and ultimately discouraging the civic duty of voting.
Voting is important! It helps determine where our money goes and what rights we have, and to have a system that makes voting seem less important than it really is only harms our country.
Emma Farina
Opinions Columnist