The system that America established to elect the president is called the Electoral College. States have a select number of electors that vote, depending on how the people in their states vote. The system today is unbalanced and corrupt and does not accurately represent the American public.
The Electoral College, when first established, made sense, to an extent. The number of electors that each state received is based on the number of representatives and senators, with the minimum each state can receive being three. This, on its own, does not sound like a bad way of organization. Since the number of representatives is based on population, it would only make sense that the Electoral College is also based on population. Wyoming, a state with a population of approximately 453,000 people, receives three electors. However, Nebraska, a state with almost double the population, about 800,000, also gets three electors, since the population is small enough. Therefore, one vote in Wyoming equates to more than one vote in Nebraska.
More populous states receive more electoral votes. California, for example, has 55 electoral votes, which, in a system where the presidential candidate only needs 270 to win the election, appears to be a huge number. That is, unfortunately, not the case. According to the statistics found on archives.gov, one vote in Wyoming has 3.6 times the voting power that one vote in California has. This means that for the more populous states, such as California and New York, the votes received there actually equate to substantially less than in Wyoming.
In every state besides Nebraska and Maine, the electors follow a “winner-takes-all” system. What this means is that, if the majority of the state votes for one candidate, that candidate gets all of the electorates for that state. In the case of the 2016 election, Florida had less than 200,000 more votes in favor of Donald Trump, or about 1.3 percent more than Hillary Clinton. However, since Florida follows the winner-takes-all system, all of the 29 electoral votes went to Trump. Many people blamed those who voted third party, in this case Jill Stein and Gary Johnson, for Trump’s victory over Clinton. If the third-party voters in Florida, about 3 percent of voters, had voted for Clinton, then the entire outcome of the election would have been different.
Voting third party in the United States is unrealistic and idealistic. There has never been an elected president that has run as an independent and won, which only allows for the country to be more divisive.
The Electoral College is both outdated and corrupt. It no longer accurately represents the American people, and it discourages people from using their votes to vote for who they want to see in office, in fear of a winner-takes-all system that favors the major parties. The Electoral College should be abolished in favor of a popular vote or needs to be altered to match the population of each state and not support a winner-takes-all system.
