Wyatt Fisher

1/11/16
JSIS B 472
Written Assignment 1

The United States should amend the Constitution to completely abolish the Electoral
College as an institution and instead utilize direct democracy to elect the President and the Vice-
President. While the Electoral College perhaps made sense as a tool to elect the President and
Vice-President in the era of horse-drawn carriages and the Oregon Trail, today we live in a world
characterized by near-instant communication, the ability to reach the corners of the earth, let
alone the country, in a matter of hours, and ever increasing access to information. To retain the
Electoral College is an insult to the individual liberties and rights of all Americans, as well as to
Americans general commitment to democracy.
According to the National Archives, the Electoral College was established by the
founding fathers as a compromise between election of the President by a vote in Congress and
election of the President by a popular vote of qualified citizens1. Today the idea of the President
being elected by Congress is laughable in most political circles. When the country was founded,
many citizens were so far removed from national politics and its effects that Congress did not
just serve to represent the opinion of their electorate, but also to represent that same electorates
best interests. Indeed, this argument was likely even stronger as Manifest Destiny took hold and
our borders expanded west, and the time to travel from California to Washington, DC would
likely take weeks. Today, it takes less than twelve hours to fly to Guam2, and an American can
watch the local news in London or Mumbai from the comfort of their home in Akron, Ohio. Not
only are Americans far less functionally removed from the goings on in Washington, DC,
Americans are far more educated, with basic civics education in school, at minimum political
news updates from their annoying Political Science major friends on Facebook, and an
increasingly mobile and communicative cadre of candidates for President. So the question
remains, why would such a compromise be necessary in todays world?
The Electoral College spits in the face of democracy. Democracy at its core is supposed
to represent an equal voice for all people: one person, one vote. Yet, the Electoral College instead
disproportionately represents the views of citizens of low-population states. Taking the most
extreme examples of the states with the highest and lowest populations, Californias 55
Electoral College votes mean there are 705,454 people per vote while there are only 194,717
people for each of Wyomings three electoral votes3. It additionally disproportionately
represents the views of voters in states with higher voter turnout, as the number of electors

1 http://www.archives.gov/federal-register/electoral-college/about.html

2 Information taken from travelmath.com

3 http://www.newsmax.com/FastFeatures/Electoral-College-voting-rights/2015/07/02/id/653350/
allocated to each state is equal to number of Congressional seats, which are determined by total
population. For example, if only three people were to vote in Wyoming, each elector would only
be representing the views of a single voter, whereas if electors were allocated by total proportion
of voters the electors represent, those three voters would be represented by one elector at
maximum (unless there was an extreme nationwide issue with voter turnout during that election
cycle). While this scenario is unlikely, it is illustrative to the macro-scale issue with elector
allocation.
Perhaps the most blaring issue with the Electoral College is the degree to which elections
are now predictable. 40 of 50 states have voted for the same [political party] in all four elections
since 20004. This results in most presidential campaigns focusing most of their efforts on
convincing the citizens of those ten or so states to vote for them, nearly ignoring the rest of the
states comparatively. Candidates take for granted the rest of the states by virtue of the candidates
political party affiliation; everyone supposedly knows that Washington will vote for the
Democratic candidate, while Alabama will vote for the Republican. Candidates should feel it
necessary and be excited to try to convince all citizens from all states to vote for them, but the
reality is that in many cases it would be a waste of their time. If a candidate wins 51% of the
popular vote, he typically has about a 95% chance of winning the electoral college5, so it could
be argued that the Electoral College does not particularly stand in the way of democracy.
However, there still exists those times when the Electoral College does not elect the president
that the majority of voters voted for, as happened in the 2000 election, and those are unnecessary
aberrations. Furthermore, elections are so predictable today because many voters assume that
their vote does not matter because they wanted to vote for the candidate they knew their state
would not vote for. The abolition of the Electoral College would thus likely increase voter
turnout as there would exist a greater sense that a single vote actually does make a difference.
The Electoral College was at a time a necessary and reasonable institutional tool by
which to elect the President and Vice-President, but that time has come and gone. The technical
and logistical hurdles of yesteryear that made the college necessary no longer exist, and concerns
about citizens ability to inform themselves properly have dissipated as communication and
information technology has developed. We today live in a world where the rights of Americans to
achieve truer democracy must prevail. The retention of this outdated system is a testament to the
antiquated thinking that some of the powers that be hold onto in an endeavor to preserve for
some citizens greater rights, representation, and influence than other citizens. The Electoral
College must be abolished in the name of the values espoused by the Constitution and of the
government of the United States of America.

4 http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/05/2016-predictions-117554#ixzz3x0qAhnTE

5 http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/ten-miles-
square/2012/07/the_electoral_college_favors_voters_in_small_states_on_average_not_large_stat
es038896.php