The electoral college is flawed in many ways and should be changed to better represent the public’s voice. The electoral college was first created by the framers of the US constitution in 1787, to help create a voting system where everyone (the white landowning males) had the power and right to vote. The whole system was a compromise between those who wanted the presidency to be elected by Congress and those who wanted the presidency to be elected by popular vote. There have been four elections where the person elected president won the electoral vote, but lost the popular vote: the elections of 1876, 1888, 2000, and 2016. One of the most controversial of these was the most recent, the election of 2016, between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. Clinton won the popular vote, with a margin of over three million votes. Trump, however, won the electoral college 304 to 277, the biggest upset in electoral votes to popular vote in American history. This points out the main flaw of the electoral college—a president can win the electoral vote while not winning the popular vote.
The electoral college is a fairly complicated system for electing officials. Each state gets its own number of electors based on its population, which make up the electoral college. However, instead of dividing votes based on population proportions, if a candidate wins the popular vote in a state, they receive all of the state’s electoral votes.
At first, this may sound fair. If they win the most, the winner takes it all. But what about the people that didn’t vote for that candidate? Does their vote not count? But even if one candidate gets a large majority, there are still plenty of people who vote for the other party. This election, 58 percent of California voted for Harris, while only 38 percent voted for Trump. That is a twenty percent difference, which seems like a lot, and it is. But when you translate that into real numbers, it’s nine million votes versus five million votes. Once again, Harris won by a large margin, but the five million people that voted for Trump essentially got no say in who their president will be. This is the other main flaw of the electoral college. Your vote doesn’t matter if you didn’t vote with the majority.
Let’s connect this all back to the electoral votes. In this election, Trump won fifty percent of the vote, while Harris won 48 percent. However, Trump won 312 out of the 538 electoral votes. That’s more than 57 percent of the votes, once again, a clear difference from what the people voted for. Trump won fair and square, but he gained an extra seven percent due to the electoral college. This is fundamentally unrepresentative of the people.
I interviewed a couple students here at LM about what their opinion of the electoral college is. Carter Weisberg ’27 states, “I don’t think it is great. I think a system where the president can be elected without the popular vote is unjust.” Daniel Mollick ’27 said, “We should do the popular vote. The electoral college is inadequate, only destabilizes our country more and more, and hurts our democracy.” While this is a small survey, it still shows that people are tired of this system, a system where your vote doesn’t matter. In 2024, the Pew Research Center held a survey on whether the current system should be changed or kept the same. As of now, over 63 percent of participants said they are in favor of eliminating the electoral college. Almost two-thirds of adults agree that the current system should be abolished.
This has been brought over to state governments as well. Seventeen states and DC have enacted the National Popular Vote Law, which is a law where the states agree to give all the votes to the national popular vote winner, though the law won’t go into effect until enough states have signed to have 270 electoral votes in total.
Overall, the electoral college system is clearly unwanted by most, and is fundamentally unfair and undemocratic. The public should be able to use their voice effectively, and when the most powerful position in the country can’t be picked based on the public’s voice, an undesirable result is bound to occur. I believe that the electoral college really needs to change. It most certainly isn’t the worst way to elect the head of state, but it definitely isn’t the best. I hope that all this data and information I have shown you will convince you to support a change in our country, a valiant change, one that takes away power from the minority and gives it to the majority.
