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December 10, 2024
For 200 years, America has used the Electoral College system to determine who wins the presidential election, including the election of the 47th president, Donald Trump, that was decided this past week. Whether you voted blue, red, or independent, there is only one place everyone’s vote went to: the electoral college. This system was originally put into place as a compromise between two groups of founding fathers. Some believed that the best way to elect a president would be to rely on Congress to vote; the others said that they should give the opportunity to everyone in the U.S. to vote for their president. After weeks of debate, they decided that the best compromise was the electoral college, which includes temporary electors for each state who vote for the president, taking into account how their state voted.
CNN’s Road to 270 map predictions (Photo Credit: CNN)
While this may have been a good temporary agreement for the tired, frustrated, and busy founding fathers (who had a much smaller country to represent than what the U.S. is today), in the modern state of our country it is completely impractical and unfair, and this system is the reason many people across America feel that their vote doesn’t really count, which is justified.
Since elementary school, when the first Tuesday of November came around all we would hear from the teachers was, “Tell your parents to vote! Every vote counts!” It may seem obvious– people should just vote for the candidate that they support. But when we finally learned how the system really works, it started to make sense that some people might not even think about voting. Because with the electoral college system, unless you live in a swing state, like Pennsylvania or Wisconsin, most people in America already know what’s going to happen. California will stay blue, Texas will stay red… so for the majority of the country, it may feel like it wouldn’t matter whether they voted Republican or Democrat, or at all. This not only causes a lack of patriotism and connection to the country they live in, but also a feeling of weakness when it comes to their government and the people that make decisions that either benefit or disadvantage them.
Misrepresentation isn’t the only part of America’s voting system that is dysfunctional; the electoral system also is responsible for the fact that a candidate is able to win the election without winning the popular vote, which has already happened five times in the country’s history. While this is a much bigger issue in present-day elections, it has been a problem since 1824, when John Quincy Adams was elected the sixth president of the U.S. without winning the popular vote. However, this event isn’t very relevant to today, especially because Adams won the election as a federalist, and lost the popular vote to the Democratic-Republican party. Before the election of 2008, this circumstance hadn’t occurred in almost 200 years. Since George W. Bush was the last president (excluding the soon-to-be-elected Donald Trump) that won both the electoral college and the popular vote, this began a 20-year period of popular vote losses for Republicans that some may say was unfairly decided. This election marked the fifth time that the Republican party benefited from the electoral college system, and only further proved how unfair and unbalanced this system makes our country appear.
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