OIB reader Marshall Marcus shares his take why the electoral college must be abolished in favor of a national popular vote for the presidency.
For many years the American populace has been exposed to the myth of ‘One person, one vote.’ This axiom is supposed to make voters believe that no person’s vote counts more than any other person’s vote.
This may be true in most elections for local, state and federal offices, but NOT for the Presidency of the United States. The framers of the US Constitution decided that the President should not be elected by popular vote. Instead they instituted the Electoral College. Voters in each state vote for Electors, and the Electors meet in December to elect the President.
Each state has two US Senators, and member(s) of the House of Representatives. There are 435 members of the House and how many each state has is adjusted after the decennial US Census. However, the Constitution guarantees that every state shall have at least ONE member of the House of Representatives (US Constitution Article I, Section 2).
Each state has one member of the Electoral College for each Senator and member of the House of Representatives (US Constitution Article II, Section 1). There are also 3 Electors for the District of Columbia (US Constitution Amendment XXIII ratified 1961).
Why this is unfair:
Connecticut has 5 members of the House and 2 Senators. That means we have 7 Electoral votes to represent a population of 3.6 million people. Each Elector represents 514,285 people.Wyoming, the state with the smallest population (587,000) has 2 Senators and the minimum guaranteed 1 Member of the House. So each of those electors represents 195,667 people.
The value of a Wyoming resident equals 2.64 Connecticut residents in terms of the Electoral College. There are 6 US States that have the minimum 3 Electoral College votes giving their residents’ votes a much higher value than residents of other states.
That’s just not fair. It is time for election by popular vote.
Marshall, if you do the same math for Texas, California and Florida, and then all 50 states, you could see the system has good intentions and is logical. The Trump and the Democrat party campaigns were well aware of the importance of electoral college votes and focused their messages on those voters.
Tom,
Yes if you do the math you see California has 55 Electoral votes representing 691,662 people, in fact the 12 most populous state have one elector representing more than 600,000 residents.
There are six states where each Elector represents fewer than 300,000 residents.
That’s not logical or fair. To quote another axiom: The path to hell is paved with good intentions.
My opinion has nothing to do with how the campaigns spent their time, money and energy, but the unfairness of the system that weights votes differently.
In 2000 and again in 2016 the winner of the popular vote lost the election. That’s just wrong.