“Now that Donald Trump has won the presidency despite losing the popular vote, there’s a growing cry to rethink, or even abolish, the Electoral College. This would be a mistake…” proclaimed William M. Daley, then-President Barack Obama’s Chief of Staff. The United States Electoral College, a body of electors established by the US Constitution in 1787, consists of 538 electors, accounting for the 435 representatives of the House, 100 representatives of the Senate, and three representatives from the District of Columbia. Each state receives three mandatory electors, and then receives more based on their population. Since the signing of the US Constitution, one question has consistently been debated: Is the Electoral College a fair and just way to pick the President and the Vice President of the United States? The system that decides our president today was implemented to preserve each state’s ability to influence the election. Besides, the system was created to quarantine electoral disputes and to make sure that the minority vote doesn’t determine the President. The Electoral College was, and is today the fairest and most just way to pick the President and the Vice President of the United States.
Rooted back 250 years in history is one of America’s deepest values – representation for all. One of the primary reasons why the Electoral College exists today is to provide each state with the ability to influence the election. Unlike the popular vote, the Electoral College makes many smaller states feel included and represented. The three mandatory electoral votes awarded to each state force presidential candidates to not only focus on the large states but swing states as well. For instance, Iowa only has six electoral votes out of 538, .01% of the total votes. However, from 1972 to 2016, Iowa has voted for six Republican candidates and six Democratic candidates. This variety in the outcome has made Iowa an important state to win if one wants to win the presidency and has brought national attention to this state that otherwise would be forgotten. Apart from giving much-needed representation to smaller states, the Electoral College also quarantines electoral disputes.
The Electoral College definitively decides closely contested elections. In many presidential elections, the popular vote has been very close, with one candidate beating another by a very small percentage of the population. The 1960 election (Kennedy vs. Nixon) was one of the closest elections in United States history by popular vote. Although Kennedy won the presidency with 303 electoral votes to Nixon’s 219, the 35th President only won the popular vote by 119,450 votes, less than 0.2% of voters. If the Electoral College hadn’t existed, many Republican voters would have demanded a nation-wide ballot recount, which could have taken months and might’ve been extremely disruptive for the country. With the Electoral College in place, Kennedy won the presidential election definitively, quarantining the possibility of an immense political conflict. Unlike the Electoral College, the majority popular vote system does not always yield a winner.
The majority popular vote would cause major problems in the United States’ election process. If the Electoral College was abolished and the president was decided by whoever received the majority of the popular vote, 20 of our 45 presidents would not have been elected into office. This is because, in those elections, no candidate received more than 50% of the votes. In 1992, Bill Clinton won the presidential election over George H. W. Bush with 370 electoral votes over Bush’s 168. However, Bill Clinton became President with only 43% of the popular vote, while Bush had 37%. The Democratic and Republican candidates only took about 80% of the vote, with the remaining 20% going to the Independent party’s Ross Perot. Perot won 20% of the popular vote, which meant that in 1992, neither Clinton, Bush nor Perot won the majority. Had there not been an Electoral College, more than 50% of Americans wouldn’t have voted for the president, a clear sign of a failed democracy. With the Electoral College, however, Bill Clinton won the election definitively. If the presidency had been decided by the majority popular vote, Abraham Lincoln, the 16th President of the United States, among others, would not have been elected hadn’t it been for the Electoral College. This would have been detrimental to the United States because Abraham Lincoln was the president to abolish slavery. Woodrow Wilson, the president to end World War I, was also not elected by the majority popular vote, but rather the Electoral College. If the Electoral College didn’t exist, slavery might have been practiced way longer into the 18th century in the United States, and World War I might not have ended in 1918.
In the United States, politicians have been trying to make every person feel represented for centuries. This has worked, almost. As a system for representing a community, citizens typically only question the Electoral College when the outcome of the election doesn’t go in their favor. For example, when Donald Trump was elected president over Hillary Clinton, despite her winning the plurality popular vote, many Democrats in the country were appalled and blamed the Electoral College as a faulted system. Meanwhile, twenty-four years earlier, no Democrat questioned the Electoral College when Bill Clinton won the election without receiving a majority of the popular vote. Although many people debate whether the Electoral College is the best system to appoint the president, it is the most representative system of every state in our country, as well as the most reliable and trustworthy.
