A Fight for Democracy: Electoral College Reform

By Sierra Pape

The second concern is the “winner takes all” structure of our electoral college. The state of Georgia has 16 electoral votes, which, like every state, is comprised of their number of representatives in Congress plus two Senate seats. Whichever candidate gets the majority of votes in Georgia takes all 16 electoral college votes for the state. So, if Candidate A gets 49% of the popular vote and Candidate B gets 51% of the vote, then Candidate B receives all 16 votes from Georgia, which eliminates the voice of all citizens that voted for Candidate A. It has racist underpinnings because if a minority group votes, their voice is not heard because all votes go to the candidate that the majority supports. This concept of “winner takes all” was strongly fought against by many founders, including James Madison, who is often thought of as the father of the Constitution, who did not believe it was consistent with the philosophy of our new democracy.

The Constitution only describes the electoral college process and how many votes each state gets; every other aspect of determining the electoral process was left up to the states. So our current reality is that individual citizens have no Constitutional right to vote on the selection of the next president. This became very relevant in the 2016 election when Donald Trump won by electoral college razor-thin difference of only 70,000+ people, which is only about a football stadium worth, while Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by over two million people. We are still waiting to see what 2020 will reveal.

So what can we do to change this system? In America today, we should hear every person’s voice. In my opinion, there are multiple avenues we could go down to rightfully choose our leader in a true democracy. We could completely wipe out the electoral college and rely solely on the popular vote but I think that that would be difficult to pass because it requires a Constitutional change. An alternative is to shift how the electoral college votes are counted. The largest worry is the “winner takes all” institution because it eliminates the voice of millions of people for each state. So if we kept the electoral college votes but just split it based on the state’s popular vote, we would be one step closer. As Senator Bayh said in 1968, “We proudly beat our chests and proclaim ourselves to be the world’s greatest democracy and yet tolerate a presidential election system in which the people of the country don’t vote for president, never have, and never will under the present system.” I will be voting in 5 years and I want my vote to count.