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Thursday, March 28
The Indiana Daily Student

opinion

COLUMN: The electoral college must go

Now that Donald Trump won the presidential election without the popular vote, conservatives are scrambling to defend the necessity of the Electoral College.

One of their popular approaches has been to use a map displaying the more than 3,000 counties in the United States and the 146 of them that contain half of the total population and say something like, “Big cities shouldn’t speak for the rest of the country.”

However, a state’s electoral power is determined by its population, so bigger cities do, in fact, carry more weight in the Electoral College than a variety of small states.

Los Angeles County is responsible for one-fourth of California’s population. California has 55 electoral votes, so L.A. County contributes about 14, which is the same power Nebraska, South Dakota, Wyoming, Idaho and Montana have combined.

What the Electoral College does, with a winner-take-all system, is allow a miniscule number of voters to shift all of a state’s electoral votes and alter the election outcome.

In last week’s election, this is exactly what happened.

Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by 638,750, but the Electoral College allowed 107,330 specific votes to rob her of the presidency.

Trump won Pennsylvania by 68,236 votes, Wisconsin by 27,257, and Michigan by only 11,837. If Hillary Clinton had been able to generate more Democratic voter turnout and had won these states as every Democrat had since 1992, she would be president.

She lost because we have the ridiculous practice of assigning a state’s electoral votes on a winner-take-all basis, which means your vote doesn’t count unless your state votes with you.

This method also allows 0.08 percent of the population to sway the election in favor of the candidate who lost the popular vote by more than 0.5 percent. Imagine the reaction if the Electoral College method were employed in the House of Representatives.

When a piece of legislation is voted upon, states would vote as unit. The representatives of each state would vote the same way, according to the preference of the majority within their state.

I suspect our representatives wouldn’t tolerate such a system. I suspect they wouldn’t even entertain the idea as a hypothetical at a dinner party. So we shouldn’t accept this farce, either. Keep in mind, of the four times a candidate has won the popular vote but lost the election, they’ve been a Democrat.

Republicans have never felt the frustration of outperforming their opponent by the most authentic measure of democracy while losing the election because of a system that was designed to protect slave owners.

As it turns out, according to professor Akhil Amar, a Sterling professor of law and political science at Yale University, our founders didn’t devise the Electoral College because they didn’t trust the ordinary man to elect the president, as the myth states.

The system was devised because, in a direct election, Southerners would have lost because much of their population comprised slaves, who weren’t allowed to vote.

The Electoral College allowed Southern states to count slaves in their populations and therefore gave the South more electoral votes.

Abolishing the Electoral College would restore the principle of one person, one vote, would encourage a higher voter turnout and would ensure the voices of Americans are heard, regardless of where they live.

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