With several states on a knife-edge, and the popular vote total favoring Clinton over Trump, much talk has occurred during the last few weeks about whether the Electoral College still has a place in today’s America. The Electoral College, made up of 538 electors, is still the formal body, not your vote, that elects the President of the United States.
During the founding of our republic, the Founding Fathers were debating how best to structure the presidency and how it would be elected. If the president was elected by the Congress, powerful factions would end up controlling it. On the other hand, if pure popular vote was to decide, the founders feared swings of popular opinion could put an unqualified or malevolent person into the office.
For those reasons and some others, the system of electoral votes was created. Each state would receive as many electoral votes as representatives in Congress. The electors would be chosen by state legislatures or political parties but had the freedom to cast their own votes. It was hoped this system would spread out the power among the states and reduce the influence of larger or more powerful groups within the country.
Today, this process continues in a similar way. When the people of a state cast their ballots, they are not voting directly for the candidate of their choice, but for the slate of electors that that candidate’s party has chosen. Minnesota, with 10 electoral votes, picked Hillary Clinton for the presidency. That means the Minnesota Democrats’ 10 electors are the ones who will formally cast the state’s votes on Monday, Dec. 19.
In theory, these electors can choose any of the candidates, but the tradition is they will vote for the winner of that state. In this way, our national election is in a sense 51 separate elections, including the District of Columbia, that then cast the electoral votes for the winners of each of their states. The national popular vote is record of how many people voted for who across each of these separate contests.
The argument made for the popular vote is a fair one. Why shouldn’t the person who gets the most votes win the presidency? The Electoral College counts states, not people, so how is that fair? The problem is the popular vote was never really supposed to factor into the national election. The votes cast in each state reflect the general issues within them, and the founders hoped the Electoral College would keep one region from having too much power over another. That creates the problem of swing states in our modern elections.
States like California and Texas get almost no attention because their citizens consistently lean toward the Democrats or the Republicans. It doesn’t matter how large the margin a candidate wins a state by; they get all of the electoral votes in all but two states if they succeed. This leaves “purple” states such as Ohio that change their votes more frequently in the sights of the political parties, as they just need to win a certain number of these to get over the top and win the Electoral College. An argument can be made that this leads to the candidate with the most states winning and therefore having a mandate from the majority of the regions of the country.
While the most-states-wins theory has its advantages, there are several points undercutting it. First, in a theoretical situation, the 11 most populous states alone could carry a candidate to victory. Though highly unlikely, this could leave the other 39 states without a voice. There have also been three elections in American history where the candidate who won the most states did not win the Electoral College, so this situation does not always occur.
In the end, the 2016 election is also notable that despite Hillary Clinton’s lead in the popular vote over Donald Trump, she does not have an absolute majority of the votes of the American people. Somewhere around 52 percent voted for Trump or someone else. If we went to straight popular vote, would we be comfortable having a president who won an even smaller majority of the popular vote, like John Quincy Adams did with only 30.9 percent of nationwide votes in 1824?
The Electoral College isn’t perfect, just like everything else, but it has provided a way to balance the desires of the states and the people. Out of 58 presidential elections, the electoral vote and the popular vote have not lined up only five times. Although I dislike these inconsistencies, this is a 91-percent accuracy rate. Until we can figure out a system that beats this number and keeps good representation for all regions of the country, the Electoral College might still be our best bet.
Connor Kockler is a Sauk Rapids-Rice High School student. He enjoys writing, politics and news, among other interests.
