OPINION

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By Ashwin Johri

In 2016, former Secretary of State and U.S. Senator (D-NY) Hillary Clinton won the majority of all votes cast in the presidential election by 2.1%, or almost three million people. However, Donald Trump (R) won more electoral votes via the Electoral College and won the election, becoming the United States’ 45th president. Presidential elections where the winning candidate lost the popular vote, sometimes called “misfire elections,” have occurred three other times in the past: during the 2000 election between George W. Bush and Al Gore, the 1888 election between Benjamin Harrison and Grover Cleveland, and the 1876 election between Rutherford B. Hayes and Samuel J. Tilden. So why do we put our trust in this system that, apparently, can inaccurately portray the will of the people?

The Electoral College is a system used to elect the United States President and Vice President through the selection of the Electors via a general election, the voting for President and Vice President by the Electors, and the counting of all of the Electors’ votes by Congress before the results are confirmed. All states except Nebraska and Maine have a “winner-take-all” system, meaning that the presidential candidate receiving the most votes is awarded all of the Electors’ votes. The number of Electors for each state is determined by the census every ten years—this number is always equal to the number of members it has in the US House of Representatives, which is based on state population, plus two more for the state’s US senators. The federal district, Washington, D.C., takes on the same number of votes as the least populous state, which is Wyoming, with three electoral votes. There are 538 Electors in total, so if a candidate wins at least 270, they are guaranteed to have won the presidency.

Map of the Electoral College with electoral votes during the 2016 presidential election. Image credit: SeL.

There are many conflicting reasons why the Electoral College was established in the first place. The Founding Fathers created it as a compromise between a vote in Congress and a pure popular vote of qualified citizens. Some believe that it was created as a way to balance influence between the large, highly populated states and the smaller, less populated ones. However, as Akhil Reed Amar in TIME explains clearly, “the deepest political divisions in America have always run not between big and small states, but between the north and the south, and between the coasts and the interior.”

Another theory of the “Founding-era” was that American citizens were too uninformed to choose an adequate candidate, especially in a time period without many accessible news sources, so the Electoral College was created as a buffer between the people and Congress, making the election consistent. When the Electoral College was created, this might have been true, but today, when most of the country has access to public information about each of the candidates running, this theory is outdated.

The Collegiate community seems to be divided on this issue. Jack Henry (‘22) said that the Electoral College “doesn’t properly represent the population’s choices” and that the presidential election usually comes down to the outcomes of a few swing states with many electoral votes, like Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Michigan. He interpreted this as undemocratic because only a few states’ electoral votes really matter in the election, because most other states tend to remain faithful towards their political affiliation in past years. Meanwhile, Anran Zhao (‘21) noted that the Electoral College had many pros and cons, but acknowledged it as the best choice. He identified the states with a smaller population, like Wyoming, as unrepresented in a traditional popular vote. He claimed that the Electoral College, flawed as it is, strikes a balance between the will of the majority and the will of smaller states with less electoral votes. He says, “It’s just important for small states to get their voices heard when electing a president, and the Electoral College is engineered to do so.”

A cartogram of the 2016 election, where the sizes of the states correspond to their representation by the electoral college. Image credit: Barry Kronenfield.

After taking into consideration my own research, the history and original intentions of the Electoral College, and the arguments of my peers, I have formulated my own opinion on the Electoral College. CNN accurately describes a good electoral system as “neutral, where no party, candidate, or region is advanced at the expense of another.” Clearly, neither the pure popular vote nor the Electoral College achieve this goal. While the popular vote favors high-population states, the electoral college seems to favor swing states, and also gives a higher mathematical weight of each electoral vote to smaller states. Because of this, I think that the system of electing our presidents needs an update. If a midground can be found between a pure popular vote and the Electoral College, which weights all states and candidates fairly and accurately, the presidential election could result in far less controversy and uncertainty.