The Electoral College is antiquated and needs to be replaced

A perennial argument that has been raised more frequently in the past 20 or so years is that the Electoral College system is antiquated and needs to be replaced. The argument is often predicated on a belief that our nation is a Democracy and that the College allows a person in one state to have more power than someone in another state.

While we Democratically elect our government leaders, we are still a Republic. Webster’s defines a Republic as “a government in which the power belongs to a body of citizens entitled to vote and is exercised by the leaders and representatives elected by those citizens to govern according to law“. Each state is a body of citizens who elect people to govern them. Each state has their own laws. Each state is allowed to decide for itself how it will be run. Each state is separate from one another and can’t tell another state what to do. So how do you balance the fact that each state is separate from one another with the fact that each state has different populations? Should a state with 5 Million people be able to tell a state with 500,000 people what to do and vice versa?

The Founding Fathers saw this problem and needed a solution that balanced this out. In order to give a balance to the population equation, the election of the nation’s executive would be by the states and each state would be given a number of votes equal to the number of representatives that it had in Congress. This would mean that whoever wanted to be President needed to campaign in all states and not just the heavily populated ones.

The President of the United States is the chief executive who runs the Executive branch of the Federal government. The Federal government’s laws are above state laws. Each citizen has a say in their state elected officials and the laws that each state enacts and collectively each citizen has a say in who will be the President. The President needs 270 of these votes win the Presidency.

In essence, every eligible voter has one vote for President. No more, no less. They help their state decide who their states votes are going to go to. That’s the way it works in a Republic. It’s smart and regardless of when it was contrived it levels the playing field because each vote in the Electoral College represents the same number of people. It allows for a state by state contest instead of a populated area by populated area contest.