The Electoral College was established as a method for electing the President of the United States in the Constitution with the second article. Instead of the people directly voting for their president, they vote for what party their state’s electors will vote for. Whichever party wins the state is the party that the state sends their number of votes in for. The number of votes that a state gets is based on their number of representatives in the House of Representatives and in the Senate. States must have a minimum of 3 votes. As a result of this, the popular vote and the electoral college vote often do not match, a prime example of this being in the 2016 election, where Clinton had a 3 million lead on Trump in the popular vote but still lost in what really mattered, the electoral college, according to Britannica.
For this reason, I think that the electoral college should be abandoned for just the popular vote. By switching to the popular vote, the President of the United States will represent what the people want. Instead of some smaller states having an advantage over the big states because each person’s vote counts for more in small states, each person’s vote will be equal.
A potential con of switching to the popular vote is that candidates would be less likely to campaign in places with less people because they want to get as many votes as possible. This means that they will try to go to big cities to get more votes. But, on the other hand, with the electoral college candidates only go to the swing states because those are the ones that will win the election for them. They don’t campaign in the states that are red or blue already because they know they already have their votes.
Switching the electoral college to the popular vote will ensure a fair election that represents each person in the United States equally.
