Clinton should have won the 2016 presidential election. Al Gore should have won the 2000 presidential election. And Cleveland, Tilden, and Jackson should have won their elections. In all of these instances, the American people who came together to exercise their right to vote were cheated out of the candidate who received the most votes in the election. The electoral college must be altered to reflect the wants of the American people.
The electoral college works as so. Each state receives a certain number of electoral votes (3 minimum) determined by their population size totaling 538 votes. A candidate must win a simple majority of electoral votes to win the election. The electoral college was originally created in order to ensure that small states would not be ignored by the president. However, as ProCon.org writers explain in the Britannica article “The Electoral College – Top 3 Pros and Cons”, in 2024, not only are these small states being ignored by candidates, but so are states such as New York and New Jersey that hold some of the largest populations of voters. Instead, candidates spend almost all of their campaign resources in the few key battleground states.The current electoral college system is worsening the problem it was created to solve.
Instead, the United States electoral college should be divided up by districts in each state. Each district should receive a certain number of electoral votes based on their population. These votes must be proportional to the population not only of the district, but in comparison to all other states as well. This scenario ensures not only that each person’s vote is correctly proportionally counted, but also allows people in strictly blue or red states to feel like their vote ‘counts’ as their district may be voting differently than how a state may vote today. This ensures that candidates will travel across the country because candidates will have more districts to swing voters in. The fact of the matter is that there are not as many people in mid-western states, and their vote should be weighted more heavily than a person’s vote who lives in a densely populated city in the North.
To ensure each and every American citizen is properly represented, it is critical that the changes described above are implemented in the electoral college process.
