Article by Emerson Segraves, TPT Staff Writer

Recently, a close friend of mine introduced me to a game called Campaign Trail. The concept is simple. You pick a previous US election and run as a candidate of your choice. Your goal? Collect the electoral votes of the most important states.

You start out by selecting your candidate, typically under the Republican or Democratic party. As a candidate, you want to focus on and visit swing states, because they matter more to the amount of electoral votes you will receive. In the game, you’re meant to ignore states that are solidly Republican or Democratic, because the electoral votes there are set in stone, for the most part. The odd thing about it? This ridiculous system is actually real.

Today, the electoral college plays a strong role in presidential elections. The system has been with the U.S. since the very beginning, written in Article 2, Section 1, Clause 2 of the United States Constitution:

Each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors, equal to the whole Number of Senators and Representatives to which the State may be entitled in the Congress: but no Senator or Representative, or Person holding an Office of Trust or Profit under the United States, shall be appointed an Elector.

In simple terms, this means that every state will be provided with a certain number of electors to cast a vote in the presidential race based on the size of their Congressional delegation. Five-hundred and thirty-eight electors cast a vote for each presidential election. This number is equal to the total number of senators added to the amount of house representatives, with an additional 3 for the District of Columbia. Just like in Campaign Trail, the presidential candidates are looking to gain two-hundred and seventy votes from the electoral college to win the election.

The core issue of the electoral college is that one vote in a smaller state is worth more than a vote in a larger state. This defies the democratic values that the United States is meant to protect. In the electoral college, when those five-hundred and thirty-eight votes are distributed, they are not distributed equally. No matter the population of a state, every state will get at least 3 electoral votes. Then, the government will begin to factor in population. A state like Wyoming, which has the lowest population in the US, will get 1 electoral vote for every 183,782 people, whilst a state like California only gets 1 electoral vote per 715,454 people.

When an election is conducted, no matter how it is split, the state casts the entirety of its votes for one candidate. For example, in my state, Georgia, we have 16 electoral votes. If an election were split 3 ways, and the first candidate received 5 votes, the second candidate received 5, and the third candidate received 6, then the third candidate would take all 16 votes. The electoral college undermines the idea that every vote is important. If the third candidate takes every electoral vote, despite only winning by a marginal majority, we ignore the importance of each vote cast in an election. Presidential candidates tend to focus on swing states like Florida and Ohio. In the beginning of this article, I mentioned that in Campaign Trail, you are looking to gain the most important votes. What signifies how important a vote is? Whether or not it is cast in a swing state? Why are the people of the United States okay with that?

The truth is, we are not. As recently as 2020, The Gallup concluded that 61% of Americans are against the electoral college. Over 700 proposals have been made to amend the electoral college process - that’s the most proposals ever made in U.S. history towards a particular topic. Some of these include amending the electoral college so representation is more equal, or abolishing the electoral college as a whole. Still, the system prevails – yet another example of how the electoral college upholds minority rule.

Taking action against the electoral college is one of the most important ways to uphold democracy in the United States. We need to reach out to our politicians and let them know - we want change. We want to abolish the electoral college.

If the minority rule, voting distortion, and the word of the people are not enough to convince you that it is time to abolish the electoral college, then maybe this will. Four times in the United States’ history have we seen a candidate win the popular vote, but lose the electoral college - most recently in 2016. That is about 9% of all presidential elections. The ridiculous nature of the electoral college is something you’d think to only see in games like The Campaign Trail, but as of today, it is a reality in the United States. We need to take a stand against the electoral college, lest it undermine the fundamentals of democracy even further.

The views articulated in this piece are the writer’s own, and do not reflect the official stances of The Progressive Teen or HSDA at large.

A Case Against the Electoral College