Electoral College

With Donald Trump likely to win the presidential election and Hillary Clinton leading the popular vote, the debate over the electoral college has been renewed. I decided to make a few comments on my feelings regarding our current approach to electing a president.


First of all, most of the comments are emotional rather than rational. Liberals want Hillary in the White House, and they refuse to accept that she lost. In their minds, they feel that the popular vote justifies overturning the election.

What we are seeing is a desire to change the rules after the election to a game that neither candidate was playing. Hillary was not pursuing the popular vote. If she were, she would have spent more time in places like Texas where there are more minds that could be changed in her favor. Similarly, Trunp would have spent more times in places like California. Instead, they focused on the battleground states that were close to even support between the candidates.

Before I go any further, I should probably explain my understanding of the electoral college. When our government was formed, smaller states were concerned that larger states would be too influential. Larger states wanted representation to be proportional to the population. A compromise was made for Congress. The House of Representatives is roughly proportional to the population while the Senate gives states equal representation. The electoral college combines the numbers for these two to balance the two perspectives. Of course, this will be skewed more towards population over states since the House is much larger than the Senate.

If we shifted away from emotion and turned to rational thought, it's clear that we need to accept the election results. That doesn't mean that we can't question whether or not our current approach to elections is satisfactory. In short, I believe that we need election reform.

Part of the problem with elections in America is that the process is set up in a way that strongly promotes partisan politics. The constitution lays out requirements that pretty much guaranteed that a two-party system would emerge, even though partisan politics were never meant to define our government. Additionally, a close three-way race would ultimately take the election out of the hand of the people and into the House of Representatives, which would likely create resentment towards the third party. Personally, I would prefer to move away from a partisan system in favor of a system that allows the best individual to succeed without the requirement of partisan conformity.

The big drawback to election reform is that it's an incredibly difficult task. Although some politicians have successfully campaigned on the platform of change, we have never been more resistant to change than we are right now. Since our election system is in the Constitution, any meaningful reform would require an amendment. These days, amending the Constitution is a herculean task.

If we can implement meaningful election reform, we need to do it the right way. We need mechanisms in place designed to prevent a political duopoly from controlling everything. We need to find ways to allow success for individuals who are not reliant on partisan politics. More than likely, we would need an instant runoff system. We would also need to remove official recognition of parties (parties should not be mentioned on ballots, and ballot access should not be based off of political parties) as well as a new way to select candidates in the first place. I could probably come up with some ideas, but I feel that this is not anywhere near the top of my list of priorities right now.