Once again, this is my ignorant impression. I’m not saying this is how it actually works. I’m just laying it out as a starting point.
As we know in the 2016 election, Clinton won the popular vote, meaning more citizens voted for her, yet Trump still won. This doesn’t happen often, but the fact it still happened is concerning.
So my current understanding of the electoral college is each state has a set number of electors. These electors make the final decision on whether a state votes for a presidential candidate. There are 538 total electors across all 50 states. A candidate needs 270, just over half, to win the election.
This is my analogy for why I don’t get this. If there are 4 of us in a car and I’m driving. I ask the 3 of you passengers where yall want to go. All 3 of you agree on the same place, but guess what? I’m driving. So we go where I want to go. Given that scenario, would you say those 3 passengers were heard? Would you say they mattered? Blow that up to millions of passengers and about five hundred drivers, that’s the electoral college.
So why do we have the electoral college? Why can’t the citizens just vote for who they want? The mainstream answer is that this supposedly levels the playing field for all states.
What does this mean? Not all states have the exact same amount of citizens. The big 4 states with the most citizens, are California, New York, Texas, and Florida. Some are worried that these big states can skew the results and leave the smaller states underrepresented.
Let’s do some math here. There are roughly 330 million people in this country. Let’s start with the big 4. Texas is 29 million, New York State is just under 20 million, California is just under 40 million, and Florida is about 22 million. I rounded all those but that total is roughly over a third of the country. Now the electors. Texas has 38, New York State has 29, California has 55, and Florida has 29. That 151 total electors for the big 4 states. Just under a third of all electors compared to just over a third with the US population. So I’ll give it that, the electoral college does cut down on that disproportion a little bit. It’s actually closer to a quarter (off 17) than it is to a third (off 29).
Either way, even if you had all 4 states going for you, you still can’t win solely off of them. And another assumption from Republicans is that these big states are mostly Democrat, so if we allowed the populous to win, the Dems would have those states in their favor. That’s an oversimplification because one, not every single citizen in those states is going to vote Dem. Two, if they’re so worried about that, the electoral college could possibly work against them. Say those states do get majority blue, but still a fair amount of red voters, the electoral college can only choose one party, so you just nullified all those red voters in that big state.
And even funnier, we don’t even vote for the electors, we vote for a slate of electors. This ‘slate’ is selected by a party, but if the party is chosen by the electors… where do the citizens come in?
So my ultimate point is if the electors are the ones making the final decision, why are we even taking the time to vote? Again, I’m not saying the answer is for us to just sit back and do nothing, but I can’t be that crazy for thinking this when I just laid this out. For all that, we’re not giving them votes, we’re giving them suggestions; suggestions aren’t final
This is obviously a big subject, and I want us to understand it. We’ll come back to it eventually.
Grant Abraham 