Now is the time the US abolishes the Electoral College

Last year November Hillary Clinton the presidential nominee for the Democratic Party clinched the popular vote but failed to win the Electoral College votes to the favor of the current President Donald Trump. This brought a barrage of criticisms directed towards the Electoral College system with many political pundits arguing that it was tantamount to shortchanging the will of the majority. I believe the US should do away with the Electoral College and let the voters directly decide who will be their president.
Many people are aware of what takes places in the ballot box; however, many are ignorant about the Electoral College, its intricacies and consequences. Once the votes cast in the forty-eight states are counted and tallied, a candidate from a certain party who has garnered the majority votes in that specific state is given the powers to select a group of electors who shall participate in casting the authentic votes for the President distinct from the popular vote whose main players are the citizens.
At this juncture, it is important to note that the Electoral College constitutes 538 electors. Electoral votes are not ascribed premised on the population of a state; rather representation in Congress is taken into consideration. This means that each state takes a minimum of three college votes bearing in mind that each state has one Representative and two Senators.
My arguments against the Electoral College system are dual, justifying why such an electoral system is archaic. First, the Electoral College exhibits the winner take all pattern. Take for example when a candidate triumphs the so-called popular vote of a particular state by just one vote, this would mean that all the electoral votes allotted for that state are taken by the above candidate ( this does not include Nebraska and Maine). When such a fact is coupled by the reality that smaller states do possess more electoral votes per person compared to the big states, this hints to the possibility that a presidential nominee can occupy the Oval office by just scooping 21.8 percent of the popular vote.
Jesse Ruderman researched this subject-matter; he intelligently writes that a presidential candidate could occupy the white house by obtaining a paltry 21.8 percent of the populous vote by just getting above fifty percent of the votes in Washington DC and each of the thirty-nine small states. In others words, the point that Ruderman was trying to drive home is that a candidate in the populous vote could lose with 78.2 percent by obtaining below fifty percent in the small states and getting hundred percent in the larger states. The 2000 presidential election is a reminiscence of this fact; Al Gore triumphs the populous vote with 48.4% while Bush garnered 47.9%. However, Bush went ahead to win the Electoral College by receiving 271 votes.
The Electoral College has led to the emergence of faithless electors who do not vote by the wishes of their state. This means that even though electors might be loyal to their specific parties, they are not bound to vote as instructed by voters in their state. The facts that a candidate triumphed the popular vote in a specific state, the electors are not duty bound to elect him in the Electoral College. Thus, electors that violate the wishes of the people in their respective states are referred to as “Faithless electors.” Since the inception of the Electoral College, the US has seen 157 faithless electors not honor the wishes of the voters from their respective states. Ideally, some states have legislated on this area to proscribe the acts of the faithless voters. For instance, a total of 29 states have enacted statutes that establish penal consequences for the faithless electors, though going down the memory lane no faithless elector has ever been prosecuted successfully. Also, twenty-one states have given the electors a leeway to cast the electoral vote by their personal preference. Is it fair for the opinion of one person to override the wishes of thousands of voters?
In conclusion, as Americans, we need to rethink our electoral system and see if it is fair and whether it reflects the wishes of the majority. As a shining light of democracy, the Electoral College is untenable and susceptible to compromise. The individual occupying the oval office should not do so through a process that is shrouded in fraud. We need to ask ourselves whether it is tenable to allow a President to enter the white house by receiving just a quarter of the nation’s vote.

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