Imagine playing a game where you score the most points, but someone else decides who wins based on their own rules. That’s essentially what the Electoral College does to our presidential elections, and it’s time we rethink this outdated system.

When the Constitution was originally drafted in 1787, there were disputes regarding the executive branch and how it would be elected. Some delegates of the Constitutional Convention suggested that the president be elected by Congress, while others favored a direct election by the people, with the final compromise being the Electoral College. However, if you were to ask any person who doesn’t consider themselves politically active, they most likely couldn’t explain how the Electoral College works. It’s an overly complicated process that continues to confuse citizens, but is still used to elect the highest position in the American government.

The debate over how the executive branch would be elected derived from the Framers’ fear of a strong executive. Years spent under the tyrannical rule of King George III left the colonists with lingering trauma of what an executive could accomplish if not properly checked. If Congress were to elect the President, would the presidency become subservient to the will of Congress as opposed to the people? Or, as depicted in Federalist 68, would a candidate misinform the less educated voters to gain the position? These were some of the questions asked during the construction of the Constitution, with the Electoral College being viewed as the solution.

The Electoral College is a process in which electors from each state vote for the president and vice president, with the number of electors equal to the state’s Congressional representatives. There are currently a total of 538 electors, including the 3 electors who represent Washington, D.C., with 270 electoral votes needed to win the presidential election. Essentially, the American people do not vote for the president and vice president, but instead vote for electors, raising the question of what the qualifications are to be an elector.

The Constitution itself doesn’t give much insight into how electors are chosen, only distinguishing that electors cannot be “a Senator or Representative, or Person holding an Office[...]under the United States,” as seen in Article II, Section 1. Until the mid-1800s, many state legislatures simply appointed electors. However, at modern state party conventions, each political party nominates a slate of electors, who are usually chosen as a reward for their service to the party. Ironic that the position that directly elects the president is linked to political parties rewarding their devout followers.

When election season rolls around, each party’s presidential candidate has a slate of potential electors who have pledged to cast their vote for their party. When Americans vote, they are voting for the slate of electors instead of the candidate directly. Electors cast a vote for the presidential candidate that the majority of constituents in their state have voted for, acting as the official votes that truly elect the president. However, there can be some complications if electors don’t cast their vote in the manner they pledged.

The term “faithless electors” is used to describe electors who do not vote according to the state’s popular vote. The Constitution doesn’t require electors to vote according to the results of the popular vote and there is no federal law that requires this. However, there have been a number of state laws intended to punish these violators. After the Supreme Court held that states have the power to force electors to vote according to the state’s popular vote in 2020, 32 states have implemented laws that bind electors. Despite this, 18 states continue to give electors the freedom to vote independently.

Rogue votes have never truly affected an election and aren’t a common occurrence. However, during the 2016 election, a record number of seven faithless electors voted against the presidential candidate they pledged to vote for, with six doing so against the vice president, voting against Tim Kaine. With the 1988 election being the last election that saw a “faithless elector”, it depicts the fact that the Electoral College is outdated. The election system, deemed logical for the 18th century, is not fit for the modern day, giving way to the growing support for the U.S. to leave the Electoral College in the past.

The Electoral College allows a candidate to win the presidency without winning the popular vote. Technically, a candidate could win the election by winning 11 states — California, Texas, New York, Florida, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Michigan, Ohio, Georgia, North Carolina, and New Jersey — and although this is highly unlikely to happen, it shows that the design of the Electoral College has constitutionally established voter suppression through the disproportionate representation of the citizenry. There have been five elections in which the winner lost the popular vote, twice happening in the 21st century, in 2000 and 2016. In the 2020 election, Biden won an overwhelming majority of the popular vote — 51.3% to Trump’s 46.8% — but only won the Electoral College 306 to 232, demonstrating that the popular vote’s importance is negligible when compared to the Electoral College.

Originally established in Reynolds v. Simmons in 1964, the one-person, one-vote doctrine is widely recognized as a cornerstone of the American electoral system, emphasizing that each individual’s voting power should be equal to that of another. This is true within same-state voting, but when this doctrine is expanded to voters in different states, it doesn’t stay true. The Framers’ attempt to prevent populous states from having significantly more influence in the government than smaller states has directly contributed to the voters in populated states having a less influential vote. In Wyoming, there are 578,000 people with three electoral votes, while California has roughly 40 million people and fifty-five electoral votes. This means there is one electoral vote for every 190,000 voters in Wyoming, and one vote for every 700,000 voters in California. The focus on trying to protect the rights of the minority state populations has led to a disproportionate distribution of electoral votes, leading to an underrepresentation of voters in larger states.

If America is known as the country built on democratic principles, does this principle stay true even if every vote doesn’t have an equal say? The winner-take-all system can be attributed to the widespread belief that certain votes aren’t as important as others. A Republican voting in California, a notorious Democratic state, will be part of a population whose vote inevitably didn’t have any effect in the selection of the president due to the fact that the Democratic candidate would receive all of California’s electoral votes. On the other hand, voters in a battleground state, such as Pennsylvania, are very important to the determination of which candidate gets the electoral votes. Additionally, candidates will spend more time campaigning in battleground states, paying more attention to some voters than others.

Abolishing the Electoral College would also help with an issue that is always prevalent during the election season: trying to get people out to vote. I have asked several of my friends, all who would be first-time voters in California, if they are going to participate in this year’s elections. Unfortunately, the answer usually is a no. This apathy highlights the problem with the Electoral College. The reason given is that their vote doesn’t matter because California is going to blue with or without their vote. In notoriously blue states, there is a lack of political efficacy for citizens that identify on both sides of the political spectrum, Democratic or Republican. As a Democrat in California, it’s apparent that the state’s electoral votes will be going to the Democratic candidate, so why should a Democratic voter go out of their way to vote when the state is going to the candidate they prefer? Conversely, a Republican voter in California has no reason to go out and vote because the state will be Democratic. People simultaneously feel unmotivated and powerless due to the fact that their vote won’t have any major impact, and only in crucial swing states, such as Pennsylvania and Nevada, will the citizenry have a good reason to vote.

There have been numerous attempts to encourage voter participation, with several different strategies being employed. In the 1990s, music executive Jeff Ayeroff started the “Rock the Vote” movement, which encouraged younger voters to vote in response to government efforts to censor explicit lyrics. More recently, in the 2024 election, was Elon Musk’s daily $1 million giveaway to registered voters in swing states. However, no matter how much effort is put into trying to get a high voter turnout, the end result is always lackluster. There has been an increase in recent years, with the 2020 election seeing 62.8 percent of all voting-age individuals casting a ballot, but even with this, the United States still trails behind other countries in the developed world, such as Sweden, Belgium, and New Zealand, ranking 31st out of 49 countries when comparing the turnout from the 2020 election. No matter how much effort is put into encouraging voter participation, or the amount of legislative action taken to make registration easier for individuals, the root of this problem lies in the Electoral College.

The Electoral College was appropriate for its time. Representation in government was a debated question and the fear of a tyrannical executive dominated the minds of the Framers. The young nation needed the Electoral College to ease the fears held by many of the citizens. However, we are no longer a young country and our institutions have been established for a long time, with implemented standards to prevent the possibility of an authoritative president. Given that recent presidential elections have resulted in winners losing the popular vote, it’s time for the Electoral College to be abolished. There needs to be a system in which everyone’s vote is universally equal, across state lines and within. States don’t vote, people do.