The Electoral College

Massachusetts U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren is the first presidential candidate in history to call for getting rid of the Electoral College.

It is an interesting—and even a daring—position.

It is also overdue.

After the last two Republican presidential pickup years, from 2000 and 2016, one would think the Democratic Party would be, in general, in support of eliminating the Electoral College.

They are not.

Well, perhaps some of them are; but, there are not enough of them.

The argument Sen. Warren, and others who agree, have is this: All states are not being represented accurately. All people’s votes are not weighted equally.

The Electoral College, now allocated to 538 electoral votes, consists of 435 electors representing the U.S. House, 100 from the U.S. Senate, and 3 from our nation’s capitol, District of Columbia.

The problem: While the U.S. House is proportional representation, relative states’ populations, the U.S. Senate does not regard populations; they are the same number applied in each state. Folding in the U.S. Senate, with the U.S. House, distorts populations in some states toward electing or re-electing a United States president.

Right now, there are 256 electoral votes from the nation’s Top 10 populous states: California (55), Texas (38), Florida (29), New York (29), Pennsylvania (20), Illinois (20), Ohio (18), Georgia (16), North Carolina (15), and Michigan (16).

The Top 10 states’ current allocation of 256 electoral votes, from the 538 electoral votes, are 47.58 percent. But, from the U.S. House, the 236 representatives in those Top 10 states, from the 435 congressional districts, are actually 54.25 percent of the nation’s population. Add an elector to District of Columbia, for electing a U.S. president, and the math becomes 236 divided by 436 to equal 54.12 percent.

The amount of people in the United States who live in a Top 10 state are 54 percent.

We have over 300 million people in the U.S. This means at least 162 million are in a Top 10 state. But, in accordance to current allocations of electoral votes throughout the nation, the Top 10 states are given approximately 141 million. What this means is that at least 13 percent less in weight is allocated to the populations of the nation’s Top 10.

That is an argument against retaining the Electoral College.


Here is a related video by Secular Talk’s Kyle Kulinski: