Staff writer pushes for new voting system

The Electoral College is dumb, and no it isn’t a place.

Voting through the Electoral College was an effective way to distribute power among states in the U.S. back when our founding fathers wrote it into the constitution.  The Electoral College gave incentives for presidential candidates to campaign abroad. With this system the candidates wouldn’t only focus on densely populated areas.

However, that was hundreds of years ago. The Electoral College doesn’t spread out presidential campaigning geographically, at all. 

Ask yourself: how many times have any of the candidates visited Washington state?

The answer is six times since June 12. That’s not so bad, unless you compare that to Ohio’s 86 visits, or Florida’s 81.

With the Electoral College the election is decided by whichever candidate can receive at least 270 of the 538 total votes.

Each state gets a number of electoral votes in relationship to their number of representatives plus senators. But no state can have less than three electoral votes. 

With two exceptions, Nebraska and Maine, every state awards electoral votes in a winner-take-all fashion. So if a candidate scores 51 percent of the popular vote, all of the electoral votes go to that candidate. 

So if you’re like my dad, a staunch conservative, who’ll be voting for the Republican ticket this year, you’re vote won’t count. Washington has been a blue state since 1988 and when Obama gets the popular vote here, which he will, anybody who voted red will be forgotten. All of the electoral votes will go to Obama and any Republican votes (from Washington) can’t influence the election any further. 

That’s how, in 2000, the Electoral College put in place a president that didn’t win the popular vote. Think how different the world would be if Al Gore had taken his rightful place in the Oval Office. I can tell you we probably wouldn’t have gone into Iraq. 

Anyway, the general public votes for electoral middlemen called electors to represent them in the Presidential election. These electors must take the collective votes of the state, down to Washington D.C and vote for whichever candidate the public chose.

That is unless you live in Arizona, New York, Texas or 21 other states that actually don’t require their electors to vote according to the popular vote. In which case only one vote matters, the electors. In instances, appointed electors decide to vote against the popular vote, this is individual is called a faithless elector. 

It should be noted that only once in history that faithless electors have changed an outcome of an election. But faithless electors have changed their minds 85 times in history due to personal preferences.

 I’ll admit that back in George Washington’s day, the quickest means of communication was by horse, and it made sense to elect representatives to vote for their general state-wide population. But considering information now darts across the country instantly, there really isn’t an excuse for letting 538 individuals choose the president.

America needs to find a better Democratic system that will represent the public fairly. 

Story by Christian Zerbel