ELECTORAL COLLEGE

I don’t claim to be a political expert at all, but I am intrigued by politics, both here and elsewhere.
            So, my curiosity has reminded me how Americans will choose their president next month: namely, via the Electoral College. That’s the system where 333 million American voters don’t actually pick the president. Who does? Why, it’s the 538 Electoral College votes, of course!
Doing a bit of research on this, it’s soon revealed that the current system is nothing like what the founding founders (who created the Electoral College in the first place back in 1879) had in mind. Their intention was that electors would actually debate and consider multiple options.  
            As the Sightline Institute (an independent, nonprofit research and communications center) says, “The Electoral College is enshrined in the US Constitution, right? Yes, and the US Constitution is notoriously hard to amend. Fortunately for voters, there’s no need. The Constitution leaves the decision of how to select electors and how to distribute their votes completely up to states. Most state legislatures have chosen to give all their Electoral College votes to the candidate who wins in their state, but they could instead choose to cast their Electoral College votes for the candidate who wins the national popular vote. And if enough states chose to cast their electoral votes for the popular winner, US voters would no longer see a mismatch between who wins the national popular vote and who wins the presidency. The Electoral College would always agree with the people: a national-winner-wins system rather than a state-by-state winner-take-all one.”
            I gather some states are already making changes. Sightline tell us: “Sixteen jurisdictions have signed on to the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, pledging to assign their Electoral College votes to the popular winner once enough other states have also signed on, so that together those states have enough electoral votes to guarantee the popular winner— states controlling at least 270 electoral votes.”
            And listen to Carolyn Dupont, a history professor at Eastern Kentucky University: “The electors now actually just serve no purpose. What they actually do is to provide openings for fraud, because they’re human beings. So I think (the founders) would be disturbed about that.”
            Consider too that in 2016, Donald Trump had a substantial Electoral College victory of 302-227, except that nearly 3 million more Americans preferred his opponent, and roughly 7 million voted for a third-party candidate.
            It seems the current system gets results that conflict with the expressed wishes of a majority of voters.
            For sure, changes to this system are not going to impact the upcoming U.S. election, since it’s only 22 days ahead. But it’s something the new government ought to take a serious look at.

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