Should the USA electoral college by reformed?

Answer 1

Favourite answer

I assume you meant "be reformed".

First let's get to the bottom of why it exists. When the US constitution was being written, the smaller states wanted a bias towards small states. In a federal country, surely being a state should count for something? And that's what the electoral college does. It means the big states and big cities don't control the result all the time, and smaller farming states have different concerns - why should they be ignored?

So yes, keep it, but I can think of two very good things to do to it. Unfortunately both need a constitutional Amendments so they're very unlikely.

1. Now that all the states choose electors by a public vote (the constitution doesn't require this and until 1868, not all states actually held an election), does the USA need actual electors? Why not cut out the middleman and just have the states allocate electoral votes? Like awarding points - then just add those up Electors are expected to vote the way they're told anyway, so what does the USA actually NEED them for?

2. Nearly all states choose electors by "winner takes all". It doesn't matter whether a candidate wins in the state by one vote or millions, the state chooses their whole slate to be electors. So what's the point of voting unless it's in a swing state (one where it could go either way)? Electoral votes should be allocated in proportion to the state's popular vote. Then everyone's vote would count more for something. It might be your vote that gets that vital extra electoral vote for the candidate you want.

You'd need a method of rounding off to the nearest whole number but there are plenty of ways to do that used in countries that have proportional representation voting. For example, the UK uses the d'Hondt method in European elections - that's the simplest and it would work. It's also used in electing the "additional members" to the Scottish Parliament and Welsh Senedd to make the result proportional, so the legal words to do it are in the Scotland Act 1998 - America, feel free to copy! It's actually quite short.

Answer 2

NO

Answer 3

NO it works and is fair.. IF it wasn't there there would and could be 8 cities decide who wins... IE... Just Los Angeles has more people then the whole state of Montana, and Wyoming, and n. Dakota, The politicians would only go to the largest cities in the Largest 5 states and spend all their money and make pro mouses to them to get elected and the rest of the country and states would have to suffer because they would never get anything..

Answer 4

Every state should apportion its Electoral votes proportionately instead of this winner-take-all most of them do that disenfranchises millions of people.

Answer 5

No, not really.

I'd like to see at least the larger states stop using the winner-take-all system of electoral vote allocation, but that's not really part of the electoral college per se.

Answer 6

I think it should be gotten rid of, and not just because of the last election. The popular vote should be the determiner.

Answer 7

No. It works just fine.

Answer 8

We could try the Hillary method and add about 300 new votes to it. And those votes would be selected by the leadership of the democrat party.

Answer 9

Reformed? Yes. Abolished? No.

Answer 10

Democrats didn't complain about it when Obama won.