The electoral college needs to go. As you are probably aware, we don’t actually vote for a president. We vote for an elector who is designated to vote for the president. The system is set up to protect small states, which made some sense as a compromise when our nation was forming but now is an anachronism. Each state is allotted the number of electors that represents the total of representatives in the House of Representatives from the state, plus the two U.S. senators. So all states start out with two votes no matter their size. We have two plus nine (nine representatives) for a total of 11.
So let’s look at what the electoral college does. Indiana’s population is close to 6.6 million, while Vermont has about 625,000. Indiana has more than 10 times the population of Vermont. We get 11 electoral votes and Vermont gets 3. (They only have one representative in the House.) So with 10 times the population we get less than 4 times the electoral votes. That means that in Indiana there are about 600,000 citizens per elector and in Vermont about 200,000. A vote in Vermont equals 3 in Indiana.
The Supreme court back in 1964 stated that when divisions of representation are set up in a state they should be apportioned to their population, so that you don’t have one district for example with 100,000 population having the same representation as another with 300,000. That wouldn’t be fair. One person one vote.
The alternate argument is to protect the smaller states. But they already have an oversized influence in one of the two national legislative bodies. Vermont has one Senator for 300,000 population and Indiana has one for 3.3 million. (California has one for 20 million). I think 10 times the representation (VT over IN) covers that very well.
While getting rid of the electoral college would require amending the constitution, not an easy task, there is a work-around being promoted. States that adopt the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact agree to require their electors to vote for whoever wins the popular vote. If enough states adopt the compact then the person who wins the most votes would win the presidency. Fifteen states and D.C. have adopted it, representing 73% of the votes needed for it to go into affect. Indiana has not.
