- Position1 of 2›
- Yes, we should abolish the Electoral College
The United States has changed significantly since the Electoral College was introduced, and it no longer reflects the reality of its population.
The argument
The objection is not that the Electoral College was badly designed but that it was designed for a country that no longer exists. It was created at a time when the population density and the geography of the United States of America was vastly different from what it is now, and its allocation of weight between places reflected the distribution of people as it stood then. A mechanism built around a particular arrangement of population can only continue to represent people fairly for as long as that arrangement holds. It has not held. The country became a modern industrialised society, and in the course of that change the majority of the population have moved from rural areas to urban city centres. The Electoral College has not been updated or reformed to match. The consequence is cumulative rather than a single error: each decade of movement widens the gap between where people actually live and the weights the system assigns, so the distortion grows as the country changes while the mechanism stays fixed. A voter's influence comes to depend on which side of that drift their state falls on, which is not a principle anyone chose but the residue of a settlement made for different conditions. A second group is left out altogether. The Electoral College does not account for voters in American territories such as Puerto Rico and Guam, who are subject to the authority of the president the system selects while having no weight in selecting them. This is not a distortion in how votes are counted but the absence of any count at all. A system that increasingly misrepresents where the population lives, and that omits some of it entirely, is not performing the function that justifies it. Because the Electoral College disproportionately reflects demographic shifts in the US, it should be abolished.
Premises
Counter-arguments
Under a system where presidential elections are decided by plurality of voters, candidates are likely to campaign in areas of high population density. If adopted in the US this would lead to voters from large rural areas being ignored. The Electoral College instead ensures that candidates campaign in parts of the country that they would normally avoid, exposing them to a variety of opinions.
Rejecting the premises
[Rejecting P1] The Electoral College is actually better for reflecting the US population, as it ensures voices usually not prioritised are heard.