The Electoral College doesn't reflect the popular vote

The argument

The objection is to the mechanism rather than to any particular result it has produced. The Electoral College does not reflect the popular will of voters under a normal democratic election. Instead of votes being counted into a single national total, electors are appointed by individual states to cast votes on the electorate's behalf. What a citizen casts is therefore a vote about who will vote, and it is the second vote that decides the presidency. That indirection carries a consequence which is arithmetic rather than accidental. Because electors are allocated state by state, a national majority can be distributed across states in a way that wins fewer electors than a smaller but better-placed minority does. This indirect process does not always lead to the winner of the popular vote also winning the electoral college — and when it does not, the divergence is not a malfunction but the system working as designed. What follows is the democratic deficit the argument identifies. Voters may end up with a president who does not command a majority of popular support yet still assumes all the powers of the office: the appointment power, the veto, command of the armed forces, and the authority to direct the executive branch. None of those powers is scaled down to reflect the shortfall in support behind them, so the deficit is carried undiminished into every act of the presidency. The conclusion follows from the distance between what the institution does and what an election is for. If the purpose of a democratic election is to identify whom the electorate prefers, then a mechanism which can reliably return the other candidate is not an imperfect means to that end but a different end altogether. That inbuilt mismatch, rather than any single disputed result, is why the argument holds the Electoral College should be abolished.

Premises

Counter-arguments

Rising levels of polarisation amongst voters and political deadlock in the United States Congress makes it increasingly difficult to get rid of the Electoral College, particularly as both of the major parties have self-interest in its maintenance. To reform or get rid of the Electoral College would require a constitutional amendment with two-thirds majority in both houses of Congress and three quarters of states ratifying it, which has only happened twenty seven times since the United States was founded over two hundred years ago. There is currently not a majority in favour of abolishing the Electoral College. Therefore the time could be better used to address more pressing issues.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P2] The abolition of the Electoral College does not have the level of support this would require.