Dear next president,

The electoral college is a group of 538 people each of whom represents a state in the presidential election. The members of the electoral college vote for president based upon the outcome of the general election. The electoral college should be abolished because it is unfair and it isn't an accurate representation of the population’s vote.

The electoral college system is overly complicated and it keeps the average citizen's vote from carrying any weight. In fact it was created as a way to do just that. In each state, even if a candidate only wins a state by one vote, all of that state’s votes will be given to that candidate. That’s not right, no matter how small of a margin the candidate wins by, none of the votes for the other candidate mean anything.

Another reason the electoral college system is unfair is because some people’s votes count more than others, depending on the state in which they live. Each state gets three electorates, plus an additional amount based on population. So each state has an extra three electorates no matter how big or small its population is, meaning the votes of people in small states count more than those of the people in large states because those three extra votes are divided among a smaller population.

Electorates breaking the rules of the system results in only a small punishment. Each member of the electoral college is expected to vote for the candidate who won the majority in the state they represent but if they don't, the fine is only one thousand dollars. One electoral college representative from Washington state says that he will refuse to vote for Hillary Clinton even if she wins the majority in his state. This would discount hundreds of thousands of citizen's votes. Electors have only voted for the candidate that didn’t win in their state 87 times throughout the country's history and these votes have never changed the outcome of the election but they have the potential to do so.

And while the electoral college vote usually results in an accurate representation popular vote, there have been three times throughout the country's history that the candidate who won the popular vote lost the electoral vote, and therefore the election. The electoral college is too easy to cheat and it doesn’t represent the will of the people. For all of these reasons the popular vote should decide the presidential election, not the electoral college. It would only take twenty-two percent of the popular vote to win the election with this system in place. That’s not fair, it’s not democratic and it’s why the electoral college needs to be abolished.

Sam

Whitaker, Morgan. "Electoral College Member Threatens to Refuse to Vote for Clinton." AOL.com. N.p., n.d. Web. 24 Oct. 2016.

"U. S. Electoral College, Official - What Is the Electoral College?"National Archives and Records Administration. National Archives and Records Administration, n.d. Web. 24 Oct. 2016.