In the final weeks of the presidential race, it has become a daily ritual for the various news agencies to report the most recent national presidential polls as a part of their major coverage. While it may be fun to hyperventilate over the latest revelation that the margin separating Mitt Romney and Barack Obama has shifted by half a point, the tracking of national polls is essentially a useless exercise. Thanks to the outdated and anti-democratic Electoral College, the presidential race will instead hinge on how a small handful of states vote in November.
The Electoral College was originally the result of a compromise between the constitutional framers that felt the president should be selected by the legislature and those that wanted a national leader directly answerable to the people. Although there were other considerations, the concerns of the former group mainly revolved around the perception that the uneducated, ignorant masses would screw up and select an undesirable president if given too much control. So, the Electoral College was instituted as a safety blanket of sorts. Additionally, the system was, and still is, supposed to represent the conception of the president as the leader of a collection of independent states. Such rationale is not entirely unreasonable; the United States is not a unitary nation but a federal republic. However, there are downsides to the Electoral College that significantly outweigh whatever benefits the antiquated system may have, and these drawbacks may end up, as they did in 2000, harming the democratic integrity of our nation's political system.
Contrary to what one might expect in a democracy, not every voter's voice counts equally. The likelihood that any one person's vote will influence the outcome of a national election depends on the state in which that person resides. A vote for Mitt Romney in New York or Barack Obama in Texas is, apart from its value as a symbol of civic participation, quite meaningless. The vast majority of states are similar in that they will always vote for the candidate from a certain party in each election, thus marginalizing the voices of their citizens in ideological minorities. Candidates are aware of this and consequently completely ignore such places during the campaign process in favor of lavishing states like Ohio and Virginia with attention. By contrast, citizens there are treated to (or, depending on the viewpoint, subjected to) media advertisements and rallies and candidate meet-and-greets. To be a registered voter in a swing state is to be, in a sort of romantic parlance, courted. While Dan the Dixieland Democrat is left looking longingly at his Obama yard sign for solace, undecided voters in Florida and New Hampshire are being made to feel as if they are each the prettiest girl at the year-long dance that is the presidential election cycle.
Individual votes are not even equivalent when examined through a nonpartisan statistical lens. Less-populated states are allotted collective influence that proportionally exceeds their respective populations. Wyoming, for example, contains 0.18 percent of the entire American populace, but is responsible for 0.56 percent of the electoral total. The inverse is true of large states: Texas contains around 8 percent of the population but is responsible for 6.3 percent of the electoral total. Such an allocation is, at least in part, designed to give greater voice to those living in rural areas who might otherwise be isolated with respect to the campaign process. But in today's digital age, where distance has become no barrier to the dispersion of information, rural voters can no longer rely on geography as an excuse to feel less included. There is no reason why a vote from Butte should count more than one from the Bronx.
Of course, the Electoral College will probably never be replaced by a national popular vote. Doing so would mean the passage of a constitutional amendment, which would require a unique show of effort on the part of Congress. Representatives from swing states would also never allow such a measure to be enacted; their constituencies are tremendous beneficiaries of the current system. However, the staying power of the Electoral College does not make it a meritorious system. The reasoning behind its inception is largely outdated, and it has the potential to act in opposition to the most basic democratic tenet of all: that the decision of the majority of civic participants, each of whom has an equal voice, is respected.
