What’s So Bad About the Electoral College?

For all the talk about how the Electoral College should be jettisoned and replaced by national elections decided only on the basis of the total popular vote, I happen to think that this discussion or debate is ignoring a very important point.

We are the only representative democracy in the entire world which doesn’t impose any legal requirement on its citizens to participate in the process used to decide who’s going to run the whole show.

Want to vote? Fine. Go and vote.

Don’t want to vote? That’s just fine too. Stay home or go somewhere else.

In 2020, two-thirds of the eligible voters actually voted in person or by mail, the highest voting percentage of any national election held in the United States.

What this means is that one-third of the country’s adult citizens had no problem letting the other two-thirds decide who would be in charge of things for the next four years.

But the reason why there’s always what Grandpa would call a big ‘gevalt’ (read: argument) about the Electoral College, is because if those two-thirds who bother to vote live in states which have smaller numbers of residents than the two-thirds who live in the more populous states, we can wind up with an election where the people who end up being in charge represent the…