Last week, I described many of the problems with the Electoral College. Although 63% of Americans want to replace it and less than half as many want to keep it, there are still some proponents of this antiquated system.

For example, some people think that "If You Think the Electoral College is a Bad Idea You Don’t Understand the System." Let's ignore that criticizing an idea by insulting its supporters' understanding is a logical fallacy and just plain rude. Instead, we should examine the actual arguments used by Electoral College supporters, independently of their understanding of the topic.

To defend the Electoral College, some have argued that its removal would compel political candidates to focus only on major cities. Let's assume that it really is bad to appeal only to urban voters – or at least that it would be bad if Presidential candidates could win elections by only winning votes in major cities. With the current U.S. demographics, no candidate could pull that off. Less than 8% of Americans live in the ten cities with at least 1 million people each, and only 13% live in the 34 cities with at least 500 thousand.

Imagine that the Electoral College was abolished before the recent election, and that one of the candidates only won votes from California, Florida, and New York. They would have lost 78% of the popular vote and been crushed in the biggest popular landslide in United States history. To win, they would have needed at least seven more states: Texas, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Ohio, Michigan, North Carolina and Georgia. These ten states are very unlikely to vote together. A candidate cannot win in the most populated states alone.

Some people fear that a popular vote would make candidates only put their effort into campaigning in a few states, but that already happens. James Coll, for instance, pointed out that "under our current system, presidential candidates seek the support of dairy farmers in Iowa, coal miners in Pennsylvania, seniors in Florida, and students in Colorado." He's right: candidates seek support from Iowa, Pennsylvania, Florida, and one or two other swing states. Most states are basically ignored.

Others are afraid of the "tyranny of the majority," where a slim majority of the population infringes on the rights of minority groups. In the United States, members of minority groups are protected from oppression primarily by the Bill of Rights, the Constitution in its current form, and various other laws. These protections are all in the domain of the legislative and judicial branches of government. The Electoral College is not directly relevant. Even if it was relevant, it failed at its job of preventing the election of a populist demagogue. Alexander Hamilton's reason for supporting the Electoral College backfired. Finally, it is important to remember that a tyranny of the minority is even worse than that of the majority. A tyranny of the minority is much more likely under the Electoral College.

One supposed benefit of the Electoral College is that it "reduces the relevance of fringe candidates who could otherwise force themselves into importance in a national poll," which is absolutely correct. By making third-party candidates irrelevant, the Electoral College maintains a huge problems in our voting system: two parties dominate without allowing any alternatives.

Considering the recent election, I should not have to explain why limiting elections to two political candidates is harmful. The average American hates Trump and hates Hillary. The most common reason that Americans supported Trump was that he is not Hillary, and vice versa.

Yet Americans voted overwhelmingly for one of them anyway. They believed that doing otherwise would elect the other person, a tragic kind of prisoner's dilemma that ended up electing the least qualified and least liked candidate in modern American history. Dismantling the Electoral College would be a step in the right direction to prevent this tragedy from happening again.

In their quest to justify the Electoral College, some people have even resorted to the argument that abolishing it means that we should abolish the government itself!

Abolishing the electoral college ... would also mean dismantling federalism. After that, there would be no sense in having a Senate ... and further along, no sense even in having states ... Those who wish to abolish the electoral college ought to go the distance, and do away with the entire federal system and perhaps even retire the Constitution.

Ladies and gents, what we have here is a classic slippery slope fallacy, arguing that some action will cause a chain reaction of unwanted consequences without proving that those consequences are likely:

The problem with this reasoning is that it avoids engaging with the issue at hand, and instead shifts attention to extreme hypotheticals. Because no proof is presented to show that such extreme hypotheticals will in fact occur, this fallacy has the form of an appeal to emotion fallacy by leveraging fear. In effect the argument at hand is unfairly tainted by unsubstantiated conjecture.

Abolishing the Electoral College means abolishing the Electoral College. It does not necessarily mean that we should abolish the Senate, states, the federal system or the Constitution. For instance, all of those except the Senate lack one of the Electoral College's main problems – citizens in some regions are given more power than others.

Larry Arnn claimed that the electoral college is not outdated because it reflects that Americans vote based on their state and because it was put into the Constitution by the Founding Fathers. Americans voting differently based on their state does not mean that Americans in some states should be prioritized above those in others.

Also, arguing that the Electoral College is good specifically because it was in the original Constitution is an unwise appeal to authority. Before the Constitution was changed to reflect the nation's improved moral sensibilities, it claimed any African-American was worth three fifths of a person. While ahead of their time in other areas, by today's standards the Founding Fathers and the Constitution were morally wrong.

The Constitution has been amended for all sorts of reasons in American history. We updated it to match our morals by giving voting rights to women and African-Americans. We tweaked it to change the dates of Presidential terms. We even used it to fix a problem with the Electoral College in 1968 by giving electoral votes to American citizens in Washington, D.C. If we amend the Constitution again to abolish the Electoral College, we will still have a country, and we will still have a Constitution.

The United States did not start out with a popular-vote election system because the Founding Fathers were afraid “that without sufficient information about candidates from outside their State, people would naturally vote for a ‘favorite son’ from their own State or region." Even if this concern was relevant once, it isn't anymore. When asked to describe reasons why they chose the candidate that they did "in their own words," American voters named plenty – yet no one mentioned that "he/she is from my state/region."

Another historical justification for the Electoral College was to secure nine out of thirteen states to ratify the Constitution – and it succeeded. It performed its job well two centuries ago. Since it fulfilled that original purpose, we can replace it.

I have wanted to write an article criticizing the Electoral College since I wrote my first Odyssey article almost a year ago. This seems important to mention, because some defenders of the Electoral College have claimed that "[m]any of those now calling for the junking of the Electoral College never thought about the issue before last Tuesday."

That is an underhanded and dirty tactic known as an ad hominem logical fallacy: they "attacked [the] opponent's character or personal traits in an attempt to undermine their argument." Like I said before: rude. Still, even if this was a valid argument, it would not apply here.

The Electoral College is a convoluted, irrational, unfair, unnecessary system beyond justification. Our age of instantaneous mass communication that crosses state boundaries, where two out of the last five Presidential elections crowned the popular winner as the electoral loser, provides the perfect opportunity to replace it.

For more information on this subject, check out some of the following resources:

TIME:"These 3 Common Arguments For Preserving the Electoral College Are Wrong"

Gawker:"A Rebuttal of Richard Posner's Moronic Defense of The Electoral College"

Stanford News: "National popular vote far better than Electoral College system for choosing presidents, Stanford professors say"

Yale University Press: "Why the Electoral College Is Bad for America"