Everyone talks about how you should vote. “Exercise your right to vote,” and “Every vote counts.” I would agree, in terms of one’s local and statewide elections. Your vote for lieutenant governor and your vote for city council will affect your daily life more than your vote in the presidential election. Instead of the president of the United States being elected directly by the people, (like every other election,) the Electoral College, which was established by the founding fathers, are the ones that vote for the president. The Electoral College was originally intended as a compromise between a popular election by United States citizens and election of the president and vice president by Congress. The Electoral College is made up of 538 electors, with a majority of 270 electoral votes required for someone to win the presidency. In a democracy, everyone’s vote should count equally. The way the Electoral College is set up, makes it so that some people’s votes count for more than others.
If the 538 votes that make up the Electoral College were split evenly across the U.S. population, which is approximately 309,000,000 people, then every 574,000 people would count for one Electoral College vote. This doesn’t happen because the Electoral College designates votes to states, not people. For example, there are 11.5 million people in the state of Ohio. In order to be proportionally represented, they should be allotted 20 electoral votes. However, the Electoral College gives Ohio only 18 votes. Ohio’s missing two electoral votes are given to smaller states, like Rhode Island. Rhode Island has 1.1 million people in it. So, it should be allotted only two votes, but instead, the Electoral College gives it four. This is done because according to the rules of the Electoral College, every state, no matter how few people live there, is awarded three electoral votes before the rest of the votes are distributed according to population. Small states population wise, (like Alaska) that should have only one or two Electoral College votes end up with three or four. States such as Texas and California are each missing six and ten votes respectively to make up for the smaller states receiving these extra votes. To put these redistribution rules in perspective, the vote of someone who lives in Vermont counts three times as much as the vote of someone who lives in Texas.
The intent of the Electoral College is to give smaller states more voting power so that presidential candidates will have to pay attention to them. In practice, this fails. In the last general election, only 18 of the 50 states were visited by a candidate on the campaign trail at all. Candidates only have to pay attention to a fraction of states because the Electoral College makes it so that in order for a candidate to win all of the electoral votes in a given state, he or she needs to only win just over 50% of the popular vote in that state. If they win a majority of the popular vote, they receive 100% of that state’s electoral votes. This means that winning the popular vote by millions of citizens’ votes is no better than winning the popular vote by one vote. Thus, candidates can safely ignore states where their respective political party traditionally polls by high margins.
It is therefore possible to win the presidential election by focusing on the states where votes matter the most and by ignoring the states where votes matter the least. There have been three instances in the history of U.S. presidential elections in which the candidate that did not win the popular vote became president: the elections of 1876, 1888, and 2000. The candidate with the most votes by the people lost the election solely because of the Electoral College.
Whether you’re voting for Trump, Hillary, or a third party candidate, just remember that maybe your vote doesn’t count as much as you think it should. So, unfortunately when people tell you that your vote counts, they’re not wrong. It just doesn’t count as much as someone else’s might. Weird, I thought we lived in a democracy?
A video that explains this more in depth:
