Although November is months away, the election season has already started, with the first presidential primaries in New Hampshire and Nevada happening last week. This year, the competition among the two leading candidates, Joe Biden and Donald Trump, will be most fierce as Biden’s approval ratings have reached a historic low and Trump’s fraudulent claims of voter fraud in the 2020 presidential election are a factor in the general mistrust from American citizens among the two. 

America’s presidential voting system is the Electoral College, created by the founding fathers. While it may have been successful during the era of the thirteen states, it certainly is not in the era of fifty. The Electoral College promotes a two-party system, is incredibly inefficient, and must be reformed with a better voting system.

 

When the Electoral College was written into the Constitution, the United States did not have political parties. There were no democrats, republicans, or libertarians – just candidates with beliefs people either agreed or disagreed with. The Electoral College allows a two-party system due to the divide among the sides of the political spectrum. 

For example, let’s say that Jill and James are two candidates for two separate left-leaning parties and that Polly and Pete are two candidates for two separate right-leaning parties. On election day in, say, Texas, Jill got 24% of the vote, James got 27%, Polly got 32%, and Pete got 17%. In this situation, although the majority of 51% of Texans wanted a left-leaning candidate to win the election, the right-leaning candidate, Polly, won. The Texan's electoral votes went to the candidate that 68% of the people did not want. Is that fair?

The following election day, the left-leaning Texans decided that a repeat of the previous election would be poor for all of Texas. So, they decide to support James’ party rather than Jill’s, causing Jill’s votes to crumble. The right-leaning parties in the second election are still divided somewhat equally, causing James’ party to win the vote. In the next election, the right-leaning Texans decide that a repeat of the past election would cause the opposing side to win. So, they decide to support Polly’s party more than Pete's, causing his party to decrease in voters similar to Jill’s. In the timespan of three elections, a two-party system has been created in Texas out of James and Polly. 

The two-party system, while simple to understand, is detrimental to America. The United States is considered a melting pot of cultures. A two-party system actively eliminates diversity in favor of results. How can America be seen as a fusion of dozens of cultures when it is politically divided by two sides? The answer is simple–it can’t. Yet, the Electoral College allows this to take place. 

The 1960 presidential election was between Democratic candidate John F. Kennedy and Republican incumbent Richard Nixon. If one were to look at the election through only the eyes of the Electoral College, it was won by a landslide by JFK, with Kennedy winning 303 electoral votes and Nixon a measly 219. However, the popular vote says differently. The popular vote says that Kennedy won by a margin of 0.17%, as there was only a 112,827 difference out of 68,838,219 total votes between the two candidates. It is a similar story in the 1992 election, where democratic candidate Bill Clinton earned 370 electoral votes and Republican incumbent George H. W. Bush won just 168. The gap between the two was 5,805,339 out of 84,014,439. In this particular election, however, there was another, now much lesser known, candidate. Ross Perot ran for an independent party and won ~18.9% of the popular vote. The number of electoral votes he got? Zero. The electoral college is inefficient in representing all the parties, as exemplified here. 

The most known candidates from this election are Clinton and H. W. Bush because they are the only ones who earned electoral votes, not because they held the overwhelming majority. The following election, another similar story took place, where Ross Perot emerged as a candidate, not part of the main two, yet received zero electoral votes from the Electoral College. Since this run in 1996, there have been no third-party candidates emerging other than the Democratic and Republican ones. The college is inefficient in representing the reality of what the population wants.

There is sadly only one solution to stopping this Electoral College problem: reforming the presidential polling process. One possible successful voting system can be direct ranked-choice voting. In this system, multiple candidates get sorted into a list by voters from who they’d prefer the most to who they’d prefer the least. Candidates get eliminated based on who the majority votes in. If a voter’s top candidate is the majority’s least top-placed candidate, the vote for said candidate is eliminated. However, their second-place candidate would be counted instead. This process is continued until there is a candidate with the majority preferredness. 

Not only would this accurately represent the public’s general opinion, but it would prevent a two-party system. Going back to the “Jill, James, Polly, Pete” analysis, if James was voted in but performed poorly overall, the people could put Jill at the top of their vote rather than James. This cycle can repeat endlessly since ranked-choice prevents the possibility of two dominant parties being on the ballot. 

Sadly, the way to push for this reform effectively is by protest. However, it may also be helpful to contact your local congressperson. If enough people take charge, the Electoral College will be talked about enough for change to be discussed. As it stands now, however, the Electoral College will reign as an inefficient, two-party favoring, and disproportionate voting system for the U.S.’s most important election.