The Electoral College: An Undemocratic Relic We Need to Ditch

The Electoral College has once again demonstrated its decisive role in American presidential elections.

Here we are in 2025, with Trump back in the White House after winning both the popular vote and the Electoral College in the 2024 election. This is different from his first victory in 2016, when he won the presidency despite losing the popular vote by nearly 2.9 million votes to Hillary Clinton.

The issue isn’t about the 2024 election specifically—Trump won fair and square under both metrics. But the system itself deserves serious scrutiny. Why the hell are we still using a system explicitly designed for an 18th-century agricultural society with slavery? And more importantly, what would it take to create something better?

The Uncomfortable Truth: Slavery Built This System

Let’s cut the bullshit about the Electoral College being some stroke of divine constitutional genius. It was a messy political compromise with three main components:

  • Small states wanted power protection. Fair enough.
  • The founders didn’t trust average voters. Not so great.
  • Slave states wanted their human property to count for representation. Absolutely terrible.

This last point doesn’t get talked about enough. The Electoral College was EXPLICITLY designed to boost the influence of slave states. Virginia, with its massive enslaved population, benefited enormously from a system that counted enslaved people (at 3/5 value) for representation while denying them the right to vote.

Yale constitutional scholar Akhil Reed Amar puts it bluntly: “The Electoral College was designed in part to cater to slavery.”

This isn’t ancient history or a footnote—it’s the foundational purpose of a system we still use to select the most powerful person on the planet.

The 2024 Election: A Perfect Case Study in Dysfunction

Trump won in 2024. Fine. But HOW he won demonstrates exactly what’s wrong with this system.

The entire presidential contest essentially came down to:

  • A few thousand votes in Pennsylvania
  • A slightly larger margin in Michigan
  • Narrow wins in Wisconsin and Georgia
  • A nail-biter in Arizona

Meanwhile, tens of millions of votes in California, New York, Texas, and dozens of other states might as well have been shouted into the void. If you don’t live in a swing state, your presidential vote is basically decorative.

Is this actually democracy? When the vast majority of Americans are just spectators to their own presidential election?

What’s Actually Broken Here

The problems go way beyond any single election:

1. Your Vote’s Value Depends on Your Zip Code

A vote in Wyoming carries 3.6 times more electoral weight than a vote in California. This isn’t some complex statistical manipulation—it’s straight-up math based on how Electoral College votes are allocated.

Living in North Dakota? Congratulations, your presidential vote matters more than your cousin’s in Illinois.

Living in New York? Sorry, presidential candidates will never care about your concerns because your state is predetermined.

Not only is this fundamentally unfair, but it also shapes policy. Research consistently shows that swing states receive more federal grants, more disaster relief, more trade war exemptions, and more presidential attention to their specific issues.

Twice since 2000, we’ve had presidents who lost the popular vote:

  • Bush in 2000 (lost by ~544,000 votes)
  • Trump in 2016 (lost by ~2.9 million votes)

To be crystal clear: I’m not saying these presidents were illegitimate under our current rules. I’m saying the rules themselves are questionable if you believe in basic democratic principles.

When millions more Americans vote for one candidate but get the other, that’s not a feature—it’s a bug.

3. It Locks Us Into a Two-Party Death Spiral

Perhaps the most insidious effect of the Electoral College is how it traps us in a dysfunctional two-party system. The winner-take-all approach in 48 states means third parties have no viable path to victory—they can only play spoiler.

Remember Ross Perot getting 19% of the popular vote in 1992 but zero electoral votes? That’s by design.

The result is a system where:

  • Voters regularly choose between “the lesser of two evils”
  • Candidates need only appeal to their base plus swing voters in swing states
  • Multiple perspectives get compressed into two increasingly extreme options
  • Frustration and disengagement grow with each election cycle

We’re stuck in a doom loop of polarization, and the Electoral College is a primary reason why.

Ranked Choice Voting: A Way Out of This Mess

Okay, enough about what’s broken. What would actually fix it?

Ranked choice voting (RCV) offers a real alternative. Instead of picking just one candidate, you rank them: first choice, second choice, third choice, etc. If no candidate gets a majority, the last-place finisher gets eliminated, and their votes transfer to voters’ second choices. This continues until someone crosses 50%.

Here’s why RCV would be transformative:

1. Vote Your Conscience Without “Wasting” Your Vote

Love a third-party candidate but worried about helping the “wrong” major party win? With RCV, you rank your true preference first, then your strategic backup choice. Your vote still counts even if your favorite can’t win.

2. Candidates Have to Appeal Beyond Their Base

When being someone’s second choice matters, candidates have incentives to build broader coalitions rather than just demonizing opponents. This naturally reduces the most toxic forms of campaigning. Why alienate voters whose second-choice support you need?

3. Winners Actually Need Majority Support

RCV ensures the winner has majority support, not just a plurality in a fragmented field. This increases legitimacy and reduces the “not my president” sentiment that’s poisoning our politics.

4. It’s Already Working in America

This isn’t theoretical. Maine and Alaska now use RCV for federal elections. New York City uses it for primaries. More than 50 jurisdictions across the country have adopted it with successful results.

The movement continues to grow, even with the usual resistance to change.

How We Actually Get There

So what’s the path forward? Three main options:

Constitutional Amendment (Hard Mode)

The cleanest but most difficult approach. Requires two-thirds approval in Congress and ratification by three-fourths of states. Given that small states benefit from the current system, this is… unlikely.

This clever workaround involves states agreeing to award their electoral votes to the winner of the national popular vote. It takes effect once states representing 270+ electoral votes join—enough to determine the presidency.

So far, states with 205 electoral votes have signed on. We’re getting closer.

State-by-State RCV Implementation (Easy Mode)

States don’t need federal permission to implement RCV within their existing electoral votes. Maine and Alaska have done it. More states are considering it. This approach allows incremental progress rather than waiting for national consensus.

Bottom Line: Democracy Isn’t Supposed to Work Like This

The Electoral College isn’t sacred. It’s not part of some perfect constitutional design. It’s a flawed mechanism created through compromise in a different era for a different society—one that included slavery and excluded most people from voting entirely.

We’ve updated virtually every other aspect of our democracy since the founding. We’ve expanded voting rights. We’ve directly elected senators. We’ve extended democratic principles in countless ways.

Yet we cling to an 18th-century presidential selection system as if it’s untouchable, watching it deliver increasingly undemocratic results with each passing decade.

Look, I’m not naive. Electoral reform is hard. The parties in power rarely want to change the rules that put them there.

But as the gap between the popular vote and Electoral College grows wider, as our politics becomes more polarized, as voter frustration with binary choices intensifies—the pressure for change will only increase.

Democracy means rule by the people. All people. With votes of equal weight.

We deserve a system where:

  • Every vote counts equally, regardless of geography
  • The candidate with the most support actually wins
  • Voters can express their true preferences without strategic voting
  • Multiple perspectives have a viable path to representation

That’s not what we have now. But it’s what we could have if we’re willing to admit that a system designed for 13 colonies in the 1780s might not be the best system for a diverse continental superpower in the 2020s.

Maybe by 2028, we’ll finally be ready to have this conversation. Until then, we’re stuck pretending that this antiquated electoral relic still makes sense.