No one will soon forget the confusion and frustration on November 8, 2016, when Donald Trump was elected President of the United States with 304 Electoral College votes, despite receiving nearly 3 million fewer popular votes (open in new tab) than Hillary Clinton. Calls for the abolition of the Electoral College were immediate (open in new tab) because it no longer seemed to properly represent the true interests of an increasingly diverse citizenry, concentrated in a handful of states.

Fast forward to 2020, and the Electoral College is still firmly in place. The latest polls (open in new tab) show Joe Biden leading Trump in the Electoral College, but it is worth looking at how the Electoral College came into being, how it is functioning, and if the votes of some Americans could be given significantly more weight than others. Worthwhile.

The Electoral College is made up of delegates elected from each state and Washington, D.C., who are appointed by their respective state legislatures to vote for a particular candidate. In essence, when you vote for a presidential candidate, you are actually casting a vote for your state to appoint electors who will officially vote for that candidate. This may seem unnecessarily confusing, but it is so.

The concept of electing electors is enshrined in the Constitution, which states that the number of delegates each state receives is equal to the number of congressional delegates it receives (Washington, D.C. receives the same number of electors as the least populous state). Currently, there are 538 voters in the Electoral College, and an absolute majority of at least 270 votes is required to win an election.

Each state legislature can decide how to choose its own electors. According to the Constitution, the only strict rule is that electors must not currently hold federal office and must not have "committed insurrection or rebellion" against the state.

Usually, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures (open in new tab), each state party nominates its electors based on their consistency and loyalty to the party over the years. In this way, the phenomenon of "non-loyal electors" who are nominated to vote for a particular party but change their vote in the actual election can hopefully be avoided.

About 60% of Americans (open in new tab) say no. The premise of the Electoral College was conceived more than 200 years ago, when there were only 13 stars on the flag and only land-owning whites had the right to vote. The framers of the Constitution believed that state-appointed delegates were needed to represent the best interests of rural Americans who had little or no education. now, with more than 200 million diverse voters spread from coast to coast, concentrated in urban areas, and better educated than ever before, more than two centuries Despite the violent changes across the country over the past two centuries, it seems counterproductive to still use the same system.

Consider, for example, the case of a swing state like Iowa (open in new tab). Iowa ranks in the bottom half of the most populous states in the nation, but it clearly played a major role in determining the winner of the recent presidential election. Iowa's six Electoral College votes represent approximately 525,000 Iowans, depending on how delegates are allocated, while in California, the most populous state in the nation, 718,000 of the 55 Electoral College votes are California residents. Even more shocking is to compare the weight of Californians' votes with those of Wyoming residents. The three electoral votes of Wyoming residents each represent only 193,000 citizens, giving their votes nearly four times the theoretical "weight" of the California vote. Such discrepancies appear to be in direct conflict with the concept of "one person, one vote," in which every American's vote is expected to carry the same weight.

There is also the fact that the majority of states (and Washington, D.C.) use a "winner-take-all" system for allocating electoral votes. This means that even if the voters in a state are split almost in half between two candidates, the one with the slightest advantage will win all the electoral votes, giving the impression that a significant portion of each state's vote will be completely wiped out. This is why "battleground states" and "swing states" are so important to candidates: in 2016, for example, Trump outspent Clinton by only 13,000 votes in Michigan, which was more than enough to give Trump all 16 electoral votes in the state.

According to the NCSL, Maine and Nebraska are the only states that split their Electoral College votes according to popular vote. These two states, under the district system, give one vote to the popular vote winner in each district and two votes to the statewide popular vote winner. However, this system has split the vote only once in each state's history, in Nebraska in 2008 and in Maine in 2016.

In addition to this, there is always the possibility that a faithless elector may decide not to vote for a candidate he or she should have voted for, completely negating a representative portion of the popular vote in that state. Currently, 33 states and Washington, D.C., have laws (open in new tab) prohibiting members of the Electoral College from changing their votes, but only a handful of these laws penalize dishonest electors or obliterate changed votes.

Of course. Regardless of how much (or how little) representative weight your vote appears to carry in the Electoral College, an election can be decided by a handful of votes in any state, large or small. Your vote could be the one vote that ensures your candidate's victory in your district, the tipping point that makes your district the decisive factor in a statewide victory, and the result could be that your state's electors will vote for that candidate on the official Electoral College ballot in December.

Too many elections have been decided not by improbable and unpredictable swing states, but by millions of voters who have stayed home thinking their votes cannot be counted on.