Fixing the Electoral College

“If an election is to be determined by a majority of a single vote, and that can be procured by a party through artifice or corruption, the Government may be the choice of a party for its own ends, not of the nation for the national good.”
-John Adams

The founding fathers gave us the ultimate guidebook with the Constitution, while simultaneously acknowledging their own potential shortcomings with an amendment system built into this very document.

The electoral college is yet another shortcoming we’ve had to face. Devised as a means of compromise over a variety of issues including slavery, one issue in particular has stood the test of time.

The strongest argument for the electoral college to date is to prevent the “tyranny of the majority.” This is a legitimate fear that a purely popular vote based system would result in presidential candidates only focusing on densely populated cities and ignoring the rural heartland. Today, we can see this fear is logical because Joe Biden has raised $1.8 Billion almost exclusively from costal cities. And you can visualize this concern in the recent New York Times article entitled:

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/10/25/us/politics/trump-biden-campaign-donations.html

For most of U.S. history the popular vote and electoral college have lined up in presidential elections, but in recent history this trend is beginning to falter with some consistency. Two of the five times in history where a president has won the electoral college but lost the popular vote have occurred in the last 20 years.

It can be easy to point to the losing side in this situation (both times Democrats) and deem them sore losers. But if you can try to view this objectively or imagine a scenario where the opposite result occurred, the reality is that the electoral college has resulted in the exact problem it intended to resolve.

We now have a system where candidates focus not on the rural heartland of the U.S. but on a few key swing states that determine the leader of the free world.

How can we fix this? Look at any electoral map and ask yourself one question.

Is everyone in all parts of [insert state here] a [insert party here]?

The same way congressional seats are determined by population, electoral college votes within each state should be allocated by population. The congressional seats determine the total electoral votes a state has anyhow, so why not expand that to its next logical step?

TLDR: Electoral votes should be allocated by congressional district.

6 Electoral votes for Trump and 21 for Biden would be a far more accurate representation of New York:

Just as this would be a far more accurate representation of Texas:

This would not only allow rural communities to be heard, it would also encourage candidates to campaign far more tactically and paint a much clearer picture of America.