As I write this article, there are about 60 some odd days until the presidential election. The candidates, as they were four years ago, are old, deeply flawed, diametrically opposed dudes that probably wont live long enough to see the next four years anyway. I will still vote as I hope every eligible voter will. I do this with the knowledge thatfor me and half of the people living in a majority of statesour votes will not matter. The simple reasoning being the system used to elect the president.

Yes, this is an article talking about the flawed system known as the Electoral College. The Electoral College is a system that depresses voter turnout, has elected 5 presidents who lost the popular vote, and whose creation was, at least in part, a compromise to give slave states more influence in the election of the president. This article is about the flaws in the system, but I will not advocate for its abolition. Instead, I want to offer a view of reform, of working within the current system to align it to our modern needs. I think the Electoral College could work better; it would certainly be imperfect and could still lead to a president being elected over the will of the people, but it could be astronomically better than what we have now.

So the first thing to understand is how it works. On Tuesday, Nov. 3, when people go to the polls or mail in their ballots, their votes will be collected, counted and certified, but no candidate will be awarded any electoral votes, as the people did not vote for a president, but rather electors who promise to vote for the president when the time comes. A month later on Monday, December 14th, the electors who were voted for by the people to cast their vote for their pledged candidate, will do so. Each state gets as many electoral votes as it has people in Congress (number of representatives, plus two senators), so California, for example, has 55 electoral votes (53 representatives, plus two senators), Louisiana has eight electoral votes (six representatives, plus two senators) and Vermont has three electoral votes (one representative, plus two senators). Each state, no matter how small, is entitled to three electoral votes, giving them unequal influence, since they often have more votes than they should.

Electors are often elected from their state in a winner-takes-all contest, meaning that whatever pledged candidate gets the most not necessarily a majority of popular votes gets all of that states electoral votes. Utah, for example, had a three-way contest in 2016. Donald Trump received only 46 percent of the vote, while Hillary Clinton received 27 percent and Evan McMullin received 22 percent. Even though 54 percent of the state voted against him, Trump still received all of the electoral votes, because he got a plurality of the popular vote.

This system has enabled 5 presidents to be elected despite a majority of the country voting against them; it happened in 1824, 1876, 1888, 2000 and 2016. Of those five, four that were elected this way were Republicans.

So how do we fix this? Many Electoral College apologists defend the system by stating that the Founding Fathers wanted the election of the president a step removed from the people so that a democratic mob would not install a populist demagogue, and an elite group could decide against the wishes of the people for their own good. While that is indeed what the Founding Fathers wanted, I need only point out that Donald Trump is the current President of the United States to show that is not how the Electoral College works in practice. I would also point out that electors are often not free to choose who they think should be president they are bound by state law, punishable by fines if they do not vote in accordance with how the people voted. The Supreme Court case Chiafalo v. Washington unanimously declared, Article II and the Twelfth Amendment give States broad power over electors, and give electors themselves no rights. Electors merely serve as conduits rather than decision-makers. But the Electoral College is the system that the Founding Fathers wanted, so it is the system I will work with.

The change that I think would alleviate most of these problems would be changing from a winner-takes-all system to a proportional system. This would mean that electoral votes would be allocated based upon the percentage each candidate received in each states popular vote. Sticking with the Utah example, Trump would have received three electoral votes, Clinton two and McMullin one. Or take California, a state where 30 percent of the population voted for Trump, yet where he received no electoral votes. Under this improved Electoral College, Clinton would get 34 electoral votes, Trump would get 17, Gary Johnson would get two and Jill Stein and Bernie Sanders would get one each. More peoples votes would actually go to who they wanted.

In addition to this, Electoral College votes should be based on the number of representatives alone, not coupled with the number of senators. This is because small states under the current system have bloated influence in the electoral college, due to them receiving more electoral votes than their populations alone would otherwise allow. Each electoral vote in Wyoming represents about 193,000 people, whereas in California each electoral vote represents about 718,000 people, meaning that each Wyoming electoral vote is 37 times more influential than Californias. How can we call ourselves democratic, when a central tenet of democracy is the principle of one man, one vote? Apologists again will say that the Electoral College exists so as to protect small states from having policy affecting them being dictated only from big states. But should the converse not also be true? Why should a large state like California be subject to the will of a state whose population is 682 times less than its own?

Proportional allocation of electoral votes also hurts our current two-party system as third parties are actually able to influence the election. Under this system, I no doubt think that contested presidential elections would be more likely to occur, thus throwing the election to the House of Representatives per the Twelfth Amendment. Here too I would change the system a bit. Currently, if a presidential election is thrown into the House, then a candidate needs to win an absolute majority of votes in order to win. The catch is that each state only gets one vote. Although there are 435 representatives, each states delegation would only get one vote, meaning a candidate would need 26 states in order to win. A more fair system would be that each representative themselves would vote for president, not the delegation as a whole. Under this system, a contested election would require a candidate receiving 218 votes an absolute majority of the total number of representatives in order to become president.

I do not think any one system is perfect, but some do work better than others. The changes I have proposed here would make the United States elections fairer, encourage participation and dismantle the harmful two-party system, but they will be unbelievably hard to implement as everything I have mentioned will require one or several constitutional amendments in order for states, electors and Congress to comply. I do not propose we rid ourselves of the Electoral College, but it must be changed to suit our current needs and ideals.

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The Electoral College does not have to be eliminated, but it must be fixed - The Vermilion