In class a few days ago, we discussed the election, the electoral college vs popular vote, and some other things. Personally, I believe that the way the electoral college gives different types of people a more equal say in government is a good idea, but that it's very poorly implemented.
First off, the way most states have a winner-take-all voting system is a bad idea. Republican votes in California and Democratic votes in Texas are entirely irrelevant. This means that politicians only have to attract voters in states that are on the fence for who they're going to vote for, rather than having to try to attract as many voters as possible. It also makes it harder for there to be change in politics, as third parties have essentially no chance of winning any states entirely, and people, knowing this, feel that third-party votes are wasted and would never vote for them in the first place.
In order to fix this, I believe we should make two changes to our current voting system. First off, we should make electoral college votes be proportional, if a state has 10 electoral college votes and one candidate wins 60% of the vote, they should get 6 electoral college votes.
In addition, we should switch to a two-round voting system, which means that you can vote for whoever you like at first, but only people who pass a certain percentage of the vote make it to the next round, like a sports single-elimination bracket. This would let people not be afraid of voting for candidates who don't have a very good chance of winning the overall election, because if that candidate didn't win, they could still pick their second choice and not feel that their vote was worthless, and if that candidate won, they'd feel confident voting for that candidate again in the second round because that candidate already managed to get a good percentage of the vote, and would have a serious chance of winning.
While these two changes would not fix everything in politics, I feel that they would make voting more fair, by making everybody's vote count, and they would also allow more change in the political system, which many people currently want.
An argument against your change in the electoral college could be thought of easily. First off if you give electoral votes to the percentage of people parties that won each state, it is basically the popular vote. This basically would be a popular vote win because if you have more votes you get more electoral points. While now if you have more votes you don't necessarily get more points since it's more votes per state.
ReplyDeleteThis is a very interesting idea. You mention Texas, and in Texas, Trump won 52.6% to 43.4%, so not a great margin. If this idea was in effect, the electoral college would look closer to the popular vote.
ReplyDelete