Joe Wozniak

I noticed a few Democrats and liberals want to get rid of the Electoral College for presidential elections. It is clear these individuals do not understand why we have the Electoral College when electing a president and how it provides all voters to be represented.

Let’s include some facts on the 2016 presidential election:

There are 3,141 counties in the United States, and Donald Trump won the overwhelming majority. There are 62 counties in New York State. Trump won in 45 counties. Clinton won only 17 counties.

Clinton won the popular vote by approx. 1.5 million votes in New York City's five counties (Bronx, Brooklyn, Manhattan, Richmond and Queens). Clinton received well over 2 million more votes than Trump as Clinton won four of these counties and Trump only won, Richmond. These five counties alone more than accounted for Clinton winning the popular vote of the entire country. These five New York counties comprise 319 square miles. The United States is comprised of 3,797,000 square miles.

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Our founders realized the popular vote would discriminate against smaller counties and states. Why? Presidential candidates only would visit states with the most people if the popular vote elected the president. The most populated states are California at 40 million, Texas at 29 million, Florida at 21 million and New York at 20 million. The next five states have 10 million to 13 million. The other 41 states have less than 7 million each, down to Wyoming with 600,000 voters.

No person with common sense wants nine states with large populations determining the presidential election. To ignore the voting power afforded by the Electoral College for the other 41 smaller states and 3,048 smaller counties would be discriminatory. And yes, Nevada, 32nd in size, has just over 3 million and would be ignored by all candidates because we are so small. Densely populated Democratic and liberal-leaning cities (New York City, Chicago, Los Angeles, etc.) do not and should not speak for the rest of our country!

The Electoral College is for all voters, counties and states to decide elections, not just the most popular person based on dense populations, where the candidates may live and/or make campaign promises that they do not pay for personally. We all know most men and women running for political office make “promises” that will never come to pass. Most people do not want some candidate’s promises of freebies to be paid by our hard-earned tax dollars.

Joe Wozniak is a Sparks resident.

Editor's note: An earlier version of this column misstated the number of counties won by each candidate in the 2016 presidential election. It has been corrected.