The Electoral College Must Die

The electoral college is a terrible, outdated system. Let's improve our democracy by getting rid of it.

National Popular Vote Bill

The most promising way to get rid of the electoral college is through the National Popular Vote bill. Once enough states pass the bill, the presidental candidate receiving the most votes will be guaranteed to win the election.

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Video Transcript

The electoral college system determines who is elected the president of the united states. While it was the best we could do, two hundred years ago, it's now just an embarassingly outdated and broken system.

It nullifies the votes of a large chunk of all citizens, and there's simply no excuse for why it hasn't been replaced with the clear obvious solution: Just let people elect the president directly.

In the electoral college, whoever receives the most votes in each state, gets all of that state's electoral college votes. This is bonkers, because in many states there's a safe majority of democrats or republicans, so no matter what sort of terrible things a presidental candidate may say or do, the winner of those votes is basically predetermined.

So candidates have *no reason at all* to campaign in these safe states or to take stands on whatever tough issues are facing the voters living within them. Because everyone already knows who's winning those electoral college votes.

As a result, candidates naturally focus nearly all their energy on only a handful of swing states that just happen to have almost the same number of democrat and republican voters. And you probably don't live in one of those states; so you'll probably be ignored.

Because if you're a republican living in a democrat-majority state or a democrat living in a republican-majority state, your vote means nothing. Because all the votes from your state will go to the opposite party.

This is insane.

And embarassing.

And undemocratic.

Electing the president is important, because that person will obviously have considerable power and influence; but this outdated process dilutes our collective voice, our abilty to decide who should run the country.

In a democracy, we're the boss and Washington is our employee; but Washington will only hear garbled orders from us until we patch up our broken voting system.

So what can we do?

There is a clear, simple, and obvious replacement for the electoral college: Simply let people elect the president directly as in done in many other countries.