One Person, One Vote

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One person, one vote. It seems like a fairly obvious, basic, non-controversial idea, especially if you have grown up hearing about the constant accolades of democracy. So the question remains, why do we not have this yet in the United States? And we don’t. At least not in terms of electing arguably the most powerful person in the entire world, the President of the United States (POTUS).

The United States has a very unique selection method for electing POTUS. It’s the electoral college. An antiquated system that at best was a necessary compromise at the time and at worst an intentionally racist system designed to maintain power by southern slave holding states. The factions at the time could not decide between having POTUS elected by a direct popular vote or having Congress pick POTUS. The electoral college was the compromise, the idea of having states pick electors who would in turn then vote for POTUS. The southern slave holding states would only agree if the slave population was included in calculating the number of electors, thus ensuring that they would have greater number of electors and thus a greater say in choosing POTUS. In modern times, voters select the electors for the state who are then pledged to vote for a specific candidate. In most states all of the electors are given to the candidate that wins the state’s popular vote. This means that if a candidate wins a state by slightly over half (say 50.1%) they still get 100% of the electors for that state. This is the reason why a candidate can lose the popular vote but still win the presidency. And it is the reason why we do not have a one person, one vote system.

Now let’s imagine if you (U in the corresponding table) were running for office. The location you are running in is arbitrarily divided into 11 sections, each section given one vote regardless of how many people actually live in that section. So to win you’ll need to get at least 6 votes. Each section determines their one vote by giving it to whoever wins the popular vote in that section. The whole population for the 11 sections is 222,880. Four sections have a population of 200 each, four sections have a population of 20 each. 1 section has a population of 2000. 1 section has a population of 20,000. And the last section has a population of 200,000. The votes are calculated and you win 209,790 while your opponent (O in the corresponding table) only received 13,090 votes. However your opponent wins the election because they won 8 out of the 11 sections. Would you consider this election fair?

Unfortunately, this is the basic method of the electoral college. It makes no sense that so many votes just don’t count in determining the presidential outcome. It is an arbitrary system, that not only gives off the perception of unfairness, but is in fact unfair. Any rational person that was relying on a vote to win something would expect that every vote should count equally. You, yourself would expect the same if you were running for office. It’s the whole notion of one person, one vote, something that again should not be a controversial idea. And the solution to this problem is super easy. All we have to to do is eliminate the electoral college and make the presidential election one based on a direct popular vote. What possible reason is there not to do this?