Electoral College Failure

The American people have had a way of telling themselves that they are choosing the candidate to become the next president of the United States. Though while they feel like they are doing this, their vote really goes to an “elector”, only a small number of which each state gets. This method of election would make more sense if all states had a number of electors representative of the population, but that’s not how it is being run currently; there are 12 states in the U.S. which, if you can get popular vote from 11 of these 12 states, you can still win the whole election and become the next president, even if you don’t get a single vote from any of the other 39 states. This is in no way fair to the American people who truly care about who takes office. Though the Electoral College was created to represent the will of the American people, it is a failure at reflecting that
which they truly want. It is possible that the Electoral College may vote to, and elect a minority president, in other words the candidate that the people favor less than the other, overall.
In 2000, Al Gore, with 266 electoral votes, lost the election to George W. Bush with 271, despite having the popular vote by a margin of 543,895 votes. The electors in the Electoral College have been known, a few times, to be ‘faithless’ to what the people in their state voted for, and cast their vote toward a different candidate than they voted for. As recently as 1988, a Democratic Elector cast his votes toward Lloyd Benson to be President, and Michael Dukakis to be the Vice, when he was supposed to cast the other way around. If the people of the United States were truly represented by the Electoral College, then Al Gore would have been elected, due to popular vote; seeing the fact that Bush was the candidate elected in 2000, it just doesn’t add up. There’s no way, taking this information into consideration, that the Electoral College would properly represent that which the American people truly desire in an election
circumstance. While there is such a strong argument from the “against” side, there are a couple arguments to fight the “for” side, as well. The Electoral College contributes to political stability of the nation by encouraging a two-party system. This is because it makes it extremely difficult for a new or minor party to win any sort of popular vote to have even a chance of winning the presidency. In the event that a member from a third party obtains enough electoral votes to shift the decision into the House, they would still need to gain a majority of over half of the state delegations, in which case they could no longer be considered a minor party. By essentially cancelling out even the possibility of a third party being a strong presence in an election, the Electoral College is enforcing the two-party system we have in place, stabilizing our political system, and balancing it out. Now, while the Electoral College does a good job of keeping the political system we have set in place, it’s not exactly a great one. It doesn’t represent the legitimate wants of the American people, in which a candidate could get majority vote in 11 out of a certain 12 states, and win the entire election, without receiving a single vote in any of the other 39 states. One can only assume that the majority vote would be with the candidate that those 39 states voted for, but since the summation of those 11 states that the first candidate had won had a higher number of electors, they won. And that’s not fair to the people that care, that is not a fair “representation” of what the majority of the nation wants. And that’s not a system we need in place when electing someone to run our country.