TL;DR: Forget Electoral College ( no offense ), upgrade electoral votes and replace winner-takes-all rule with electoral vote split between presidential candidates, like Maine and Nebraska.
Even though I am not an American citizen of any kind, I find the 2020 election is no less entertaining than a telenovela. The continuing drama between Trump and Biden after the election day sort of piqued my interest for the electoral process and how representative democracy works in Murica-land.
Electoral College and popular vote are just quick fixes
At first glance, I find it both surprising and weird that America doesn't follow most of the free countries where people directly decides which candidate will assume the presidency. But the more I see it, Electoral College ( EC ) somehow makes sense.
It should not be dismissed that most Americans live in urban areas (World Bank), and those people are more likely to vote for Blue candidates, every election could be an imminent defeat for the GOP. Also, given that each state has different demographics and possibly culture ( because history is not exactly the same for every state, pretty much every state has its own story to tell ). EC probably does it job well in making sure that popular opinion in every state is taken into account, and it certainly give states with sparse populations more representation.
But unlike popular vote, this ironically leaves the choice of millions of Americans unheard of. In the 2020 election, California is home to the largest community of conservative voters in the country - with 5.890 million registered votes for Trump and Pence as of November 20, but by winner-takes-all ( WTA ) law all of their votes are metaphorically cancelled by nearly 11 million Biden voters. The same issue happened in reverse in large states like Texas and Florida as well. The rule also creates extreme side effects where a single voter can theoretically flip the entire state should both candidates have the exact same number of votes.
Perhaps one of the most talked-about disadvantage of Electoral College is that it gives citizens of small states more power than others. A voter in Wyoming has 3.5 times more electoral votes than a Californian. From here it can also be inferred that ethnically homogenous states like Vermont and Alabama often have an upper hand in terms of votes.
In short, Republicans favor EC because it gives conservatives sense of control over the election and Democrats favor popular vote because they've been having more total votes since 2004. Like face masks, the electoral process appears to be politicized as well.
No matter where you look, popular vote and EC are solutions made in a hurry. And people across the nation are yearning for a better and fairer voting system. Suppose we're entrusted by the president-elect to come up with a less shittier electoral system and we've only got 7 days to make a new one, how are we gonna come up with a completely original system from scratch ?
But fret not my readers, fixing the electoral system is somewhat easier than you might have imagined. There are three things we should bear in mind as we design, and these are:
Representativeness: The system should guarantee that everyone's voice is heard and taken account of.
Fairness: Remember what I've talked about the voters in Wyoming and California ? That ain't gonna happen.
Transient: Elections should be quick and decisive. Ballots should not be bounced around.
The Solution
In my honest opinion, I think electors are as unnecessary as most people are already informed enough to make decisions. Lack of information nowadays is not as much a pressing issue as widespread misinformation. In fact, more levels of intervention and abstraction just leaves more room for corruption and malfeasance. Electors should be the first ones to go.
To make sure the election a fair one, we shouldn't ditch the electoral votes completely but upgrade it. Iowa, for instance, has 3.155 million people as of 2019 (United States Census Bureau). We can easily divide the state's population by 100k and rounding the result up we have 32. So Iowa will have 32 "electoral votes" instead of 6. Same goes for California ( 395 ) and South Carolina ( 51 ). For the national total, 50 states should add up to somewhere from 3280 to 3290.
As you may have known already, the WTA-thing hurts representation seriously. To counter this, we give some credit to GOP voters in Blue Wall states and Dems living in the Red Wall. How much of the electoral vote is split between two sides depends on the difference between the candidates' popular vote. Oregon ( 42 ) is a Blue Wall state where Joe is 17% of votes ahead of Donald. Unlike WTA, Joe takes 84% ( 35.28 - yep, keep the fraction intact ) of the electoral votes from the state and concede the rest to Mr.Trump and other candidates like Jo Jorgensen and Howie Hawkins.
The method, however, cannot be applied to battleground states where the vote difference between two candidates is not really big. Applying the method to Texas ( 290 ), where Trump won Biden by 5.5%, Trump gets 55.5% ( 160.95 ) of votes and the rest will share the remaining 45.5%.
Conclusion
In conclusion, I'm not good at writing kick-ass conclusions, but I gotta say there will be always an infinite supply of solutions out there waiting to be discovered and unearthed. But hopefully this suggestion would be the first step toward something greater than the election itself. Let me know your thoughts in the comments below.
References
United States Census Bureau. “Population of Iowa.” Census.Gov, 2018, www.census.gov/glossary/#term_Populationestimates.
World Bank. “Urban Population (% of Total Population) - United States | Data.” Data.Worldbank.org, data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.URB.TOTL.IN.ZS?locations=US.
