National: A Growing Number Of Critics Raise Alarms About The Electoral College | Mara Liasson/NPR
It’s hard to make an intellectual argument in favor of the Electoral College. Most people feel that the person who gets the most votes should become president. After all, that’s how we run every other election in this country, says Jesse Wegman, the author of Let the People Pick the President. “If anything, representative democracy in the 21st century is about political equality. It’s about one person, one vote — everybody’s vote counting equally,” he said. “You’re not going to convince a majority of Americans that that’s not how you should do it.” Another way the Electoral College is unfair, says Harvard University political scientist Gautam Mukunda, is that each state gets electors based on its representation in the House and Senate, which means small states get extra votes. “The fact that in presidential elections people in Wyoming have [nearly four] times the power of people in California is antithetical at the most basic level to what we say we stand for as a democracy,” he said. But Brad Smith, who used to be on the Federal Election Commission, disagrees. Sure, the election may be decided by just a handful of states — swing states that can shift red or blue. But Smith, a Republican, says the battleground is diverse. “Those states include some of the states with the heaviest minority populations in the United States, some of the states with the fewest minority populations in the United States,” he said. “They include states from every region of the country, and that forces candidates to try to go out and have a platform that will appeal to the huge, diverse sections of America — or at least not grossly turn them off.”
Full Article: Here’s What Critics Say Is Wrong With The Electoral College : NPR