By Amy Clark
Guest Columnist
Every four years, during the presidential election, do you feel, like me, and many other Americans, that the Electoral College is an outdated relic from our Founders?
According to Professor Elizabeth Yuko, a journalist for the Readers Digest, “The Electoral College may have made sense in 1776, but in 2026, it needs to be tossed into the dustbin of history.” Yuko quoted the opinions of four other experts in her June 30 online article. She asked them, “Why did the Founders create the Electoral College?”
Rodney A. Smolla, professor at Vermont Law School, believes, “The Founders doubted that average Americans were sufficiently well-educated or informed enough to be trusted.”
Tony Williams, senior fellow at the Bill of Rights Institute, states, “The Founders created an Electoral College for an indirect election to protect the interests of less-populous states rather than the needs of a few large cities.”
Tristan M. Hightower, professor at Bryant University, noted, “If you weren’t a White man who owned land, you did not have the right to vote.”
Smolla explained, “In 1787, the Founders came up with the Three-Fifths Compromise, which counted a slave as three-fifths of a person. The compromise artificially inflated the political power of the slave states, giving them extra representatives in Congress, and thereby also in the Electoral College, even though enslaved people weren’t given the right to vote.” That sounds nonsensical now, but slaves were a large minority of America’s population at the beginning.
“How does the Electoral College work to create the outcome of our presidential elections?” asked Yuko next. Hightower reported, “States are allocated a number of ‘electors’ based on congressional representation, which is based on population. Every four years, American citizens vote in the Popular Election which determines which presidential candidate those electors will select.” Smolla added, “Even the smallest states have at least three electors, since every state has two senators and at least one representative. Today, California has the largest number, 54, because it has two senators and 52 members of the House of Representatives. There’s a winner-take-all system in 48 states, where all of a state’s electors go to the candidate who won the popular vote in that state. Maine and Nebraska use a district system, in which two electoral votes go to the statewide winner of the popular vote and one electoral vote is awarded to the popular vote winner in each of the state’s congressional districts.”
Wow, that’s complicated! But, each state has the right to regulate how their state’s electors are chosen. Since the 1964 election, there have been a total of 538 electoral votes in the country, with a majority of the votes—270—needed to elect a president.
“Why do we still have the Electoral College today?” wondered Yuko.
Lindsey Cormack, professor at Stevens Institute of Technology, answered, “The main reason is because it can only be changed via a constitutional amendment and that would be very difficult.” Hightower added, “The biggest change has been the size and diversity of the voting population. America looks much different than it did at its founding, so it’s debatable if the 1787 decision still makes sense in 2026.” According to Smolla, “It’s responsible for the artificial influence of a handful of swing states, which often determine the election. This tends to render irrelevant the votes of many voters in other states. If our nation went to a national popular-vote system, every single voter’s vote would be of equal weight—and matter.”
“How has the Electoral College been a problem over the last 250 years?” asked Yuko.
Smolla asserted, “There have been five presidents—John Quincy Adams, Rutherford B. Hayes, Benjamin Harrison, George W. Bush, and Donald Trump (in 2016)—who did not win the popular vote but were elected through the current system.” Hightower counters, “Today, some people contend that many of those states that fill out the middle of the country are vulnerable to the larger states because of their small populations.”
What do you think, should the Electoral College be eliminated?
Cormack warns, “A constitutional amendment would require two-thirds of both houses of Congress and ratification by three-fourths of the states. The swing states benefit very much from the Electoral College in that they get the bulk of campaign dollars and attention, so they would be less likely to agree to such a change.”
Smolik argues, “The National Popular Vote Interstate Compact proposes, if states with enough electoral votes to win the Electoral College—which is 270 total electoral votes—pledge to devote all of those states’ electoral votes to whichever candidate gains the most popular votes nationally, then the president would effectively be chosen by whoever wins the national popular vote. So far, 18 states plus Washington, D.C., have joined the Compact, adding up to a total of 222 Electoral College votes—48 short of it going into effect. Besides, if one party perceives the current system to be an advantage, that discourages reform.”
Now, I see why the Electoral College requires us to use an antiquated election system that does not fit our nation anymore.
If one of our two main political parties is not often successful in gaining the majority of the Popular vote then when they win the Presidency via Electoral College, America is no longer ruled by the majority of the “We, the People.” It is ruled by the voters in half a dozen swing states.
The current situation is frustrating to most voters who believe it is helping to diminish the value of their presidential vote. Do you think this unhappiness is contributing to the belief by many Americans that democracy is not worth it?
