The popular vote totals from this month’s election puts Hillary Clinton ahead of President-elect Donald Trump by nearly 1.8 million votes, according to the most recent estimates by the Cook Political Report.
Trump dominated the Nov. 8 election with nearly a 60-electoral vote margin, according to estimates, while not all states have given official results.
In the election aftermath there has been an uptick in conversations about the Electoral College, with some feeling the system is outdated.
“There’s no practical reason to not have the popular election of the president,” said Peter Kierst, a political science professor, explaining that the country’s founders intended the Electoral College to be an appropriate middle ground for elections.
“As a practical matter, the founders didn’t know how to conduct an election,” he said. “Originally it was thought (the Electoral College) was the best way because people didn’t have enough information about who to vote for.”
Kierst also pointed out that the logistics of counting up millions of votes was daunting in the 18th century.
“It’s an outdated system,” said Spencer Scott, a senior philosophy major, taking into consideration the vast differences between the country when the Electoral College was created and now.
Scott mentioned that size, population and culture has all changed dramatically.
“The Electoral College should at least adapt to the new country,” he said. “As time goes on certain things need to change.”
The U.S. is one of only a handful of countries with an Electoral College voting system. Further, the country is one of the few that indirectly elects its head of state.
Originally created in 1787, the current system of presidential elections went through major reform after a bitterly contested election of 1800. Since then, the country has seen five instances in which the popular vote didn’t reflect the electoral vote, including the 2016 election.
Two examples of this have happened in the last two decades, with the 2000 and 2016 election — both of which ended in a Democrat winning the popular vote and losing the presidency.
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Supporters of the Electoral College feel it forces a candidate to campaign in states across the country, increasing the diversity of his or her policies.
“They should definitely campaign to everyone they’d be in charge of,” said Matt Delgado, a freshman biology major, adding that he feels the Electoral College results were fair.
“In my opinion no one wanted to vote for Hillary so Trump won. He got all the rural votes throughout the country,” Delgado said.
Others see the Electoral College as a problem, including Josh Blanchard, a freshman nursing major who says the system isn’t representative of its constituents.
“This is how a democracy dies,” he said. “People’s voices don’t matter. Our vote didn’t matter.”
Blanchard noted the importance of swing states — those which typically have a close election — in determining the results.
“Your vote only matters in swing states. They shouldn’t be picking the country’s president,” he said.
Blanchard expressed concern that candidates only campaigned in a handful of states, and those states determined the election results.
Kierst also noted problems with the system.
“I think if you were designing this system all over again, you wouldn’t do it this way,” he said. “Any argument for retaining the Electoral College has to explain the benefits of it over the cost of the president not being decided by who got the most votes. At least if we had a popular vote we could say, ‘at least we got the candidate who got the most votes.’”
Blanchard expanded on Kierst’s sentiment.
“If you do open up a popular vote it’s more fair game,” he said.
According to Blanchard, the Electoral College “makes no sense and silences the voice of most people.”
Despite the criticism of the system, there is an argument for its retention.
“It was designed to preserve the states as separate political entities outside the federal government,” Kierst said.
Kierst explained that election fraud and corruption was designed to be much more difficult in an Electoral College system compared to the popular vote, since the federal government does not run the election process.
“The Electoral College comes into existence for three days and then disappears — it’s hard to corrupt,” he said.
Because the election process is outlined in the Constitution, reforming the system would be difficult.
A super-majority vote in Congress (two-thirds) is required to create a Constitutional amendment.
Over 700 proposals have been introduced in Congress for a change to the Electoral College, more than for any other subject, according to the National Archives and Records Administration.
Some don’t feel the necessary effort is worth the reward.
“We’ve got a lot of stuff to fix,” Kierst said. “These days if we’re going to spend so much time and money, there are other things to reform first.”
Kierst also noted that change can and has begun at the state level, as two states, Nebraska and Maine, use the Congressional District Method in divvying up their states’ electoral votes.
In those states, a candidate can win an Electoral College vote from a district in the state.
For Kierst, the Congressional District Method seems like a step in the right direction.
If the method had been used in 2016, he said, the Electoral College would more closely represent the popular vote and avoid anomalies like the 2016 outcome.
Brendon Gray is a news reporter for the Daily Lobo. He can be reached at news@dailylobo.com or on Twitter @notgraybrendon.
