Why Electoral College is still preferred

I think we will all agree that the Electoral College is an imperfect system. All but two states are "winner take all". So the outvoted people then have no electors to represent them.

In the big cities, the situation is generally characterized as having a powerful political machine controlling many of the votes, partly by having the largest populations of people on welfare whose votes they can count on.

Nevertheless, an elector selected by 95 percent of the voters has no more voting power than if he were elected by 51% of them, so these people are underrepresented. A further factor is that our founders gave the smaller states more electoral votes per person to counter fears that larger states and cities would tend to focus entirely on the concerns of densely-populated areas.

So why not elect a president via a simple popular vote?

There are some very good reasons:

Starting with the big city political structure, large numbers of votes are controlled by relatively few politicians in the city government. This small number of VIPs should not be allowed to each carry a voting power many thousands of times greater than that of a person living elsewhere in the country.

The same thing occurs in many state governments - relatively few powerful politicians controlling a lot of congressional (and sometimes media) influence on the election process. And again, relatively few political VIPs swing thousands of popular votes.

So yes, the Electoral College process needs some fixing (e.g. unbound electors who can vote in violation of their franchise). And yet our Founding Fathers thought and debated through a number of the political problems that, since they are based on human behavior, remain unchanged. And their system, imperfect as it is, remains vastly superior to a "popular" vote badly skewed by political power broker.

Gib Van Dine

West Chicago