The problem of modern day democratic system based on the popular vote and the advantages of the American style electoral college

     The modern-day United States has a unique democratic system. Unlike most European countries, the American systems are not based on the popular vote but built on the elector group; those people made up the electoral college. The number of electors each state has will depend on how many congressmen or congresswomen and senators they have, and there are 538 electors in the electoral college, including the elector from all fifty states plus the District of Columbia. Furthermore, they are the people who vote for the president; most of the time, they will vote based on the popular turnout in their state, but not all the time. Moreover, in the recent election, we started to see some criticism of this system. Hillary Clinton had 2.8 million more popular votes in the last election but still lost the election to Donald Trump.  And this is not the only time this kind of situation happened, actually just 16 years ago, George W. Bush also won the presidency even he did not win the popular vote, also back 1824, 1876, 1888 John Quincy Adams, Rutherford Hayes, and Benjamin Harrison also became president without the popular vote. 

    And the people are starting to question and challenge the kind of democratic system we have in the United States today because clearly, the turnout of those elections does not represent what people want. Some politicians suggest we should switch to a more European-style system, which is heavily based on the popular vote to decide who will be the next leader, the media, and some organizations are pushing this idea to the American public.  Changing the current system shall Profoundly disagree. When someone read the Constitution of the United States, they will realize the founding father was trying to avoid election based on the popular vote when they designed this system.

    One of the essential concepts in the Constitution of the United States is the balance between the large state and the small states. Large states have more population, and most of the time they are more developed and more advanced on the economy, the smaller states have less amount population, and most of the time their economy are heavily based on agriculture, which is still the same today, that means they are less successful in their economy.  If the election is only based on the popular vote, the states with more population will always benefit from it, and the need and the voice of smaller states will be ignored. The electoral college is the solution to this problem because it gives the people in smaller states more voting power per person, makes the smaller states more critical during the election, and forces the politician to pay more attention in those areas. For example, the state of California had a population of 39250017 during the time of the 2016 election. They have 55 representatives in both house and senate, that is 713637 citizens per one elector, and the state of California have 12.15% of the United States, produce 14.1% of the United States’ GDP, and they are also one of the most developed regions in the United States, which made them a large state, or in other words, more powerful state. Then let us look at the most minor “important” state in the union, Wyoming. The state of Wyoming has 585501 people that is 0.18% of the entire US population, and they only produce 0.21% of the GDP in the United States. However, they have three seats in the electoral college, that is, 194067 citizens per elector. Compared to 713637 in California, people in the state of Wyoming have three times more voting power than Californians per person, making the policymakers in DC unable to avoid them during the election. Also, base on the popular vote will reduce the state’s power and increase the power of the federal government because the states no longer matter during the election. Unlike most countries on this planet, the United States is made by states, not provinces. Each state is politically independent of the other, and the state’s government created a balance with the federal government to eliminate the chance of the birth of a tyrant.

    Many European countries have multiple rounds of voting due to the reasons they are based on the popular vote. It is hard for one person to have 50% or more votes in the first round of the election; the second and even third rounds will be necessary for those countries. The argument that this system will work in the United States is questionable because most of the European countries are relatively small compared to the United States both on population and territory, which means they will spend less amount of time and less labor force to collect and count the vote and make fewer errors during the process. However, for the United States, it is a different story. Election in the US is way more expensive than in European countries due to the larger population, landmass, and political environment. In the recent presidential election in 2016, both parties spent 2.3 billion dollars for campaign commercial and public events. For the United Kingdom, that number dropped to 73 million US dollars. But in this case, money is not the most crucial problem; no matter how expensive it is, the US economy is powerful enough to support it, the electoral college also helps maintain the political stability in the United States. For each state, the winner will get all the votes from the electoral college, under the two parties system, which means the parties that win in each state always reparent the majority in that state, even there are some smaller parties, but most of the time they only get less than 1% of the vote.

    One of the most important reasons of the popular vote will not work is that we often overestimated humanity. Two thousand years ago, when the people in ancient Greeks first designed the democratic system, they were based on the assumptions that each person is rational and responsible, and they will decide that base benefit of themselves in the long turn, this statement is not valid. Instead, based on logic, people during the election can be driven by their emotions, by the amount of hatred towards the opposition side, the attack commercial, and the people gather together blindly waving the flag and cheerleading their party. The provocative speech on the stage and crazy crowd under it was the greatest fear for many of the founding fathers, the tyranny inside humanity. The people make their judgments heavily based on their feeling and emotion, and the population are not trained adequately to understand how politics work, without of education. So when they gather together, they are no longer thinking individuals but the group of mobs. The fundamental idea behind the popular vote is the idea of direct democracy, which is the kind of system that made the Greeks lose the Peloponnesian war, killed Socrates, ended the Roman republic, elected Adolf Hitler. The electoral college and the elector served as a great filter from the public, and they will make their decisions more reasonable and avoid the politician using popular as an excuse not to fulfill their duty. The most recent example will be the Brexit last year, now the British politician is blaming the British people for letting them leave the European Union. After all, people always get hurt in the end.