The race for the White House is perhaps our country’s most competitive event. Most people all over the country are constantly monitoring the results of the primary elections, and many can’t wait to see what candidates both parties nominate. However, most people also don’t realize that our current system for holding general elections is not only an outdated one, but it’s one that also doesn’t work.

In case you aren’t fully up to speed on how the current electoral system works, allow me to explain it for you. Each state holds it’s own elections, and whichever candidate gets the most votes out of a particular state wins that state. It doesn’t matter how many people vote for a candidate as long as a he wins the state, even if by a small margin. Each state also has a certain number of “electoral votes”. It’s very complicated, but usually, the more populated a certain state is the more electoral votes it carries. For example, Texas carries more electoral votes than Louisiana and Louisiana carries more electoral votes than New Jersey. The candidate with the most electoral votes wins the election. It sounds fair enough, right?

Well, that’s just the problem: It’s not fair at all. You see, it doesn’t matter how many people vote for a candidate in a particular state, as long as that candidate gets more votes. Even if a particular candidate gets only one more vote than the other, that candidate walks away with all of the electoral votes from that state. Therefore, it is actually possible for a candidate to get more votes in Colorado than in Texas, and lose Colorado and win Texas. As a result, it is actually possible for one candidate to get more individual votes (also called popular votes) and still lose the election, as evidenced by the Bush versus Gore election of 2000. Why is it fair for one candidate to get more votes than the other candidate and still not win?  

The current system, which runs on electoral votes instead of popular votes, has been around since our country’s beginning. When our country was first starting out, the founding fathers were afraid that a tyrant could come to power and manipulate the people into voting for him/her. However, people today are much less easily manipulated than the people of that age, and it would be very hard for a tyrant to manipulate people. People know where there freedom lies, and they wouldn’t let someone try to take it away.

The electoral vote system just doesn’t work as well as a popular vote system would. With our current system, it is possible for a candidate to win the election even if more people voted for the other guy. If more people vote for, say, Hillary Clinton than Ted Cruz in the general election (assuming that those two end up being the nominees for their respective parties), it is possible for Ted Cruz to still win. Or if more people want Cruz than Clinton, it would still be possible for Clinton to win the election.

It should be easier than ever now to run our elections based on popular vote rather than electoral votes. The current system was good for it’s time, but we have entered a new age. Perhaps the constitution could be amended to change this, since that is about the only way that the current system could change. The electoral vote system needs to end so that we can begin using a new, better system based not on electoral votes, but on who the people actually want.