Petition the US government to abolish the Electoral College

I was 8 years old during the 2016 American presidential election. Despite being young at the time, I recall how most news sources predicted the presidential candidate for the democratic party, Hillary Clinton, would win the election against her republican counterpart Donald Trump. However, this isn’t what ended up happening. Hillary Clinton did win the popular vote with 2.9 million votes more than Donald Trump, however, she  failed to win a majority in the electoral college, securing a victory for Donald Trump. A 2.9 million vote difference may not sound like a lot, but that’s more than the population of 4 US states, Wyoming, Vermont, North Dakota, and Alaska, combined. 

The less popular presidential candidate winning isn’t uncommon in American elections. Out of America’s 45 total presidents over its history, 5 have won the election despite losing the popular vote (1824, 1876, 1888, 2000, 2016 (thoughtco.com)). That’s 11% of the time. Why? States don’t have an adequate number of electors based on their population.  If they did, then this would never happen. For example, California has a population of about 37 million people, and have 55 electoral votes (researchmaniacs.com). That’s about 1 electoral vote per 672k people. Now take the state of Texas with about 29 million people with 38 electoral votes (popularanswers.org). Now there’s a state with 763k people per electoral vote. This means a person’s vote for president in California is worth more than somebody’s vote in Texas. If you do the math, you’d see how these 2 states aren’t the outliers. States electoral votes are not consistent with their population. The “all men are created equal” rule doesn’t apply here if some people’s votes are worth more than others.

Many people, especially republicans, would argue that the electoral college is a blockade against mob rule. They seem to fail to realize however that democracy is the idea that the majority rules. If a majority of the country agrees that (X) should be president, then they should be. That’s democracy.

Unfortunately, the electoral college is deeply ingrained into our presidential system and proves possibly impossible to dislodge. The only real feasible way to get rid of this undemocratic institution is to force the issue onto the American government, showing how unpopular the electoral college system is with a nation-wide petition.