I Tried to Save the Electoral College. The Math Wouldn’t Let Me.

Your vote may not count. Not because it wasn’t cast, not because it wasn’t counted, but because the person you trusted to cast it for you has opinions of their own.

But a faithless elector is the rare case. It almost never happens, and ALL states can legally cancel or replace one.^[1] That version of the problem doesn’t really bother me. What bothers me is the quieter one, the system can screw you over while every single elector does their job perfectly and follows every rule. You vote. Your vote gets counted. Every official acts in good faith. And you still end up feeding a ballot into a system that was never built to let one vote out of 155 million be heard. The government works for the people. The people should be what decides who holds office, right?

This is not hypothetical. Four times, the candidate more Americans voted for has lost the presidency anyway.^[2] Two of those four happened since 2000.

The reason you’ll never hear for the Electoral College’s existence is slavery. The South wanted its enslaved population counted toward its political power without letting those people vote. A direct national popular vote would have counted only actual voters, which would have stripped the slave states of that advantage.^[3][4] The three-fifths compromise, and the Electoral College built alongside it, let the South inflate its weight in choosing the president. That is not a footnote. It is one of the load-bearing reasons the system took the shape it did.

The practical reason is obsolete, and the original political reason was shameful. Neither one is a reason to keep it.

The system has decided that some votes are worth more than others, and it decided it by geography. Live in California and your vote is essentially worthless next to a vote cast two thousand miles away. Move to Wyoming (I wouldn’t wish that on my worst enemy) and your voice suddenly counts for more, because your single vote is a bigger slice of a smaller pie.

Do the math. Wyoming has about 580,000 people and 3 electoral votes. Divide one by the other and each electoral vote there stands for roughly 193,000 people. California has about 39.5 million people and 54 electoral votes.^[5][6] Run the same division and each electoral vote stands for roughly 732,000 people. So a single vote in Wyoming carries about 3.8 times the weight of a single vote in California. Same country, same election, and the system has quietly decided that one of those people counts almost four times as much as the other.

Now think about how a presidential campaign actually spends its final months. The candidates circle the same small group of states, over and over. Roughly seven of them, depending on the year, decide the whole election.^[7] The other forty-some are scenery.

I couldn’t tell you the last time a presidential candidate tried to win my vote. Part of that is me. I turned 18 in New York City, voted in New Jersey by mail, and was not especially plugged into New Jersey politics. But part of it is that there was nothing to plug into. Neither New York nor New Jersey is a swing state. Neither one gets a visit, an ad, or a tailored promise. When you vote anywhere outside the seven states that matter, the system is telling you: it does not really matter whether you vote at all.

This should make you angry! The Electoral College is defended, constantly, as the thing that protects small states from being ignored. Wyoming gets ignored. It is a guaranteed lock for one party, so no campaign spends a dollar there. New Jersey gets ignored for the same reason in the other direction. The system is publicly defended for doing the exact opposite of what it actually does. A system that is defended out loud and then quietly works against the people it claims to protect is not a mistake, it is a choice in design.

I did not start out wanting to abolish the Electoral College. I started out trying to save it. I spent time on a fix that kept the College intact, allocating its electoral votes proportionally instead of winner-take-all. I wanted to base it all off of the least populated state. For example, if the least populated state had 100,000 voters, and your state has 150,000 voters, you’d have 1.5 votes towards the election. Now say a state voted 60/40 in favor of a blue candidate. That’s 90,000 votes for the blue candidate and 60,000 for the red. Dividing by 100,000, you’d get 0.9 votes for blue and 0.6 votes for red. At the end of collecting the votes, the national total for blue and red is just the national vote for each candidate divided by 100,000. That’s just the national vote. The divisor does nothing at all. Every honest attempt to keep the electoral college while also reallocating a proper amount of votes based on population lands back with the national popular vote.

The real answer was simpler than the thing I was building, and it annoyed me that I hadn’t dug deep enough to find it the first time.

Abolish the Electoral College. Count every vote in the country. Whoever gets the most wins.

Having a one person, one vote policy means you do not have to hand your ballot to an intermediary you have never met and trust them to carry it for you. It means your vote matters on its own, regardless of whether a family member, or the person next to you, or a stranger two thousand miles away, disagrees with you. Voting is democracy’s life. It is the mechanism that turns a population into a government.

The first objection to a national popular vote is the one I raised against my own idea before anyone else could: doesn’t this just let big states dominate? California has 39 million people. Doesn’t counting every vote hand them the country?

It doesn’t. A “big state” is not a thing that votes. 39 million Californians vote, and they do not vote as one bloc. In 2020, California split roughly 63/34.^[8] About 6 million Californians voted for Trump. Under the system we have right now, every one of those 6 million produces exactly zero electoral votes. The state went blue, the bucket tipped entirely blue, and 6 million people were erased. Meanwhile 580,000 people in Wyoming deliver three electoral votes, guaranteed. The current system is not protecting small voices. It is deleting six million of them in a single state.

A national popular vote does not make California dominate. It makes Californians count, all of them, including the 6 million the current system silences. “California dominates” would require all 39 million to vote the same way. They never do. Nowhere does.

The unit stops being the state and becomes the person. A voter in Wyoming and a voter in California each get one vote, the same weight. California has more total influence only because more people live there, and more people having more influence is not domination. It is the definition of the thing we keep saying we want.

The system that causes the most neglect is the one we already have. Right now about seven swing states decide the presidency and the other forty-some are scenery. Under a popular vote, a vote in Wyoming is worth a vote in Pennsylvania, which gives a candidate more reason to show up in Wyoming, not less. The fear that small places get ignored describes the present, not the proposal.

Two other defenses deserve a quick answer. The Electoral College is said to force candidates to build broad geographic coalitions. It does the opposite. It forces them to chase seven states, a narrower map than a popular vote would produce. It is also said to contain recounts, keeping a disputed result inside one state instead of triggering a national one. That one is partly true. It is a real cost, and I will come back to it honestly.

I have to be honest about my own proposal, because doing anything else is the move I just spent an essay attacking.

I will not tell you the national popular vote is flawless. But “isn’t flawless” is an empty thing to say. It is true of every voting system ever designed, and it carries no information. Flawless was never on the menu. So the real question is not flawed versus flawless. It is which specific flaws you would rather live with.

The first is the serious one. A national plurality vote has no majority requirement. In a race with three or more real candidates, someone can win the presidency with well under half the country behind them. In 1992, Bill Clinton won with 43% of the popular vote, because Ross Perot pulled 19% of it.^[9] Under a pure national popular vote, you could seat a president on 38%. That is a genuine legitimacy problem. The Electoral College does not cleanly solve it either, but I am not grading my proposal on a curve. It is a flaw. The fix, a national runoff or ranked-choice voting, is its own redesign with its own tradeoffs.

The second is practical. A genuinely close national race means a national recount, every precinct in the country rather than one state. Slower, messier, more open to litigation. Florida in 2000 was a disaster, but it was a contained one. A national popular vote does not contain it.

These flaws are real, and I am not going to wave them away. But I’m not conceding either. Every system on offer is flawed. The only honest question left is which set you would choose.

So here is the choice. One system can seat a president the public was less inclined to back in the first place, and hold him up with structure instead of support. The other gives you a closer election, decided by where the general population actually landed. I will take the closer election every time. A president should be held up by the people who voted for him, not by the machinery that happened to count them.

And wanting this should be easy, because it costs almost nothing. We are not building a new machine. We all already vote for the candidate we prefer. The popular vote does not add a single step to that. It removes one. It takes out the intermediary standing between your ballot and the outcome, and lets democracy do the plain thing it was always supposed to do.

We aren’t far from this reality at all. It does not need a constitutional amendment that will never pass. The National Popular Vote Interstate Compact is already law in 19 jurisdictions holding 222 electoral votes, and it takes effect at 270.^[10] The fix is 48 electoral votes away from being real.

That gives me hope. It should also come with urgency, because 48 votes do not close themselves. A government that actually works for the people is close enough to reach, but close is not the same as done. It still takes effort. It still takes us deciding, out loud, that we want it.

Your vote may not be heard. But it can be.