The electoral college is anti-democratic

The Electoral College is an anti-democratic relic, a system designed not to reflect the will of the people, but to warp and distort it. In any other contest, the person who gets the most votes wins. Not in the American presidential election, though. Here, a candidate can lose the popular vote and still stroll into the White House. It’s an electoral absurdity that’s played out multiple times in history, leaving millions of voters effectively silenced, their ballots reduced to background noise.

Why? Because the system turns the whole game into a handful of swing states. While the rest of the country watches on from the cheap seats, voters in these battlegrounds wield disproportionate power. Live in a solidly blue or red state? Tough luck—your vote is a formality. This dynamic feeds apathy and cynicism, as whole swaths of the electorate realize they’re on the sidelines of their own democracy.

It gets darker when you look at why the Electoral College exists in the first place. It’s not some grand constitutional principle, but a product of backroom compromises designed to protect the interests of slave-owning states. The Founders needed the South onboard, so they threw them this bone—a system that gave more clout to regions where human beings were considered property. Fast forward a couple of centuries, and the system still props up inequalities. Today, it inflates the influence of rural voters, giving them more weight than urban populations, where most of the country actually lives.

In the end, the Electoral College isn’t just outdated—it’s fundamentally at odds with the principles of democracy. If we really believe in government by the people, then we ought to ditch this rigged game and adopt a direct popular vote, where every vote counts equally, no matter where you live.