Here's Why the Electoral College System Is Fundamentally Broken

Ultimize reform of the Electoral College. I realize that might not excite you that much, but it's an important issue. Here's why. Imagine you go to your kid's Little League game. Your kid's team scores 6 runs, the other team scores 4 runs. Game over, right? Wrong, because the umpire walks out and says, well, technically the other team wins. Because they scored their runs in more important innings. You'd lose your mind. You'd be screaming, this is not how scoring works. The number is the number. And the umpire would say, yeah, but this is how we've always done it. That essentially is the Electoral College when it comes to the United States and how we elect presidents. Now, I want to give credit where credit's due. The whole conversation was sparked by a really detailed piece in Vox. Vox.com. I'd urge you to check it out, by reporter Ian Millhiser this week, who laid out just how close this system actually is to being passed, where we get rid of the Electoral College. And when you see the numbers, it's kind of shocking. There's this thing called the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact. Sounds complicated, it's not. A bunch of states basically said, hey, what if we just gave our electoral votes to whoever actually gets the most votes. Radical concept, right? Counting. Right now it's at 222 electoral votes. Now you need 270 votes to become president. That's the majority. So this entire system, this centuries-old structure, comes down to just a handful of states. Let's name them: Pennsylvania, Michigan, Arizona, Wisconsin. Those 4 states basically decide whether we finally adopt the radical modern idea of counting votes equally. Now let's talk about why this system even exists, because if you don't understand that, none of this makes sense. Our system was designed in the late 1700s when information moved at the speed of a horse. When most people didn't vote, they couldn't, when elites didn't fully trust direct democracy. And yeah, there were political compromises, bad ones tied to slavery and representation that shaped how power was distributed. So this wasn't some perfect sacred design. It was a workaround, a patch. Uh, this is the best we can do right now system. But here's the problem: we never updated it. Today we have instant communication, national campaigns, universal suffrage— in theory, at least— and yet we're still using a system designed for a world where voters might not even know who they were voting for. And here's where it gets crazy in modern America: you can have more people vote for Candidate A, Candidate B becomes president. That's not fraud, that's not a glitch, that is the system doing exactly it was designed to do. And even Donald Trump, even Donald Trump, before benefiting from this system, said way back in 2016 that if he won the popular vote but lost the Electoral College, he wouldn't accept it. He talked about people taking to the streets if he in fact won the popular vote and lost the Electoral College, which tells you something important. Even the people who benefit from this system instinctively know it doesn't feel right because no other democracy, no other modern democracy does this, not one. There's no country where they say, yeah, we counted all the votes, but we're going with the other guy. That's uniquely American, and it gets worse. The Electoral College doesn't just distort outcomes, it distorts behavior. It turns elections into a weird game where only a few states matter. Campaigns ignore most of the country. Millions of people know their vote doesn't really count. If you live in a solidly red or blue state, a solidly Republican or Democratic state, you're not really a voter, you're scenery. Which brings us back to those four states: Pennsylvania, Michigan, Arizona, and Wisconsin. They're not just swing states anymore, they're potential system-changing states. Let me simplify this as clearly as possible. If more people vote for you, you should win. That's not left-wing, that's not right-wing, that's math. And if your system can't handle basic math, It's not a system, it's a loophole. Now people will say, well, we've always done it this way. Yeah, we also used to let state legislatures pick U.S. senators, redistrict who could vote. Legislatures could do that, design systems around elite control. We changed those things because they stopped making sense for the most part. Yeah, they're still redistricting. Keeping the Electoral College today is like insisting we still need a fax machine to send an email. It made sense once, it doesn't anymore, and the only reason it survives is because some people benefit from that glitch. Here's the simple truth: a system where the loser can win is eventually a system people stop believing in, and once people stop believing in the system, that's when you get real instability. So this isn't just about politics, It's about legitimacy. It's about whether people believe their vote actually matters. And right now, for millions of Americans, it doesn't. Again, to clarify, if just 4 states that do kind of go back and forth from Democratic to Republican, if at some point they get enough Democratic voters— because let's face it, Republicans realize that the current system benefits them But if those 4 states I mentioned can actually get enough Democrats to change their state constitution, then this system becomes more fixed. It'd be very hard— the theory goes it'd be very hard to change the constitution of the states back to say that votes shouldn't count. That's the real concept here. So again, just these 4 states could say, all right, our electoral votes are going to count for whoever wins the popular vote nationwide. That completely changes the dynamic. That gets rid of all this nonsense of swing states. And it would force politicians and campaigns to actually talk to all Americans, not just a handful of idiosyncratic people in a handful of states. And that's why I'm very much in favor of it. It's frankly why Donald Trump was in favor of this back in 2016. So it's not really a Democrat/Republican type of thing. It is sort of an elitist/non-elitist thing. If you feel like, okay, I have a message that isn't going to appeal to most Americans, but I want to hold power anyway, then you want to keep the status quo. Jules writes in and says, "Oi, TJ, I'm listening. So much great information. Electoral college reckoning well explained." A system where the loser can win. It is strange. Ultimize.