Reason 1: The Electoral College makes some votes worth more than others.
This one is pretty obvious and a common complaint. Presidential candidates campaign mostly in swing states while mostly ignoring other states. Shouldn’t we live in an America where each person is equally important? Campaigning for votes in Los Angeles or Boston should have as much value as campaigning for votes in Detroit or Philadelphia.
Reason 2: Minority winners
Four times in American history, the candidate who won the most votes did not win the presidency, and we don’t have ranked voting so this makes it unrepresentative. No candidate who has majority support should be able to lose the presidency. It’s undemocratic.
Reason 3: Slavery
The reason the Electoral College was created was to protect slave power. The structure of the Senate was designed so we would have an equal number of slave and free states, prolonging the agonizing torment of slaves across the South. The House increased slave power through the 3/5 compromise, which meant slave owners were overrepresented while slaves had no representation. If it was not for the 3/5 compromise the South would not have had nearly as much influence in early American politics.
If the President had been directly elected by the people starting in 1788, the South would not have received any electoral benefit from slavery, and the North would have dominated presidential elections. By making slaves count for the presidency while not having the votes, the South would have been more powerful than it would have been. The electoral college was a way of ensuring the South had power without having a prime minister. This is enough reason to abolish the system and move to a direct popular vote.
Reason 4: Small states don’t matter in the Electoral College
As this map demonstrates, if we divide states by population, shade all the smallest states red and all the most populous states blue. The state in the middle is Virginia, the 12th largest state in the country. Even with the Electoral College, small states don’t have enough votes to matter more than large states. There have only been three states in American history where a state with fewer than ten electoral college votes could have flipped the election alone. That’s how democracy works. Campaigning in any state with under ten votes is pointless under our current system, whereas under a direct popular vote every vote will count equally.
If Texas became a swing state, and it sure looks like it will soon, with Trump only winning a 5% margin of victory in 2020 versus Bush win, it’s possible Texas could become a swing state with shifting demographics. If this happens, Texas alone will decide as long as we keep the electoral college, but not with a popular vote.
Texas flipping in the elections where it voted for the winner would have flipped the overall result in every election since 1988.
Even though the Electoral College increases the percentage of the overall vote in small states, it only increases the power of large states.
Reason 5: We will become a unitary state if we abolish the Electoral College
This is one of the more absurd arguments. The Electoral College has nothing to do with the separation of powers between states and the federal government, which is based on the 10th Amendment. Plus, power has gradually moved more towards the federal government ever since John Marshall was chief justice, and all of this has been with the Electoral College. It’s a nutty argument.
In short, even though repealing the Electoral College will be difficult, it should still be repealed because it is undemocratic.