LONG POST INCOMING BECAUSE I HAVE WORDS TO SAY
the electoral college was created in 1787, 3 years before the first official census in the United States. it was created at the Constitutional Convention after being discussed and debated for several days. the 3/5 compromise was to keep the south as part of our country despite the qualms they had with their population being more than 30% black. the electoral college was never meant to be perfect, it was meant as an antithesis to the monarchy they had previously been under until the end of the Revolutionary War. the first census was in 1790, but they calculated estimations in 1780 that, while being way off on the actual quantity of people in the US, the percentages were approximately the same as in the 1790 census.
during the constitutional convention in 1787, the south didn’t want the black population to count AT ALL, it was the north that wanted them to count, since the estimated percentage of black people in 1980 was 38.4%. since then, the United States gave black people 1. freedom, 2. the COMPLETE right to vote, allowing them to be seen as 1/1 a man in the eyes of the electoral college instead of 3/5, and 3. the respect they have always and will always deserve.
in the electoral college, there are 538 votes total that can be counted, and a candidate needs 270 to win. this means that you need 51% of the votes to be considered the winner of an election cycle. each state is allotted a certain number of electoral votes, determined by general demographics of that region. places like Wyoming or Alaska has few votes to represent fewer people.
fun fact: 82.5% of the United States population is urban, and 17.5% is rural. let’s consider the following: each vote is counted as 1, there is no electoral college, and every legal citizen of the US can vote. let’s also assume those percentages exclude anyone under the age of 18, so they purely represent voters. now, let’s consider a situation where 100% of the urban population voted for one candidate, and 100% of the rural population voted for the other candidate. in this hypothetical situation, the rural population would very clearly lose, yes?
now, come the next election cycle, consider if the rural population and got discouraged from voting, so maybe 50% of the rural population voted in this election. they would lose even worse, correct? this is the kind of election we can expect without an electoral college, although not this extreme.
now consider if every state with majority-rural population (for the purposes of this, we will consider that all states with single-digit electoral votes) voted for one candidate. total number of votes for that one candidate would become 29.5%, which isnt enough to win the popular vote, but has a much better chance to win with a split urban vote.
in summary: i agree that something needs to be done, but i dont agree that that “thing” is getting rid of the electoral college. it serves a purpose aside from supposed racism. i think it needs to be massively overhauled to give the rural communities more power and take into account the popular vote, but it isnt a good idea IMO to abolish it completely.
sources: https://www.history.com/news/electoral-college-founding-fathers-constitutional-convention
https://www.history.com/news/the-history-of-the-electoral-college-debate
https://userpages.umbc.edu/~bouton/History407/SlaveStats.htm
https://www.statista.com/statistics/985183/size-urban-rural-population-us/#:~:text=Size%20of%20urban%20and%20rural%20population%20of%20the%20U.S.%201960%2D2019&text=In%202019%2C%20there%20were%20approximately,people%20living%20in%20urban%20areas.
https://www.britannica.com/topic/United-States-Electoral-College-Votes-by-State-1787124
https://worldpopulationreview.com/states
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