The Electoral College

Yesterday, the Electoral College convened and officially elected Obama to be the next President of the United States of America. While that is a wow moment, certainly, because of all the historic indications of electing Obama, it also makes me think about how amazing and somewhat ridiculous it is that we still have the Electoral College operating in our democracy. The founders created the institution as part of a massive compromise in order to compensate for a lack of access to information and to find a way to ensure the smaller states were given more than their fair share, proportional to population, of a say in who was elected President.

It was a great solution at the time. Certainly, there was not the same level of access to information that there is now, in the age of the internet, and candidates could not so easily get around from state to state as they can now in order to be accessible to all voters nationwide. However, now it makes no sense. There is, if anything, too much access to information about the candidates, and voters generally do not know how their electors are chosen, much less who they are. They are voting for the candidate.

Are we still so concerned with the representation of small states in electing the President that it makes sense for us to maintain the Electoral College? Is that more important than ensuring that someone (like Gore) who wins the popular vote by a half million votes nationwide becomes the next President? Personally, I think it makes a mockery of the idea of universal suffrage and democracy. I, like many Americans, expected there to be outrage and perhaps a strong movement to abolish the electoral college after the farce that was the 2000 Presidential Election, but there really hasn't been much of a movement at all. Why? And why haven't the movements that have been started been more successful?