As the world’s oldest and most powerful democracy, the United States of America plays an important role in the global perception of a people’s government. But America isn’t a perfect democracy — far from it. Our system has long since begun to show its age, and nowhere is this more present than in presidential elections. Most Americans feel that their vote doesn’t matter, and they’re not entirely wrong.
From its inception, the American government was intended to overrepresent rural populations while underrepresenting urban ones. When the time came to elect a president, it used to not make much of a difference. From the advent of true popular elections in the 1820s, to the 2000s, only three presidents had won in the Electoral College without being the most popular choice. But since 2000, two presidents — Republicans George W. Bush and Donald J. Trump — were defeated by their Democratic opponents in terms of actual votes but still managed to win the Presidency via the Electoral College. By focusing candidates’ and voters’ attention only on states likely to swing between support for either party, reinforcing the narrative that most Americans live in states too overwhelmingly “red” or “blue” to make a difference, and simply valuing the voices of certain voters more, the Electoral College is a terrible failure of the American Experiment, and a significant majority of Americans agree that it needs to go. But, even as the government’s failure to act and protest feels futile, the best way to demonstrate the discrepancy between American popular opinion and what’s represented in the Electoral College may simply be to continue voting — even when you know your vote isn’t going to change an election’s overall outcome.
Numerous laws have been introduced to eliminate the Electoral College, favoring the adoption of a simple, national popular vote in its place. In this system, whichever candidate receives a majority of votes (or the closest proportion of votes to a majority) would be elected president, regardless of how many states they’re supported by. This is how it’s done in most democratic countries, but these proposals have failed to gain much traction in Congress. This can largely be explained by the fact that Republican candidates have failed to win the popular vote in all but one of the last eight presidential elections. With lawmakers’ support for the national popular vote as split along party lines as it is, it’s no wonder Americans rightly feel that the government hasn’t done anything to fix the existing system.
Besides, it’s important to note that the conception of most states “solidly” preferring a particular political party is not quite as accurate as one might think. Texas, for instance, is perceived as a very strongly Republican state, and one that would be difficult for Democrats to do well in this decade. In reality, however, Republicans won Texas by little more than half a million votes in the last presidential election — a margin of less than six percent. Even then, only about 52 percent of voting-age Texans voted in this election; if turnout had been just a few percentage points higher, the election could have gone either way.
Even in states in which elections are not this close overall, local elections — be them for mayors, governors, representatives, or even school boards — often are. Virginia is thought of as a safely Democratic state on a national level, but it was only a few nights ago that Democrats narrowly gained control of its state government. States also vote differently in certain elections, as we can see from Tuesday’s election results. Democrat-sponsored ballot initiatives passed by a landslide in Ohio — even though it isn’t generally even considered a state worth competing for among Democrats. Likewise, Kentucky, a state that typically votes for Republicans by double-digit margins, re-elected its Democratic governor just this week. States and districts in which general elections consistently prefer a particular party by a wide margin might have closer primary contests. For example, in California, the Democratic presidential primaries in 2020 were relatively close. The winner, Bernie Sanders, ultimately walked away with less than half a million more votes than his closest competitor in the state, Joe Biden. If half a million more Democrats (a number which certainly existed) had voted for the second place candidate, California could have adopted a very different vision of the Democratic party than the one it did.
I’ve saved the best reason to vote for last, and it may also be the most obscure one. You see, there’s an agreement between 16 states and Washington, D.C., called the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact (NPVIC). The NPVIC mandates that, if an election comes to it, every signatory will award their electoral votes to the winner of the national popular vote, regardless of the winner in those states. Compared to the visible state of American politics, this idea is borderline revolutionary, but it’s closer to reality than many people realize. Already, states representing 205 of the necessary 270 votes to secure an Electoral College majority have signed on. The NPVIC is currently pending in another six states, with a combined total of 63 electoral votes. Assuming all of these states adopt the agreement, it would only take one more state’s agreement for the Compact to effectively allow Americans to bypass the Electoral College without going through the bureaucracy and partisan politics needed to abolish it officially. It’s not a perfect solution, and it won’t fix all of America’s problems — but it’s certainly a start.
The Electoral College may have once been a sensible compromise, but it’s come to be an archaic, bureaucratic method of voter repression. Under the Electoral College, the vast majority of our votes don’t really matter, but it’s nonetheless paramount that we continue to vote in every election that we can. If nothing else, it’s most meaningful to demonstrate our demands and promote our preferred primary and local candidates until our votes really do matter.
