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their gift for foresight gave us one of our most important tools: the Constitutional Amendment. It took all of 15 years from George Washington's first inaugural in 1789 to ratify the first amendment concerning presidential elections. The Twelfth Amendment (1804) did away with the practice of electing the President and Vice-President as winner and runner-up, respectively, in the vote count for president. Today we take for granted that every citizen over the age of 18, men and women of any race, rich or poor, can cast their vote for a president who can hold said office for no longer than eight years beginning on January 20th - except for the fact that none of this is in the original Constitution (see Amendments 15, 19, 20, 22, 24, 25, and 26 so I'm not forced to bore you with a civics lesson).

One of the main objections to the Electoral College is its lack of consistency for determining the qualifications of electors. In fact, the only guideline concerning who can be appointed an elector is in Article II, section 1 of the Constitution, which vaguely states that they can be anyone except a senator, representative or other "person holding an office of trust or profit under the United States." More alarmingly, there are also no Constitutional provisions requiring that electors cast their votes in accordance with their state's popular vote, although roughly half of the states have put their own laws on the books in this matter. The only thing almost consistent across the country is that all states except Maine and Nebraska have a winner-take-all system where whoever wins the majority of electors (even if it's just 51%) gets all of the electoral votes for the state. This is the reason why Obama's seven percent win of the popular vote in the 2008 election translated to over a 200% victory in the Electoral College (365 to McCain's 173).
How does this seem like a proportional or democratic process?

Under the current EC system, political campaigns use complex mathematical equations when planning their geographic strategies, letting the numbers-needed-to-win run the show instead of the needs of the people. Would our Founding Fathers be proud of the Electoral College system today if they saw the ways in which it is flawed? When anyone asks why the Electoral College should be abolished, the answer should come in the words of the late Tim Russert: Florida, Florida, Florida. The outrage following the 2000 debacle was regrettably short-lived, with people such as the newly-elected Senator Hillary Clinton calling for abolition in front of cameras and then dropping the issue like a hot potato when the news cycle moved on. Many Americans have not forgotten the injustice and national embarrassment of Bush v. Gore, citizens like myself who hope that the next proposal in the long line of 700 plus will finally be successful in ending this antiquated, undemocratic system of electing our President.

Learn more about this author, Rebecca Bauer.
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