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watch television on the night of the elections, waiting for the announcement of who the next President will be, the way in which the Electoral College works may actually alter the outcome. Though this has never actually happened, in a close electoral election, it is possible that the candidate whose party garnered the majority of the Electoral College members could lose the election.

You must remember that the general elections select who the Electoral College members will be. The Electoral College members actually cast the vote to select the next president. When the electoral members gather to cast their ballot, what if one or two members vote for the opposing party? In a close election, those one or two votes could change the election results, and allow the opposing party's candidate to win the election.

This demonstrates the first method in which the public's vote is nullified. If a person votes for a candidate, and that candidate 'wins' in the voters state, and the electoral representatives decides, for whatever reason, to vote for a different person, every person who voted for that winning party has been disenfranchised. The vote they cast was overridden by a single human being who ignored the results of the vote.

The second method of nullifying a persons ballot is simple in concept, but difficult to picture. Image you live in the state of California with its 54 electoral representatives. To simplify, we will use the total population of California, or 36 million, to illustrate. What this represents is that each electoral vote from California represents about 666,667 people. However, if a person wins the California election by 19 vs. 17 million vote, or whether they win the election by 35 vs. 1 million, the candidate will still receive only 54 electoral votes. The extra 16 million votes the candidate won in the second example are simply wasted votes. They did not make any difference at all.

The solution to the first problem mentioned is the abolition of the electoral college. The solution to the second problem is modifying the method of awarding electoral representation from a 'winner take all' method, to a 'proportional representation' method. Using the proportional representation method would have resulted in a 28-26 decision in the electoral distribution in the first election, and a 52-2 award in the second. These both represent much more closely the intended will of the voting public, and would indeed, be closer to the intent of our founding fathers when they signed the US Constitution back in 1787.

Learn more about this author, Alan Fernald.
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