by Ken Spitze

Created on: July 05, 2007

It is most certainly NOT important and should be abolished.

We live in a democracy. The defining aspect of a democracy is the ideal of one person one vote: the person receiving the most support from the individual citizens is elected to hold office.

However, the current President of the United States received fewer votes from the public than did his opponent. How on earth could this occur? How could a person receive hundreds of thousands fewer votes than his opponent, yet be selected to lead us? Most of us know the answer: our constitution stipulates that the Electoral College chooses the President. What many people don't know is why we have this institution in the first place and, more importantly, why we STILL have it.

I'm sure there are volumes written on the debate that occurred over two centuries ago, and on the debates that have occurred since. However, I believe that the rationale can be summarized fairly briefly. We have this institution to give smaller states a disproportionately greater voice in electing the President so that they might not be overwhelmed by the larger states. This dates back to a time when thirteen separate colonies with very different population sizes were forged into one nation.

The result is that some individuals in this Country have a larger voice in the election of their leader than do others. Specifically, an individual residing in a smaller state has greater voting power than does an individual living in a larger state. How does this occur?

To understand this, let's briefly review the Electoral College. The members, and their votes, are distributed among the states based on the number of members each state has in our Legislative Branch, which consists of The House of Representatives and the Senate.

The members of the House of Representatives are distributed among the States in proportion to their population. However, each State has two Senators regardless of its population. The result is that the number of votes a State gets in the Electoral College does not accurately reflect its population.

Despite the aforementioned principle of one person one vote, the Electoral College system insures that this is most certainly and dramatically NOT the case. How dramatic? Wyoming has three electoral votes and a 2000 population of 493,782, or one vote for every 164,594 persons. California has 55 electoral votes and a population of 33,871,648, or one vote for every 615,848 persons. In other words, a voter in Wyoming has 3.7 times as much

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