I'm pondering the Electoral College tonight...

We were fortunate that the 2012 Presidential election didn't become the latest where the popular vote and the Electoral College vote did not match up.  Has the time come to change how we elect our Presidents?

Every other Federal elected position is done by the measure of the popular vote.  It is the best way to measure the will of all people, not just those in the states needed to get to 270 electoral votes.  Those who are Democrats at this moment will be opposed to the idea of changing the present system and those who are Republicans at this moment will be in favor of the idea of changing the present system.  Why?  Because there are states where there are a lot of electoral votes to be had that will probably never again end up on the Republican side of the ledger in a Presidential election.  California is one of them.  Had President Obama been discovered selling cocaine to school children a week before the election, he still would not have lost the state of California.  While that's certainly hyperbolic, it's also probably true.  The same is almost certainly true of Oregon and Washington.  Between the three states there are 74 electoral votes.  That's 27% of the total needed to be elected President.

There's no point in doing what some have suggested, that being divide up the electoral votes of each state on a proportional basis.  In other words, California has 55 electoral voted.  If the vote was split 65% Democratic and 35% Republican, under this suggested system, 36 of those 55 would go on the Democratic side and 19 would go on the Republican side.

It would be simpler to just allow the popular vote to decide who wins than trying to make a workable system out of the above concept.  One person, one vote.  People who live in states where their chosen party is clearly in the minority would no longer feel like their vote is a waste of time.  They would no longer be greatly outnumbered.  It's true that at the moment, there is an advantage owned by the Democratic party on a nationwide basis, but eliminating the electoral college system would require the candidates to work hard in all 50 states.  They couldn't play the games they played this year in the waning weeks of the election, focusing efforts on states they felt were still in "play".  There would no longer be "swing states", where the voters would be perceived to have more influence on the ultimate result of an election.  The concept of one person, one vote would once again have real meaning.

What happens if in 2016 or beyond that election, there is a result where the popular vote is won by a wide margin by a candidate who loses the electoral vote by a narrow margin?  It is possible.  The concept of "mandate" springs from the margin of victory in the minds of politicians, pundits and people.  There would be no mandate in that situation and it would cloud the following four years.

There is a related problem that needs to be dealt with.  That being the number of people who actually register and vote.  The 1980 U.S. Census showed a population of more than 226 million people.  If we assume that 20% are not of voting age, that means there was a total of 180 million people who were of voting age.  Only 92 million votes were cast in the 1984 election, considered the biggest landslide victory in history for Ronald Reagan.  If we become more conservative and estimate that only 140 million were of voting age, that means that only 65% of the eligible voters voted.

Reagan carried 49 of 50 states in the electoral college.  He only lost Minnesota, the home state of his opponent, Walter Mondale, by less than 4,000 votes.  The popular vote was more than 54 million votes for Reagan and more than 37 million for Mondale.  By all appearances, this is a very clear mandate.  Yet if there were 140 million who could have cast votes and only 54 million of them voted for Reagan then well less than half of eligible voters.  Half would have been 70 million.  One-third would have been almost 47 million. That means that Reagan was actually elected by just over one-third of eligible voters.  That's true voter apathy, not a landslide mandate.

So we need to solve the issue of voter apathy and consider if the electoral college is still how presidents should be elected in the future.  I have no answer for the former.  I do believe the time for the electoral college has passed and it should be abolished.