Keep the voice of the people

Since the election, I’ve been hearing a lot of discussion about the electoral college. Trump won the electoral vote, while Clinton narrowly won the popular vote. With videos like Adam Conover’s "Adam Ruins Everything" it can hard to see why the electoral college is. In a democracy, it seems that a simple majority should decide. Which candidate did most people want? Well allow me to challenge that very valid thinking, by explaining how the electoral college benefits us as a nation.

If you look at the electoral map county by county, it's a huge sea of red with little pockets of blue floating about. We know that majority of the mass in the US is very rural, with low population densities. The blue pockets are mostly major cities and universities. That's why, even though most of the map was red, Clinton still won the popular vote.

This is New York city. Population 8.4 Million people. They are factory workers, web designers, lawyers, bankers, creatives, professionals, and more. New York has concerns. Police relations, crime rates, housing costs, wall street regulation, homelessness, free speech questions, second amendment questions, LGBT rights, just to name a few. These concern the people of NYC, but not so much the people of my next town.

This is Crook, Colorado. A town so small that many in Colorado don’t know it exists. Population 110 people.

Here is a picture just outside Crook in Logan County. The people of Logan County (pop. 20,504) are mostly farmers and ranchers. There are a few pockets of industry. For many of the people of this area, the concerns are quite different. They want to know about grazing fees and livestock regulation, they have questions about imminent domain and federal land use.

Now consider yourself running for president in 2020. We’ve abolished the electoral college, its popular vote only. Where are you going to invest your time and money? New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago, San Francisco, Houston, Miami… you’d be smart too, because you’re able to reach the most voters efficiently. Are you going to visit Crook, Colorado? Probably not. How about Sterling, the county seat, population 18,000? Probably not.

So what? Those people still have a vote, it doesn’t matter that they are not visited they can still vote for the person who they feel represents their issues best. But here is the problem, why would you spend anytime in New York, talking about the problems of Colorado? Instead, you the politician are going to spend time talking about and working on the issues of the big city, and the issues of the small town will be forgotten.

We don’t want the votes of big cities making the policy decisions that affect the small towns. The web designer in New York doesn’t care whether rifles are legal or not, but the rancher in Colorado needs hers to fend off predators. The banker in LA doesn’t care if grazing fees go up, but that impacts the Rancher’s bottom line. The electoral college forces our Presidential candidates to listen to and speak on the diverse set issues affecting people across the country.

@ThethoroughbredOfSin @imgur.com
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