Call to Abolish Electoral College System

We, the undersigned, ask you to reconsider the country's antiquated and unbalanced Electoral College Vote system. We do not believe a true democracy can be had in the United States until every citizen's vote carries equal weight.

We ask you to weigh the benefits and drawbacks of this outdated system in comparison to a direct, popular vote.

The current system is over two hundred years old, and while it was appropriate given the governmental pioneering in the era in which it was written, the viewpoint rings less true in our lifetime. The country has evolved and matured beyond the Electoral Vote system, which becomes more ill-fitting as we increasingly move away from the fledgling country we once were. Many had doubts then that the country and its new democracy would even survive, and they could not have foreseen the rapid growth, innovation, and culture changes that have reshaped the nation.

Now that the United States is comprised of fifty states and a hearty, growing population, the original concerns that prompted the Electoral College system are no longer valid. For example, "in the founding of our nation, the Electoral College was established to prevent the people from making "uneducated" decisions. The founders feared the easily-swayed opinions of the public and designed the Electoral College as a protection from the easily-swayed public." (FairVote.org)

In these modern times, there is absolutely no further reason to continue this practice. Foremost, it forces citizens to relinquish their vote to a set of individual Electors. An individual Elector can (and has -- 156 times, in fact, since the founding of Electoral College) violated thousands of votes by choosing to act on their own behalf, instead of that of the people. Furthermore, nearly half of the states' Electors can vote however they wish, wth disregard to the popular will of the state.

In addition, votes are not counted equally. An example from FairVote.org: "For instance, each individual vote in Wyoming counts nearly four times as much in the Electoral College as each individual vote in Texas. This is because Wyoming has 3 Electoral votes for a population of 493,782 and Texas has 32 Electoral votes for a population of over 20 million people. By dividing the population by Electoral votes, we can see that Wyoming has an "Elector" for every 165,000 people and Texas has an "Elector" for every 652,000 people."

This inequality in regards to vote weight is unacceptable. If truly “all men are created equal,” it makes absolutely no sense that one person’s vote would count as four times greater than another’s.

Other problems caused by the Electoral College system are partisan battles in Congress should the issue of presidential election fall to them, the enforcement of a two-party system, and most importantly, that a Presidential seat can be won without the majority of the vote.

It is time to recognize that the United States has evolved since the country was first formed, and that its election system should evolve along with it. We have no need of the Electoral College system in modern times, and, in fact, we believe we cannot have a true democracy without an abolishment of the Electoral College system in favor of a more direct, popular vote.