IT'S LONG PAST TIME TO DUMP THE ELECTORAL COLLEGE--BY THE NUMBERS

Let's do a little math:

The number of electors each state sends to the electoral college is equal to the number of Representatives it sends to Congress plus the number of senators. The number of representatives is proportional to each state's population, but every state has two and only two senators. Every state gets at least one Representative. This arrangement strongly favors smaller states when it comes to electing the President. Here's by how much:

If you live in California, with a population of 38 million, your vote helps elect one of 55 representatives to the Electoral College. That works out to slightly more than 677,000 votes per elector.

If you live in Texas, population around 27 million with 34 electoral votes, it takes 686,000 votes to send someone to the Electoral College.

In Florida or New York, with populations around 20,000,000, it takes around 670,000 votes per elector.

Electoral College Votes by State

Credit: Wikimedia

Switching over to the states with the lowest population:

Wyoming, with a population less than 600,000 and 3 electoral votes: 192,000 votes per elector.

Vermont, just over 600,000 and 3 electoral votes: around 209,000 votes for each elector.

Alaska and North Dakota with around 740,000 citizens and 3 electoral votes each, around 240,000 votes per elector.

You get the idea, states with large population are strongly disenfranchised in the Electoral College, while the states with the fewest people are strongly favored.

This isn't a trivial effect. Joe Smith's vote in Wyoming is 3.6 times more powerful in terms of electing the President than John Smith's vote in California. 

Or, looking at it another way, slightly more than half of all Americans live in the 9 most populous states. Yet those states get just 240 electoral votes. The other half of the U.S. population, spread among the 41 less populous states, gets 298 electoral votes. That makes an average voter in a lower-population state about 1.25 times as powerful as an average voter in one of the 9 largest states.

In an excellent piece about how poorly the Electoral College works for most Americans, constitutional law professor Jamie Raskin points out that the combined population of the 12 smallest states is about the same as the population of Ohio. Those states get 40 electoral votes. How many does Ohio get? Eighteen. So an Ohio vote counts less than half of a vote in those states. Please tell me how that makes any sense in electing a President for all of us.

And in brief, that's why Donald Trump will be taking the oath of office on January 20 even though Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by more than 2.8 million (and counting)--a bigger margin than 10 earlier presidents! Reportedly spurred on by wealthy backer, hedge-fund CEO Robert Mercer, Trump hired British-based Cambridge Analytica, a high-powered marketing firm that identified the urban-rural split and honed the rust-belt strategy that gave Trump his 290-to-232 electoral vote "landslide" despite the fact that 2.8 million more voters chose Clinton.

Please explain to me why in the world we should let this incredibly unfair and undemocratic system continue.