I have heard many people complain about the Electoral College and suggest its removal from the Presidential election process. I could not disagree more with this stance. The Founding Fathers feared that larger population groups would be able to rule over more rural areas because of a pure majority vote. Even with the removal of the Electoral College, this most recent election outcome would have been the same. Obama received a majority of the popular vote. However, if you look at a map of the votes broken down by county and color coded red for Republican and blue for Democrat, you will see that a majority of the individual counties were red. As a matter of fact, if you could drive in a straight line starting on the west coast and head east, you could drive a line that would bring you within a few hundred miles of the east coast without passing through one single blue county. Driving from north to south, you could literally drive a line from the Canadian border to the Rio Grand and never pass through a blue county.
What happened with the 2012 election is exactly what the Electoral College is supposed to prevent. So what happened? The answer is simple. The Electoral College system was not designed by the Founding Fathers as a winner take all system. It was intended that Electoral votes would be awarded by congressional district. So the candidate who won the popular vote in the most congressional districts would have the most electoral votes.
Let's examine Florida, my home state, for instance. Florida has 29 Electoral votes. Obama received all 29 of those votes because he won the popular vote in the state. But when you look at the map of Florida broken down by county, Obama really did not win that much of Florida. What he did win was the major metropolitan areas, such as Tampa, Miami, Orlando areas. Now I won't claim I know how the congressional districts are broken up, but I will estimate that under a proper system, Obama would have carried maybe 4 or 5 of Florida's 29 votes. Even in California, which we all consider one of the most liberal states in the Union, Obama would not have carried a majority of its 55 Electoral Votes.
So the Electoral College in itself is not the issue. The issue is the system has been altered from its original intent and is broken. We need a grass roots effort across the nation to get as many states as possible to award their Electoral votes by Congressional District the way the system was intended to work.
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