Electoral college should be abolished in favour of national popular vote

The basic democratic principle: one person, one vote. A vote cast in Wyoming counts roughly four times a vote cast in California toward the Electoral College. This isn't a system feature; it's a malfunction. The president is the only federal official who is supposed to represent all Americans equally. A system that weights votes unequally for that office is simply undemocratic, regardless of historical reasons for its design.

The bottom line: the current system produced two presidents in 20 years who lost the popular vote. Both made significant policy changes with no popular mandate. The system's defenders must argue that the small-state weighting produces better outcomes than the alternatives — not just different outcomes. I've yet to see that case made with evidence rather than theory. Meanwhile, the democratic legitimacy cost is measurable and ongoing.

The 'geographically broad coalition' argument is empirically backwards. Under the current system, candidates ignore safe states entirely — there is zero reason to campaign in California or Texas as a presidential candidate. The swing state set is around seven states. NPV would actually increase the incentive to campaign everywhere, because every additional vote counts regardless of which state it's in. Iowa and New Hampshire would lose their stranglehold; large states with internal diversity would gain.

Historical context matters here: the Electoral College was partly a product of the Three-Fifths Compromise. Slave states got extra electoral votes based on their enslaved population, which boosted Southern presidential influence despite those people having no vote. This isn't the only reason the EC exists but it's a reason to be skeptical of arguments that it represents principled small-state protection rather than contingent historical deal-making.

The Electoral College forces candidates to build geographically broad coalitions rather than maximising totals in already-won population centres. Without it, a candidate could win by running up margins in California, New York, Texas, and Florida while ignoring the rest of the country. 'Flyover country' ignoring is already a complaint; national popular vote would structurally guarantee it. Federalism has value beyond historical accident.

The three-fifths origin story doesn't settle the current debate. Many aspects of the constitutional framework have origins we'd find problematic today; the question is whether the current institution does something valuable enough to retain. Senators from Wyoming and California have equal votes, also an artifact of the Connecticut Compromise. We don't abolish the Senate because of its founding bargain. The EC's current effects — not its 1787 purposes — are what we should evaluate.

Under NPV, campaigns would concentrate in the highest-density population centres where marginal voter contact is cheapest per vote. Rural and exurban voters would be de-prioritised even further than under the current system. The argument that NPV increases rural influence requires believing that campaigns are constrained to geographic coverage rather than efficiency — they're not. They go where the marginal vote is cheapest, and that's cities.

Popular legitimacy isn't only about aggregating raw votes. It includes whether the winner commands acceptance across the country's geographic and cultural diversity. A candidate who wins 50.1% of a national popular vote while losing 40 states faces a different legitimacy crisis than a president who won by EC with a plurality deficit. The EC forces a kind of distributive legitimacy that a national popular vote can't guarantee — and in a country with America's regional tensions, that matters more, not less.