The Electoral College system receives a lot of hate, and for good reason. It is an inherently undemocratic system, meant to take power out of the hands of the people. The winner-take-all system means that votes of voters whose preferred candidate lost reelection do not matter. They only end up contributing to the popular vote, which does not matter either in an electoral college system. This is why in 5 of our presidential elections, the candidate to lose the popular vote has won the presidency. In addition, this means that votes in a majority of states do not matter. Most states, like Vermont or Wyoming, often vote overwhelmingly for one candidate over the other. This means that on an individual basis, votes do not matter since the state’s result is guaranteed from the start. In the 2020 presidential election, only 8 states had margins of victory of under 5%, and only 16 states had margins of victory of under 10%. This means that 34 states(+1 for the District of Columbia) and 335 electoral votes’ votes do not matter. Any system that effectively disenfranchises a majority of voters is antidemocratic and should not be allowed to stand in the world’s oldest democracy. It’s obviously an unrealistic scenario, but it is technically possible for a candidate to win the presidency with only 20% of the popular vote, a clear indicator of how ridiculous this system is. However, as things stand now, the Electoral College is a political issue because of the way it benefits Republicans and harms Democrats. For that reason, we will never be able to agree to reform it. Nonetheless, the Electoral College is still a fundamentally flawed system that degrades America’s democracy.

Even once the President is elected, the systems that follow are flawed, which we only discovered after the 2020 presidential election. After attempts to challenge the results of the election through the courts, supporters of former President Donald Trump attempted to overturn the results in unprecedented ways. First, by trying to convince state legislatures to ignore the official vote and send their own slate of electors to the Electoral College; second, by trying to have congresspeople object to the electoral votes during the formal counting of the votes by Congress; and finally, by storming the Capitol during the formal counting. All of these attempts eventually failed due to the actions of individuals who opposed the terrorists and chose to uphold the law. However, this revealed that we should not need to rely on people to make the right choice in the first place. Instead, our laws should be crystal clear so that nothing like this can ever happen again. Apparently, a bipartisan group of 16 Senators is working on legislation to tighten up our post-election laws so that there will be no room for loopholes within the laws. Obviously 16 Senators will not be enough to overcome the 60-vote threshold in the Senate, but considering that objections to the election were rejected by margins of 93-6 and 92-7 respectively, an agreement can be reached that will win the approval of the Senate.