Every action has unintended consequences, but not all of them are bad. And not everything about the US Electoral College is bad. But before I spout off on that, let me explain why the college of electors was created in the first place.
When our Founding Fathers were putting together the Constitution, the found that in order to finish the task compromises had to be made. One of those compromises was the electoral college. Some convention delegates wanted a direct election of the President. Some wanted the states to elect the president. Others wanted a parliamentary system. That is a system that many Americans are not familiar with. In the parliamentary system, the leader of the majority party in the parliament becomes the Head of State. It would not be the Speaker of the House of Representatives, but the House Majority Leader, currently California's Kevin McCarthy. Also, in a parliamentary system, all of the "ministers" as they are called in England, or Cabinet Secretaries, as we know them, would come from the lower house as well. The Secretary of State would likely be Ed Royce, who is currently the chair of the Foreign Relations Committee. In a parliamentary system, there is no third branch of government, as the executive branch would be part of the legislative branch.
But the Founding Fathers decided to have an executive branch. Some delegates wanted one vote per state, some wanted Congress to choose the President and some wanted the people to choose. Therefore, the electoral college was invented as a compromise.
In our history, there have been three elections where the majority of the people disagreed with the Electoral College. As it turns out, in order to become the President, you simply have to win the right states, and not necessarily the majority of them. Eliminate the Electoral College and that changes.
In today's America, we can already see how that will change. The Democratic Party controls, with almost no exception, the large cities in the United States. While the Republican Party, with almost no exception, controls rural America. Without the Electoral College, the battle for the White House every 4 years will almost certainly be fought in the Suburbs. That is similar to the way campaigns are played out now, except for one difference. Instead of concentrating on only the swing states like Virginia, Pennsylvania, Ohio and Florida and ignoring states that are predictable, like California except when they need to raise money. The candidates will see that suburbia, even in New York and California are in play and will work harder for the votes there.
That is not to say that Republicans will completely ignore the big cities and Democrats will ignore fly-over country, as the race will need all the votes it can get, but they will spend less time in areas that are reliable.
That does, however, disprove the myth that if the electoral college were eliminated that the candidates would be more focused on the people because every vote would count differently. But that is not true. Take Los Angeles for example. Why would the Democratic candidate need to focus on the city when the vote is already firmly in his corner? Why would the Republican candidate waste time in neighborhoods where he or she would not be welcome? Both candidate would focus on areas where they can swing the voters in one direction or another, like the San Fernando Valley and the Gabriel Valley, where there are more undecided voters and where voters tend to go into different directions depending on who the candidate is. These are areas which mostly get ignored in presidential elections today because California has been solidly democratic since the 1990s.
The same story goes for many states all over the country. Utah, for example, is solidly Republican, except for the communities on the north half of Salt Lake County, some of which have money to burn. Utah, the state, is ignored in presidential elections today, but would be difficult to ignore without the electoral college.
However, there is not system that would get the candidates to focus on the problems of the country as a whole. And that is why we have Congress. Members of Congress, especially the House of Representatives, are tasked with solving the problems that they see in their individual districts. If you really want to reform elections, there is a better solution that eliminating the Electoral College completely. That would be to eliminate the winner take the entire state, but do what Nebraska and Maine already do. The winner of each Congressional District gets the elector from that district. That will bring the focus of each election where many problems exist, and possibly bring power from the White House to the House where it was meant to be in the first place.
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