I’ve been reading about the Electoral College this week just to try to get a better understanding of how it works and why we use it for presidential elections. It seems really overcomplicated and unnecessary, and I still don’t quite understand exactly why we use it, except that it’s because we always have.

Many people think their vote counts as exactly one vote toward their candidate, and the candidate with the most votes wins the election. This isn’t how it works. But because the Electoral College has elected the winner of the “popular vote” (the candidate with the most votes) over 90% of the time, many feel this a fundamental component of “Americal Federalism”, whatever the hell that is.

The best explanation I could find of how this works is from Wikipedia. Using the Electoral College to elect a president, means that states having less population with 5% of the Electoral College votes have much more voting power than those in other states with higher population. This results in the US having several key “swing states” that have a much larger impact on the election than others, so the candidates often focus much more of their time and resources on those states.

Wisconsin and Florida are very big swing states, which is why we get many more visits and attention from the candidates than most other states. This was probably another reason both candidates came to Kenosha after all of the violence and destruction here too. And it wouldn’t surprise me if this was actually a factor in a lot of the violence as well. But maybe I’m giving the offenders more credit than they deserve. Can they really be deep thinkers? I don’t know, but trying to figure out all of this Electoral College crap is almost enough to drive me to violence. Why not just make everyone’s vote count equally and use the actual numbers? Aren’t we a country of equality? Oh yeah…not…quite…yet. I think everyone in the US needs to be Electoral College Dropouts!