I didn’t have a good idea of what the conflict over the electoral college was before reading The Electoral College, Explained by Sarah Geis. I had seen some posts on social media about it, but I only had a vague sense of the problems of the system. Sarah’s essay explains what the electoral college is, why it was implemented, and why it isn’t a good system for democratic voting. She also explores some other options for the voting system. Sarah raises the point that the Electoral College was created because “At this time, the Founding Fathers felt that giving the vote directly to the people could be risky.”
     This essay really made me think about our voting system. I believe that the electoral college does not do a good job of representing American votes. It attempts to ”give power to the small states” by taking it away from the larger populations, grouping votes together so that in a city that voted mostly one way, votes for the other way do not seem to count. If someone loses the popular vote but wins the presidency, can we really say that we, the people, chose them to be our president?