There are many confusing explanations in
response to this question, but it’s a simple matter of state votes vs. public
or popular votes. When you vote for President, you are actually voting to
determine how your state will vote for President — you are not voting directly
for the President.
Frankly,
I could care less, how my state votes for the President, yet it is one of the
primary reasons for the electoral college process. It’s all about big states
vs. little states. The Founders had a fear that under the popular vote, the
choice of President would always be decided by the largest, most populous
States with little regard for the smaller ones. When they wrote the
constitution, this was a big deal with the limitations of travel and
communication. Obviously, a candidate could campaign in a few large states,
save money, time and likely get elected.
In
today’s world, the process is totally meaningless and irrelevant and yet we
continue to use the same antiquated process over 200 years after it was
instituted. It has now led to two unprecedented Presidential elections in the
last 16 years where the states elected George Bush and Donald Trump, but the
public elected Al Gore and Hillary Clinton by over 500,000 and 2.23 million
votes, respectively.
Another
reason for the electoral college process was to prevent a charismatic tyrant
from fooling the public and attracting a majority of the popular vote. The
Founders reasoned that the electoral college process would allow a more
knowledgeable group of savy electors to override a misinformed public. As you
might expect, there are various opinions on whether that “check and balance”
actually works.
