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Popular Vote Fans: Los Angeles County Would Have More Say Than Wyoming, Nebraska, And Kansas Combined, Are You Fine With That? [Opinion]

By Dawn Papple
Published on: 07:04 PST, Nov 17, 2016

Many Clinton supporters are calling for an end to the Electoral College because Hillary Clinton won the popular vote, but she is not the president-elect. Currently, there is a push to try to influence members of the Electoral College, sworn to vote for Donald Trump, to become faithless electors and break the vow they made when they agreed to be an elector for the Republican candidate.

This year, according to the National Archives and Records Administration, electors will meet on December 19 in their own state to vote. Their decisions will be presented to the President of the Senate, Vice President Joe Biden, by December 28, 2016. The candidate who has earned greater than 270 electoral votes when the brand new Congress meets to count the electoral votes on January 6, 2016, will become the president. As it stands, the person is set to be Donald Trump.

Article II of the Constitution and the Twelfth Amendment dictate how we choose our president and our vice president. No candidate can be declared a winner if they have not earned a majority of the electoral votes. Usually, a clear winner is established. This year, had the polls been correct the morning of the election, we could have had the opportunity to see the House of Representatives choose the President from the top three electoral vote contenders. Evan McMullin, Gary Johnson, and Bernie Sanders supporters all stood a chance of getting their candidate to the White House by winning just one state if neither Clinton nor Trump had made it to a majority of the vote. It didn’t happen, but it remained a possibility.

That possibility could never exist if we made it so that the popular vote determined the president. If we kiss the Electoral College goodbye, we would be sacrificing the requirement for the president to be chosen by a majority of votes. We would have to. Unless a fiercely popular candidate ran in the general election, it’s unlikely that either candidate could muster more than half of the popular vote.

According to The Nation, the former Secretary of State appears to be leading the popular vote by at least a million votes and counting. To many liberals, it seems like Clinton was ripped off. They say that the time for the Electoral College and the Twelfth Amendment has passed. Mrs. Clinton won Los Angeles County alone by over a million votes, according to the California Secretary of State website.

In Wyoming, there are 447,212 people that are of voting age in the entire state, according to the Secretary of State of Wyoming. Los Angeles voters would completely wash out the voices of all the voting age people in Wyoming if we relied on only the popular vote. Los Angeles voters as a whole don’t understand the needs of Wyoming residents. They can’t possibly understand.

In all of Nebraska, there are 1,211,409 registered voters, according to the state’s website. So, if you add Nebraska voters and Wyoming voters together, they still don’t begin to have a voice when held up against the voters in Los Angeles County alone. In fact, if you take voters in Nebraska, Wyoming, and Kansas and add them together, you would still be able to squeeze in voters from another state in before beginning to have a voting voice equal to that of Los Angeles County voters. Are the voters in Los Angeles County capable of understanding the needs of these three states?

Hardly. How could they?

California voters would have more power than 46 other states combined, according to data reported in The Los Angeles Times.

The United States covers an area of 3.8 million square miles from sea to shining sea. Los Angeles County makes up a mere 4,083 square miles of our country, but they would hold almost unilateral control of our federal appointments if we switch to a popular vote count for determining the winner of the presidential elections.

That sure is a lot of power for one county registrar to hold. Especially when that county seems to have experienced a great deal of election problems this year alone, from a highly controversial primary to stacks of ballots going to one person’s apartment before the November election and everything in between.

[Featured Image by Unsplash/Pixabay/Cropped and resized/CC0 Public Domain]

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