Oh, the Electoral College. Good question. It was put in place, basically, to disenfranchise voters. Originally, the US was going to have the House of Representatives choose the president. That idea was obviously problematic, but they didn’t want to let regular people (shudder) pick the president either. So they compromised, and now your state gets as many electoral votes as you have Congressional reps. Nebraska and Maine split their electoral votes by popular vote, but in every other state, whoever wins the popular vote gets ALL of the electoral votes.

I think the Electoral College is a sham of democracy. Basically, swing states get to pick the president. Presidential candidates don’t focus on issues important to people in large states like Texas and California because they already know where all of their electoral votes will go. It discourages voters in those states from getting involved in the political process because they feel like their vote doesn’t count.

I would love to see the Electoral College abolished entirely, or at least change it so that a state’s electoral votes are split up by who voted for whom (ie, if 75% of people in your state voted Democrat, 75% of your electoral votes would go to the Dems, as opposed to all of them). It’s possible that if Obama wins the EC and loses the popular vote, we might finally have a chance at getting the EC eliminated for good. I would love to get involved with a group trying to eliminate the EC process, but I don’t know if one even exists. It’s such a monolith that it’s tough to tackle. America fucking loves its own history. Everything the Founding Fathers did was sacred, so we can’t touch it or change it, even if its archaic and was designed to disenfranchise people.