Donald Trump won the presidential election. When all the votes were tallied and the final electoral votes were verified, Donald Trump was elected as the 45th president of the United States.

Since Election Day, there has been a firestorm of news reporting that Russia had interfered with the election, but all of this talk is immaterial, and distracts from the real issue we should be addressing: how we elect our leaders.

There is constant debate over various issues with our system of choosing the
president. One of the cornerstones of Bernie Sanders’ campaign was campaign
finance reform. However, the debate over our elections always seems to come back to a single point.
On Election Day, everyone has an equal voice. Whether you’re rich or poor,
male or female, white, black, Asian, Latino, or anything else – on Election Day everyone gets just one vote. And every vote counts the same.

But that point isn’t even true. And this isn’t an issue of complex statistics or ideas; basic logic will tell you that every vote is not equal.

If every vote carried the exact same value, then the candidate with the most votes would win every election.

Many suggest that without the Electoral College, densely populated areas, mainly on the coasts, will have too much influence over the election. They suggest that candidates will only campaign in those areas and ignore the more rural areas further inland.

However, any success the Electoral College ever had in fulfilling those goals has since been eliminated by modern political strategy.

According to data tallied by FairVote, about 66 percent of campaign stops during this election cycle occurred in just six states: Florida, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Virginia, and Michigan.

The Electoral College doesn’t make candidates reach out to more rural areas,
but rather shifts their focus to swing states, states which have been shown to be an accurate predictor of the overall outcome of the election.

Additionally, the Electoral College makes individual votes in less populated states mean more. Since every state is guaranteed at least three electoral votes, less populated states like Alaska and Montana, which may otherwise receive less electoral votes if they were determined strictly by population, have more electoral votes per capita of voters than California or Texas, where there are far fewer electors per capita.

Obviously states like California and Texas have a far greater percentage of the total electoral vote, but each individual voter has less influence.

It is time to explore other systems for electing our leaders. Systems that force our leaders to try to earn all of their votes, rather than just focus on a select few states. And a system in which every vote is worth the same.