The American electoral college system should be abolished because it provides foreign nations with the opportunity to influence the outcomes of U.S. presidential elections, according to Politico.
The authors used Alexander Hamilton’s Federalist No. 68 to explain the Founding Fathers’ theory that the U.S. electoral college would protect the nation from “the desire in foreign powers to gain an improper ascendant in our councils.”
The story further argued that Hamilton and the other American forefathers could not have imagined, or prepared for, an election like 2016, thereby bolstering the claim that Russia “was able to manipulate America’s election process with stunning effectiveness.”
“But it’s clear the national security rationale for the Electoral College is outdated and therefore it should be retired. Simply put, it enables foreign powers to more easily pierce the very shield Hamilton imagined it would be,” authors Matthew Olsen and Benjamin Haas wrote.
After doing away with the electoral college, the nation would be better off moving towards a system where the U.S. elects presidents based on the national popular vote, according to the authors.
“No voter would be more electorally powerful than another. It would be more difficult for a foreign entity to sway many millions of voters scattered across the country than concentrated groups of tens of thousands of voters in just a few states. And it would be more difficult to tamper with voting systems on a nationwide basis than to hack into a handful of databases in crucial swing districts, which could alter an election’s outcome,” Olsen and Haas wrote.
The authors threw out the possibility of creating some sort of task force or media platform to publicly call out and identify “the false narratives that adversaries push through fake news stories.” They also suggested that the U.S. put more pressure on social media websites, like Facebook, to ensure they “identify and block fake accounts and bogus ad campaigns designed to tilt our elections.”
Whether or not these other measures are enacted, “ending the Electoral College should be central to the discussion.”
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