Elizabeth Warren Says We Should ‘Get Rid of the Electoral College’

Sen. Elizabeth Warren wants to get rid of the electoral college, which is great because the electoral college fucking blooows.

Speaking at a televised CNN town hall event in Jackson, Mississippi, the Democratic presidential candidate said that she wants to end the electoral college once and for all, Reuters reports, scrapping the weird, arcane system responsible for putting two of our worst presidents into the White House.

When asked by a town hall audience member what she would do to expand voting rights, the Massachusetts Senator, who's currently third in the polls, said that "every vote matters."

"The way we can make [every vote matter] is that we can have national voting," she continued, "and that means get rid of the electoral college and everybody counts."

Warren's words echo those of fellow Democratic hopeful Pete Buttigieg, who has said that the electoral college "needs to go." Bernie Sanders similarly called for a reassessment of the voting body.

In case you keep zoning out every time someone tried to explain the electoral college to you (understandable), let me do a terrible job of explaining it again to you now. The electoral college is a thing that's made up of 538 electors from all 50 states and also Washington, D.C. There are 538 of them because each state has the same number of electors as it has senators and representatives (100 + 435 = 535) plus three electors from D.C. (535 + 3 = 438). These electors generally cast their electoral votes based on our votes in the presidential election. (There are also faithless electors, but that's a whole other thing we don't have time for here.) Whichever candidate clears 270 electoral votes becomes the President of the United States, which is why Donald Trump and George W. Bush got elected even though they both lost their respective popular votes. It's a system that makes no sense until you look back at its history and realize its whole purpose was to limit democracy and keep the same rich white men in power.

In short: It's bad! And explaining how it works is the worst.

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