The Electoral College is not a fair measure of voters

The results of last week’s election offer a dramatic parallel to the 2016 election where Hillary Clinton’s popular vote count exceeded Donald Trump’s, yet Mr. Trump won the election by electoral points. Many, including myself, have argued that the Electoral College is anachronistic and not a fair measure of the pulse of the nation.

This point is no more evident than by comparing the House and Senate results. The House voting, based largely on equal quadrants of population across the American landscape, clearly shows a strong Democratic Party preference, whereas the Senate voting, grossly askew, favors sparsely populated states.

As Paul Krugman, a columnist for The New York Times, recently indicated, “600,000 people in Wyoming (have) the same representation as almost 40 million in California” within the Senate.

Just as the Pennsylvania congressional districts had recently been restored to a more equitable demographic balance, I believe it’s time that the United States does the same. States such as Wyoming, Montana, Idaho and Utah should be consolidated into one entity. Similarly, it can be argued that we really no longer need two Dakotas, Carolinas and Virginias.

Such consolidations would likely save millions of dollars per year by eliminating redundancies, and I won’t accept the argument that fair representation within those new entities will be lost in light of modern methods of communication. That the powerful Senate is so out of character with the fabric of our nation remains as much an aberration as the original 13 colonies themselves.

ALAN DUNN

Squirrel Hill