Split electoral votes between candidates

My primary issue with the Electoral College is the fact that the winner of the popular vote in each state is awarded all of the electoral votes, no matter how close the popular vote was.

In this past election, in some states, the winning popular vote margin was measured very closely. And I had a real problem with awarding 100% of the electoral votes in those states to just one candidate — to me, that just wasn’t right or fair.

I could support continuing the Electoral College if the electoral votes in each state were split between the candidates based on their relative share of the actual popular vote in that state. I think this would be a reasonable compromise between those who argue that eliminating the Electoral College would give all the voting power to the larger urban areas and those who argue that the current state of affairs gives all the power to the rural smaller states.

Charlotte McRanie

Black Mountain, N.C.

Jon Gabriel did a really poor job of giving his opinion on why the Electoral College works in his column “The Electoral College is undemocratic? Of course. That’s why it works.”

The Electoral College wasn’t created to protect the rural from the urban, as he says. It was created for a few reasons, but today, the rural farmer vote in Wisconsin is worth more than the rural farmer vote in many other states. This is not protecting the rural vs. urban vote.

If a candidate were to win the 11 states with the most electoral votes by one vote each, they would win the presidency. If the remaining 39 states all voted for the other candidate, it would mean a person was elected by a small percentage of the overall population. The Electoral College made sense in the early days of the United States, but with technology it has been obsolete for close to 100 years. Either way, voters will be overlooked. It makes more sense to have a true democracy and use the popular vote for the presidency.

Douglas A. Morgan

Eugene, Ore.