Presidential candidate and Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren came to Jackson State recently and held a town hall hosted by CNN and Jake Tapper. She  suggested  many things, including beginning reparations, giving people scholastic advantages because of their racial minority status, and taxing people because of their wealth, but to me, the most atrocious thing she said was advocating to abolish the electoral college.

Abolishing the electoral college alienates rural voters and leaves them out of national politics. President Trump, who recently tweeted about the benefits of the electoral college, campaigned in Mississippi in the Republican primaries, the general election, and then the midterms to campaign for Senator Hyde-Smith. The electoral college encourages national campaigning, not just big states like California and New York. This gives people all over the country a chance to have their votes matter.

Along with national campaigning, the electoral college forces a presidential candidate to get a diverse group of people to win the presidency. One must have people of all different jobs, races, and backgrounds to win. Taking away the electoral college will also put the national government in charge of certifying each election, making it easier to hack votes and change the outcome. Changing each individual state’s electoral vote is much more difficult than hijacking one big city’s votes. Our founding fathers realized this when forming our Constitution.

Thankfully, to abolish the electoral college, a Constitutional Amendment would have to be passed, which is very difficult to make happen. With a Republican Senate, multiple Republican State Governments, and a Republican president, Elizabeth Warren’s dreams of stopping candidates from campaigning in Mississippi and putting California and New York in charge of our federal government forever is extremely unlikely.

All opinion pieces are the views of the author(s), and the author(s) only, with the exception of staff editorials, which are unsigned and reflect the consensus view of the students in the Sentry classes. Staff editorials are the only columns in the paper that express the unified view of the Sentry staff.  This staff editorial process is comprised of two main steps.  First, the staff talks amongst themselves about a topic and organizes a position on the issue on which all class members can agree. The editorial is then written and run past the staff members for approval.

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