Toward the end of the presidential election I was very disheartened by the Electoral College and how a small handful of swing states would decide the presidency for the whole country. I think the Electoral College needs to be revised and I have a simple idea for it.

A state’s number of electoral votes is determined by the number of seats in congress. For South Carolina we have nine votes by virtue of having two senators and seven House members. To get a more accurate reflection of the local people’s vote, have each electoral vote be credited to the candidate who wins the vote within the individual House district and the two Senate seat votes go to the candidate who wins the popular vote of the state. To clarify: If candidate A gets the majority of votes in House District 1, then they get that one electoral vote. So if candidate A wins four House districts and candidate B wins three districts plus the popular vote, then candidate A gets four electoral votes and candidate B gets five.

I know chances of it happening here are close to zero, as our state is mostly a single-party state, and no party is willing to give up anything to the other. But I do hope that there are some lawmakers in this state who will read this and try to make our state a leader in bringing change to the Electoral College so that every vote in every state matters in the election of president.

Henry Ivey West III

Columbia