A recent poll indicated that if the election were held today, no single presidential candidate would get a majority of votes. Even the Republican candidate has only 38% support.
Obviously things will change between now and the 2020 election. But this poll points out a problem with the way we award presidential electors.
Utah has six votes in the Electoral College, all awarded to the candidate who gets the highest number of votes in the general election. Everyone else's votes are essentially wasted, even if a majority didn't want that candidate. That happened in 2016.
This is the problem with a winner-take-all approach. But it doesn't have to be that way.
Utah legislators should amend state law to allocate presidential electors in proportion to the votes they received. Fractions would be rounded up for candidates in the lead.
For example, a Republican nominee with 42% of the vote would be awarded three of Utah's six electoral votes. The Democratic nominee, getting, say, 32%, would be awarded two electoral votes. And the leading third-party candidate with 15% support would get one.
This would not only be vastly fairer and more representative of Utah citizens' preferences, but would mean that every person's vote — Republican, Democratic or otherwise — can matter in choosing our next president.
I ask our state legislators to pass a bill changing our electoral vote allocation from an unrepresentative winner-take-all method to a fairer proportional system to more accurately reflect the will of the voters.
Alan Wessman
Spanish Fork