With the present system I don't think everyone's vote is important because only a few states decide election.
The people don't elect the president, the States do.
Huh?
Explain please, I'm confused.
Well, for starters, our government is a representative republic, not a strict democracy. In a strict democracy, the majority rules, always, which means the majority can put in place things that would actually harm the minority (tyranny). It would also mean that to elect a president, the winner would need at a minimum of 50.1% of the vote. In this most recent election, that didn't happen. We'd have to drop the bottom vote getter and vote again, and keep doing that until someone got a majority of the votes.
Most importantly, this is the
United States of America, where each State is a separate and distinct sovereign entity (although the federal government has tried its dead-level best to change that over the years).
The Constitution lays out how we elect the president and vice president. It is done by each state by Electors (Article II, Section 2).
"Each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors, equal to the whole Number of Senators and Representatives to which the State may be entitled in the Congress: but no Senator or Representative, or Person holding an Office of Trust or Profit under the United States, shall be appointed an Elector." Each state has 2 Senators, and a number of Representatives, and each of those gets one Elector. So the Electors represent The People of each State in exactly the same way The People is represented in the Senate and the House of Representatives.
Article II, Section 3 lays out how the Electors select the president and vice president, but that section was amended by the 12th (1804 - to stop the practice of the runner up being the vice president (can you imagine the harmony and effectiveness of a President Trump and Vice President Clinton?)), and later 22nd, and 23rd Amendments.
The national presidential election actually consists of 51 separate elections (47 States, 3 Commonwealths, 1 District of Columbia), rather than the one big far hairy popular vote election that the SJWs and bed wetters think it should be. When we vote for the president and vice president, most ballots actually say at the top that you're voting for the "Electors for..." and naming the presidential and vice-presidential candidates each slate of electors is pledged to.
Most states (except Maine and Nebraska) give all of their Electoral votes to the candidate who wins the popular vote. That's why if you win the popular vote in Florida you get all 29 Electoral votes. But they don't have to. How the states divide up their Electoral votes is up to them. In Maine and Nebraska they divide them up by Congressional District.
So, each State casts its vote for the presidential and vice presidential candidates, by having its Electors vote. Whichever candidate gets the strict democracy simple majority of those votes wins. If neither candidate gets a majority (270) of the 538 electoral votes, the election for President is decided in the House of Representatives, with each state delegation having one vote, and a majority of states (26) is needed to win. The Senators would elect the Vice-President, with each Senator having a vote, with a majority of Senators (51) is needed to win.
There is a "movement" to get the states (the current swing states, in particular) to award all of their Electoral votes to the candidate who wins the national popular vote. The people in California, Washington, Oregon, and some of the more populated northeast states, who all vote Democratic, are the ones who desperately want to convince Florida, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and a couple of others to do that, so that the total of their blue states plus those swing states totals 270, to Hell with all the other states. But that movement has about as much chance of happening as the country itself doing away with the Electoral College completely.
On a not completely unrelated note, California is threatening a Calexit (like Brexit, get it?), to secede from the Union, because their votes for Clinton didn't get Clinton Elected, and they're pouting and temper tantrumpting about it. I don't think they realize just how little resistance such a move would encounter. More likely, the rest of America will respond with, "Excellent! When? Don't let the door hit yer ass on the way out."
I think we should completely redo the Electoral College so that each county gets one vote. Kentucky, for example, has 120 counties. 118 of them voted for Trump. Democrats would never ever win again. BWWAAAHHHAAAA
