The 2016 election saw Donald Trump win against Hillary Clinton with an unexpected victory, with Trump scoring 306 Electoral College votes compared to Clinton's 232. With that victory however, comes the dissenting cries as Clinton won the popular vote by roughly 2 million votes. This has sparked a wide number of debates, ranging from the issues of democracy, the need to scrap the Electoral College, overturning the Electoral College, illegitimate wins, and more. There are some arguments that need to be confronted head on, while one of the more salient arguments has been ignored. That is how the Electoral College is structured to begin with.

The Electoral College gives each state a value, which is the number of Senators + House Reps. Thus, the bare minimum a state may have is 3. Now, before we go further, there is one argument that needs to be squashed right out of the gate. Some pundits, and even some of the general public, attack each state having two senators, stating that sparsely-populated Wyoming gets the same number of senators as booming California. The aforementioned, oft-neglected sibling known as the House of Reps gets ignored once again as people miss the fundamental structural difference between the House and the Senate.

The Senate is based on each state, regardless of population, to have an equal stance here in the United States. Each state is granted two senators. The House of Representatives, on the other hand, is based off of the population of a state. Wyoming, for instance, has one House Rep, while California has 53. This bicameral system is meant to balance the population of each state and the equal standing of all states.

Now, a vigorous debate can be had on the system of direct democracy vs. the Electoral College. This isn't meant to dive into those particulars; rather, this is meant to understand an invisible deficit occurring in the current Electoral College System. That deficit is within the House of Representatives.

Over the decades and decades of American history, the House of Representatives would increase depending upon the new census taken. This kept true with the spirit of what the House of Representatives was meant to be: a system based off representing population totals in each state. However, the 20th century halted the gears of the House of Representatives, and now as the population continues to steadily grows, the House of Reps is now frozen in stasis.

The Apportionment Act of 1911 and The Reapportionment Act of 1929 established a permanent hold of 435 House of Representatives.

Usually, the House reapportioned itself in a manner that increased, or at least preserved, the representation of most states. Gradually, however, the method for calculating apportionment caused smaller rural states to lose representation to larger urbanized states. A battle erupted between rural and urban factions, causing the House (for the only time in its history) to fail to reapportion itself following the 1920 Census. Signed into law on June 18, 1929, the Permanent Apportionment Act capped House Membership at the level established after the 1910 Census and created a procedure for automatically reapportioning House seats after every decennial census.

So with fear of losing seats due to redistricting, these Acts were enacted to preserve politician's seats instead of following the system in place that had been used for decades upon decades. With the House of Representatives frozen at 435, it crippled one of the fundamental aspects of the House of Representatives existence: representing population shifts. More and more populated states, as their populations continued to grow, did not see the increase in the number of Representatives allotted to them. Furthermore, because of the House of Representatives being locked in place, that also hampered the Electoral College's ability to reflect the system it was designed for.

One potential solution is utilizing the Wyoming Rule. The Wyoming Rule is a proposal to increase the House of Representatives by using a ratio of the smallest state as the base value in determining seat allocation, in this case, Wyoming. Wyoming has a population of approximately 586,000 people. Under our current system, California has 53 Representatives with a population of 38.8 million. Under the Wyoming Rule, California would gain 13 seats, totaling 66 Representatives. Not only would this system become more representative of the growing populations decade after decade, but would also unleash the Electoral College to fulfill the role it was designed for. California would go from 55 Electoral College Votes to 67. In total, under the Wyoming rule, a new total of House Reps would be 545, an increase of 110 Representatives as well as updating the Electoral College values.

Once more, updating the House of Representatives to be more representative of the continually growing population, as well as changing the Electoral College values, does not change the potential discourse between direct democracy and the Electoral College system. However, this conversation should only be had when the actual potential of the Electoral College is utilized and people can accurately look at the data, instead of the frozen Electoral College we have in place today. Also, while decreasing the population-to-representative ratio in larger states to be more proportional of the people they are meant to represent, it is not necessarily the entirety of the changed needed in our current political system and atmosphere. The forces of legalized corruption, money in politics, corporate takeover, gerrymandering, and more work against the actual people these Representatives are meant to uphold. Nonetheless, changing this current paradigm of 435 can help alleviate at least some of the numerous ills that plague our system.