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Pros And Cons Of Abolishing The Electoral College

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Watching this year’s election was shocking. Against all predictions, against every analysis, Donald Trump became the president-elect of the United States. But were those predictions really off? As the LA Times put it,” Hillary Clinton got roughly the same number of votes that President Obama received four years ago en route to his reelection, but she nonetheless lost the presidency to Donald Trump, who came in at least 2.8 million votes behind her.” This is, of course, because of the electoral college. Should we really put the decision of an archaic system over the voice of us, the people? No, we should not. The electoral college is outdated and undemocratic. The electoral college was created at the birth of the United States for two reasons. …show more content…

In states that are heavily democratic or heavily republican (the “safe states”), a part of the population’s vote is simply ignored. A democrat living in Alabama is ignored. A republican living in New York is ignored. Their votes might as well be thrown away. Is this democratic? It certainly discourages voting on both sides. Another imbalance comes from the number of a state’s electors versus its population. The number of electors is based on a state’s presence in congress, with one elector per senator and representative. This means that each state has a different number of votes per elector. By dividing the population by the number of electors, we can figure out that Wisconsin has one elector for roughly each 575,000 people. Compare this to Wyoming, which has an elector per roughly 200,000 votes. A vote in Wyoming is therefore three times as powerful as one in Wisconsin. This is not fair, and this is not democratic. Each person should get one vote, which is equal to every other vote. Even if the imbalances were fixed, electors aren’t even required to vote for who they pledge for. A few have already decided to abandon Trump. According to the Huffington post, twenty nine states have laws in place to punish these faithless electors, but not a single one has been successfully prosecuted. In the third largest nation in the world, the final decision rests on the shoulders of a few

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