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What Is The Electoral College Essay

737 Words3 Pages

When people vote for a president they are actually voting for presidential electors, known as the electoral college. The electors get chosen by the people who elect the chief executive. These electors are the ones electing the candidate for your state. Right now the number of electors per state is from 3-54. This leads to a total of 538. Here in Ohio there are 18.
History
The Constitutional Convention considered several possible methods of selecting a president. One idea was to have the Congress choose the president. This idea was rejected because some felt that making such a choice would be too much of an issue and leave too many hard feelings in the Congress. A second idea was to have the State legislatures select the president. This idea, …show more content…

These people later vote for President and Vice President. So the president and vice president are chosen by the electors consisting of 538 throughout the U.S. Since past experiences, most states vote with the winner-take-all system. Nebraska and Maine are the only two other states that do not use this. They use something called the “congressional district method”. Maine and Nebraska have taken a slightly different approach in recent years. These states allocate two Electoral Votes to the popular vote winner, and then one each to the popular vote winner in each Congressional district (2 in Maine, 3 in Nebraska) in their state. This creates multiple popular vote contests in these states, which could lead to a split Electoral Vote. The winner-take-all system is exactly what it means. The candidate with the most votes (270 is max) will win the election even if it is as close as a few votes. If no one receives enough votes then it is established by the contingency procedure from the 12th amendment. This later leads to the house and senate choosing. One might be wondering if this system has failed. It has in the past but was resolved by going to the House of Representatives for the final …show more content…

The system does give one a straightforward voting process, but rather a really deep and hard process. Some people may think it is also good in many ways also. Some may think the Electoral College gives disproportionate voting power to states, favoring the smaller states with more electoral votes per person. It can also be very good some ways. The Electoral College avoids the problem of elections in which no candidate receives a majority of the votes cast. For example, Nixon in 1968 and Clinton in 1992 both had only a 43 percent plurality of the popular votes, while winning a majority in the Electoral College (301 and 370 electoral votes, respectively). It just all depends on what you think as an

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