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Electoral College Essay

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Electoral College
What? That is what most people say when you explain to them what the electoral college is. It is a very complicated system. In this paper, the electoral college will be broken down and hopefully, it will be easier to understand. The electoral college is currently used in our elections. Most people think that when they vote that they are voting directly for their political candidate. That is not true. The electoral college plays an even bigger role. In this paper, we will investigate and learn 3 things. First, how the electoral college started. Next, how it works today. Finally, why we have it. The electoral college started in 1787. The Constitutional Convention picked presidents through Congress, Governors of States, a …show more content…

There could be many explanations as to why we have it, but there is one central reason. It all links back to our founding fathers and the end of the constitutional convention. At the end of the constitutional convention, the electoral votes were given to the Committee of Eleven and out of that Committee came the electoral college. Why didn’t they just leave it as the Committee of Eleven and just not change it to the electoral college? That is where the reason we have the electoral college comes in. The reason is that “The framers of the Constitution didn’t trust direct democracy”(Joe Miller) that is why the framers from the Committee of Eleven got the idea of creating an electoral college. The Electoral College would become an indirect democracy which sounded good to the founding fathers since they didn’t trust the idea of a direct one. What was so bad about a direct democracy? The founding fathers believed that a direct democracy, “would bring groups of citizens who have a common interest in some proposal that would either violate the rights of other citizens or would harm the nation as a whole”(Joe Miller). The founding fathers that took the most place in this discussion were James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and Alexis de Tocqueville. These men wholeheartedly believed that a direct democracy would bring chaos and saw the electoral college as a solution. That is the reason why we have it. As can be seen, it is all a connection and once you make that connection it makes the reason for the having the electoral college a lot easier to

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