Electoral College Pros And Cons Essay

Maansi Dasari

Mr. Morris

AP English 3

12 January 2017

The Electoral College: The last remnant of slavery Amidst the chaos of the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election, emerges a cacophony of voices screaming for Electoral College reform. Many are angered by the results, others are confused: how can one candidate receive nearly three million more votes than the other and still lose the election? The Electoral College has been the United States’ method for electing a president since the Constitution was ratified, and this is far from the first time that it has been criticized. Proponents of the system accuse current skepticisms of being partisan, and the skeptics of being “sore losers”. However, defenders of the Electoral College, such as Guelzo and

The system was an experimental product of the 1787 Constitutional Convention. The delegates to the convention, as was the rest of the world, were inexperienced with the formation of a democracy, and made their best attempt to strike a balance between a true democracy and appeasing the newly-united states. As the fragile nation quickly discovered, each of the states had its own needs, and compromise was a necessity. Supporters of the Electoral College often downplay the role that slavery played in its creation by insisting that the compromise was intended to protect the small states from the will of the large ones, but the true divisions that the Electoral College intended to patch were between the North and the South, and they involved one key issue: slavery

Even today, the Electoral College ensures that “the preferences of minority voters count for almost nothing” (Hoffman). The popular “winner take all” system of distributing electoral votes at the state level fundamentally disenfranchises the conflicting opinions of minority votes (Hoffman). In alternative systems of distributing electors proportionally or using the national popular vote, the ballots cast by minority voters across the country would significantly add to one candidate’s total. In this manner, the effects of the Electoral College with regard to suppressing minority votes is appallingly similar to the types of political gerrymandering banned by the Voting Rights Act of 1965. (Kelkar) The minority votes, even if they comprise 49% of the state population, get virtually nozero electoral representation in the vast majority of states. When it comes to presidential elections, African Americans are “completely disenfranchised--just as they were for so many years in the eras of slavery and segregation”