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Essay On Electoral College

1345 Words6 Pages

There are many problems with the way that the presidential election works in America. Because of the way that the Electoral College in set up, there is the possibility that the person that loses the popular vote may win the electoral vote, meaning that the person who becomes president may not be the person that majority of the people of the United States wanted to become president, which is what happened in the 2000 election between Bush and Gore. This isn’t even the only case, as both Andrew Jackson in 1824 and Samuel Tilden in 1876 won the popular vote but didn’t become president. The Electoral College also creates an imbalance of power with the electoral votes a state may get based on its population. For example, a vote from Wyoming is …show more content…

Currently, there are 21 states that have no law binding their elector to vote for the candidate that the state’s popular vote chooses, however, even in the 29 states that have laws enforcing the electors to vote for their states popular vote, the fine for not doing so is usually $1,000 and over the years, a number of electors have gone against their states popular vote. During the founding the United States, the Electoral College was actually established for the purpose of preventing the public from making uneducated decisions. The founders feared that the uneducated public, at the time, would not make intelligent decisions when deciding which candidate to choose for, however, this was not designed for the modern day public and leaving the decision of voting to the electors is counter-productive. Since the founding of the Electoral College to the 2008 election, 157 electors have not voted for whom they were supposed to. The Electoral College also enforces the two-party system, because of the winner-takes-all system, which makes it so that smaller third parties stand no chance of winning any electoral votes. People will also be discouraged from voting for a third party, feeling that a vote for a third party is “wasted” and would rather support “the lesser of two evils,” by voting for one of the two parties they would rather win, even if that party isn’t exactly the party they want to

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As the mode in which electing a president needed to prevent the possibility of “cabal, intrigue, and corruption”, stated by Alexander Hamilton, and thus the Electoral College was born. Our current system follows the regulations dictated by the US Constitution and 12th amendment: each state is assigned a number of votes based off said state’s population and whomever receives the majority of the votes wins that year's election. The system was crafted in attempts to make sure bigger states did not hold an absurd amount of power over smaller states; it was crafted to serve the republic. The political and socio-economical climate is completely different than the one in which the Electoral College was created in. In fact, the original design was “supposed to work without political parties and without national campaigns”, giving more choice to the public.

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With the unpopular winners, it makes it seem that the Electoral College does not truly have the people’s choice heard. The president just needs to win the Electoral College but not the national election. This makes it possible for the president to win without the public opinion in his or her favor. In fact, an unpopular president has been elected five times, in 1824, 1876, 1888, 2000 with George W. Bush and 2016 with Donald Trump(Ballaro and Bourassa). This creates an 11% or 5/45th false-positive rate for the presidential election.

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If we somehow happened to be a capable vote, then we ought to have the capacity to really pick who might be president. The Electoral College removes that from us. The Electoral College is not by any stretch of the imagination reasonable for our rights and our opportunity. It, for the most part, takes away the ability to vote the president. The Electoral College was made in a period when votes were harder to gather and number.

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Citizens have a say but at the same time uneducated people are not able to solely choose the next president of the United States. As Alexander Hamilton, an american statesmen and one of the founding fathers, said, “It was equally desirable, that the immediate election should be made by men most capable of analyzing the qualities adapted to the station” (document 1). Alexander Hamilton is saying smart, educated men should be the ones deciding who should become the next president. The United States has had the same system that has worked flawlessly, there is no reason to change a system that is still working

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The creation of the Electoral College was the result of one of the many compromises of our Founding Fathers. The intentions of such a system were developed to create fairness for smaller states and to prevent an unsuitable candidate from acquiring the office. Although it has been rare, the possibility that the Electoral College and not the popular vote would decide a presidential election was intended in its creation. The pros and cons of such a system have changed over time and are heavily debated in our current circumstances. Due to advancements in technology not envisioned by the founders, alternatives have been suggested to resolve the conflicts of what some feel is an outdated system.

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Many people choose not to vote in an election due to the fact that their vote is not effective in influencing the outcome of an election. This system of voting within the electoral college also generally favours large states over small states, meaning that they also do not have much influence in an election turnout. This problem requires reform because not only does it underrepresent the minority opinion, there is also a possibility that the winner might not be the candidate with the most popular votes. In fact three U.S Presidents, Rutherford B. Hayes in 1876, Benjamin Harrison in 1888, and George W. Bush in 2000, were elected with fewer popular votes, only winning the election because of the electoral votes they received.

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Other systems like run-off election and direct popular vote show a better picture of what the people want. In “One Vote For The Electoral College" the author goes into detail and explains direct popular election. “This successful and satisfactory system, one that has worked with only a few close calls, would dissolve with the abolition of the Electoral College, exposing the nation to dangerous forces that could tear it apart” (Turner 414). Besides the direct popular election, there is also the run-off election. It is functioned around making sure the people’s vote does not go to waste.

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The Electoral Process is a problem in the government due to creating possibilities for the loser of the popular vote to win the electoral vote (it has happened at least four times out of the fifty-six presidential elections). Also the electoral college warps the presidential campaign by bringing about the candidates to grant extra weight to the narrow needs of the swing states. The electoral college system also deforms the one-person, one-vote principle of the democracy since electoral votes are not distributed according to population. The electoral college creates the probability of a 269-269 tie vote. The electoral college doesn’t exactly stick to the Constitution cause the Constitution says that an elector cannot vote for a vice presidential

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