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Essay On Electoral College

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The electoral college is the idea that our Founding Fathers can up with to solve the problem of how the president should be elected, but it wasn’t the first solution brought up. They first thought that Congress should elect the president. Congress electing the president was shot down though because it would interfere with the separation of powers and some feared presidential candidates would bribe Congress so they could be elected. Another idea was to have state legislatures choose. This suggestion was also rejected because many believed that the president would feel indebted to legislatures and would allow them to “erode federal authority and thus undermine the whole idea of freedom” (William C. Kimberling, uselectionatlas.org). A third proposal …show more content…

Finally, the concept of the electoral college introduced. It would be an indirect election where people voted for electors who then choose the president. The number of elector a state has would be based on their number of representatives in the House of Representative plus 2 for their Senators. The electoral college was amended in the early 1800s because in the old system the person with the most electoral votes became president, and the person with the second most votes became vice president. Candidates, who only days earlier were throwing insults at each other, had to work together to govern the country. The problem was obvious. Therefore, Congress passed the 12th amendment which made electors cast a vote for the president and a separate one for vice …show more content…

One of them is it does not represent the whole population of a state with the winner take all system in place in most states, excluding Maine and Nebraska. In a state, not everyone supports Democrats or Republicans, but if they are in a “blue” or “red” state, it doesn’t matter because all the votes will go to the popular party in that state. Thousands of citizens don’t think their vote matters because they live in blue or red state. But, with proportional voting or popular vote, those people may start to feel that their vote matters leading to a larger voter turnout. All votes would be equally important with a popular vote. Along with that, why would a voter feel their vote matters when candidates barely campaign in their state? Presidential candidates tend to ignore states they know they either have no chance of winning or are guaranteed to win in. Another argument against the electoral college is that small states are overrepresented. For example, a voter in Wyoming has almost quadruple voting power than a voter in California. California has 1 electoral vote per 712,000 people while Wyoming has 1 electoral vote per 195,000 people. In addition, it is possible for a 269-269 tied vote to happen which mean that the House of Representatives would decide the president. Each state has exactly one vote. Therefore, a states like Texas, New York, and

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The Electoral College has been our presidential election procedure since 1787. This system was created to indirectly choose the president in a way that fits the desire of the citizens, which also prevents uninformed voters from deciding upon the country’s leader. Each state receives one electoral vote for each member of Congress, which totals up to 538 electors.

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The Framers of the Constitution created the Electoral College as a compromise between electing the President directly by popular vote and having Congress choose the President. At the time, there were concerns about electing the President directly, such as the lack of communication and travel infrastructure to facilitate a national election and the possibility of uneducated voters being easily swayed by popular demagogues. Additionally, the Framers were concerned that smaller states would be overshadowed by larger ones in a direct popular vote. The Electoral College has several pros and cons.

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Every four years we hold an election to decide who will be hold the office for the President of the United States. The founding fathers established the Electoral College to keep a candidate from manipulating the publics opinion and keep them from gaining absolute power. It also was set up so that smaller states would be able to have same power or say as the bigger states (Why the Electoral College). Each state is giving “Electors” based on the number of members it has in the U.S. House of Representatives, and also gets a 2 Electors for the two members they have in the U.S. Senate. Washington D.C. however only has 3 Electors.

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After much heated debate, and leaving the subject of the executive branch and returning to it, an idea was proposed. This proposal goes to the roots of our nation as it was made in compromise of the two most popular standing ideas. This proposal was the electoral college. This gave the votes to the electors who chose how their state would use their electoral votes. The votes were based on the size of each state.

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The framers of the constitution set up the Electoral College as a means not be controlled by Congress. “According to the terms of the Electoral College compromise, presidential electors were to be chosen by the states in a manner designated by their legislatures… the electors could not simultaneously hold a federal government positon…the person who receive a majority of votes cast by the Electoral College would be president” (Davidson, 64). What this means is that sates were a loud to produce their own legislation in choosing electorates, as such presidential candidates need not fear congressional collusion in being swayed to run a certain way. The bases of the College remains much the same today, in that each state by default is given two votes and the rest are amounted to population bases.

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Several years after the United States came to be, the Constitutional Convention met to determine how the new nation should govern itself. The delegates saw that it was crucial to have a president and vice president, but the delegates did not want these offices to reflect how the colonies were treated under the British rule. The delegates believed that the president’s power should be limited, and that he should be chosen through the system known as the Electoral College. The Electoral College is a body of people who represent the states of the US, who formally cast votes for the electing of the president and vice president. Many citizens feel that the Electoral College goes against our nation’s principle of representative democracy, while others

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Electoral college has been with us since the birth of the constitution, and to this day we are still using this type of system to this day. The Electoral College is a system that the United States uses to elect our upcoming presidents and vice presidents. Each state has electors equal to their senate member and house of representatives, however who ever gets the highest popular vote in the state gets the electoral vote. The issue is the Electoral College do not give votes to the people, but to the states. Which has some unfair consequences.

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In 1787, years after the founding of the United States, the Constitutional Convention met to decide how the new nation would govern itself. The delegates understood that the need for a leader was necessary but still bitterly remembered how Britain abused of its power. The delegates agreed that the President and Vice President should be chosen informally and not based on the direct popular vote, thus gave birth to the Electoral College. The Electoral College is defined as “a body of people representing the states of the US, who formally cast votes for the election of the president and vice president.” Since 1787 the Electoral College has been the system for voting in the United States, but with our nation ever more changing and growing it

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The Electoral College chose electorates who where most knowledgeable and informed individual who was not biased and did not have a political party would be elected in each state. The original plan did not last too long, only through 4 presidential elections, it was later changed for the second time, but had many flaws and made a mess with tiebreakers going to Congress and the Senate, also the

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Instead the candidate who received the most electoral votes was elected, provided that he receives a number of votes equal to a majority of the whole number of electors rather than the majority of the electoral votes. Nobody actually ran for Vice President instead the runner- up in the presidential contest was elected to the second office. Notwithstanding the founders’ efforts, the Electoral College system does not function exactly as they intended, however, as with so many constitutional provisions, the document prescribed only the system’s basic elements, leaving ample room for development. As the republic evolved, so did the Electoral College system, and, by the late nineteenth century, the following range of constitutional, Federal, and State legal and political elements of the contemporary system were in

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The article “Electoral College” lets us know that, “the original method of electing the President and Vice President, however, proved unworkable, and was replaced by the 12th amendment, ratified in 1804 (“Electoral College”). The 12th amendment required that each Elector had to cast one vote for President and a separate one for a Vice President (Kimberling). The amendment also required that if no candidate received the majority of Elector votes for President, then the United States House of Representatives were to select among the top three candidates with each state casting only one vote

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The Electoral College is the process to which the United States elects the President, and the Vice President. The founders of the Constitution came up with this process. This was done to give additional power to the small states, and it was done to satisfy them. It works by the citizens of the United States electing representatives called electors. Each state is given the same amount of electors, as they are members of congress.

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