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Essay On Electoral College Vote

2998 Words12 Pages

The United States utilizes a fair, equally representative system to elect its president, right? Wrong. By examining the most basic criterion of evaluating elections, the classic “Everyone’s vote should count the same,” the United States, and more specifically the Electoral College, is doing an unequivocally terrible job representing its citizens in presidential elections. The Electoral College currently counts one Vermonter’s vote as equal to three Texans’, and one Wyomingite’s vote is worth four Californians’. Clearly this is unacceptable, and thankfully it can be changed. The Electoral College is flawed, and should be replaced with a direct, popular election utilizing the Alternative Vote. It is first worth examining both the status quo and how it came to be. The factors that led the Founding Fathers and Framers of the Constitution to the Electoral College are no longer relevant. The first was that it could take several weeks to transmit information from one end of the country to the other, making direct election impractical and a representative election more convenient. Now, in the digital era of near-instantaneous communication, this concern is no longer relevant. The …show more content…

The textbook definition for the monotonicity criterion is as follows: “A voter can’t harm a candidate's chances of winning by voting that candidate higher, or help a candidate by voting that candidate lower” (Electoral Politics Dictionary). This makes a lot of sense and ought to be preserved whenever possible. Those against the Alternative Vote (AV) say that because AV is not monotonic in every single case, it ought to be dismissed out of hand (Edwards 114). However, Dr. Crispin Allard, who holds a PhD in statistics from the University of Warwick, estimates the Alternative Vote will fail the monotonicity criterion at a chance of 0.03% per election, an acceptable rate, especially when weighed against the benefits of AV (Van der

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To start off, in some cases, it is unfair to candidates who win the popular vote, but do not win the Electoral vote. For example, in the Presidential Election of 2000, G. W. Bush ended up with 50,456,002 popular votes, Gore with 50,999,897, and Nader with 2,882,955. (Document F) As you can see, Gore was in the lead for the popular vote, and it seems like he had a good chance at being elected President. However in the Electoral vote, G. W. Bush had 271 electoral votes, Gore had 266, and Nader with 0.

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This system will allow, each voter to not only elect a candidate but to select their preferences. This would end the spoiler dynamic of third party and independent candidates and consistently produce a majority nationwide winner. By eliminating the candidate with the lowest number of votes and picking the candidate with the highest votes will be a new system introduced in modern

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The old system of electing electors to the college is still in place – and it should be. The Electoral College should not be abolished because it properly divides power - but still keeps it in the people’s hands, keeps extremists out of

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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)

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Do you want a voting system that can be a disadvantage to you? The Electoral College is not useful in today’s elections. In most electoral college elections there are only two candidates, this can lower the diversity of the candidates that the people can vote for. Furthermore, if we switch to a Direct election it would be much simpler and eliminate the need for the Electoral College which is very complicated. Importantly, the Electoral College is a complex voting system that may be confusing to many voters and it decreases the variation on which candidate to choose.

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The United States democratic political system serves to pursue practices that are quite undemocratic. The flawed principles consist of an abundance of issues with a major one being the electoral college. This controversial practice is a heated argument amongst politicians and everyday civilians. The real question is however, is the system in place the prime resolution to maintain a democracy in which the people’s vote actually count? The Electoral College should be abolished with the amount of complications instilled in it and be replaced by a popular vote implementation in order to have a healthy and equal democracy.

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Blanche Lincoln said: “Voters must have faith in the Electoral process for our democracy to succeed,” but the problem is people don’t have faith. In fact according to Vox out of a sample of 1,084, 62% believed that a popular vote system would be a more fitting system to use compared to the Electoral College. Even our current president, Donald Trump, tweeted: “The electoral college is a disaster for our democracy.” Although he has changed his stance (most likely) due to the fact that he won the election only thanks to the Electoral College. Gene Green, a U.S. representative in Texas, stated, “Every citizen’s vote should count in America…

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The Electoral College system assures balanced power between the states, puts the independent parties under control, grants balanced voting, and supports the major political parties. The Electoral College has proven itself to be very sufficient in determining the president and the vice president of the United States. Since this system has been successful since our Founding Fathers created it, there should be no reason as to why we should get rid of the Electoral

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The Issues with the Electoral College and the Necessity of it Intro: During the drafting of the Constitution in 1787 there was dispute over how the president of the nation should be elected. Many people believed that the president should be elected through a direct popular vote, while others believed the nation’s congress should decide on who becomes president. The framers of the Constitution believed a popular vote electing the president would make it too easy for tyranny of the majority, and they were worried that the American public was uneducated and a tyrant could sway public opinion. On the other hand, allowing congress to elect the president would take away a lot of the power of our nation’s checks and balances. Congress would choose

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To Dan Newhouse, Although some people say the electoral college is best for the public, it is actually putting chains on their opinions. Many people would say that the founding fathers made the electoral college because it was the best way to vote in their time. But what they don’t realise is that the electoral college is outdated, we have more people, and technology now, and that allows everyone to vote. That is why the electoral college should be stopped, so the chains that keep the citizens opinion’s down are broken.

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This is why I try to tell whoever I can about the Electoral College’s faults and what could replace it. Once the issues with the Electoral College are important to the populace they will elect representatives that share these ideas. These representatives will be pragmatic and most likely will begin at the state level, giving candidates an approximately equal percentage of electoral votes from the popular vote, i.e. if a candidate receives 50% of the popular vote, he or she will receive as close to 50% of the electoral votes. Once several states adopt this, others would fall in line

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1101 Words | 5 Pages

A vote is is held in the House where each state gets one vote and the winning candidate must receive twenty-six votes in order to consider it a victory. While this system seems fair in theory and has worked in the past, the reality is it has become outdated for our democratic

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In order to take a more perceptive look into the electoral college debate, we will need to take a look into the history of the debate as well as the Founding Fathers’ intentions for it. The first thing that we need to take a look at would be the Founding Fathers' intentions as well as how the electoral college changed throughout history. In the article “Electing the People’s President: The Popular Origins of the Electoral College” it is stated that “Our Founding Fathers understood that America is a nation of both ‘we the people’ and a federal system of states” (Villegas 202). What Villegas is saying is that the Founding Fathers' looked at the people’s rights, as stated in the promised bill of rights during the Continental Congress. Most people who argue against the electoral college say that the people’s will and saying of “we the people” in the Constitution are violated, but rather it is a compromise between giving the people a chance at a say of the vote, as well as the federal state of

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As Turner said in his article, “...most call for the winning candidate to receive a popular plurality (forty percent is often mentioned) and a run-off election if that is not achieved” (414). Run-Off was made so if a vote for a certain candidate became no longer valid, as in they dropped out or got voted out, the vote would still matter and it would go onto the individual 's next suggested candidate. “Wouldn’t it be an intolerable strain to the American political system, giving rise to popular outrage and contempt… that sometime again a man with fewer popular votes than his opponent is the electoral winner? I doubt it…” (Bayh 169).

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The American Election System has been the symbol of how our democracy has elected our members of our government, whether a person votes for a mayor of a town or for a Representative in Congress. However, there is one shocking fact that most of our population has either no knowledge, or is unaware of, and that is that the popular vote doesn’t decide much of the election outcomes for the President of the United States. This is the system more commonly referred to as the Electoral College, and it is a completely undemocratic system, for the Electoral College has so much control on the presidential outcomes, that even elections can already be decided ten years in advance. In fact, through how the Electoral College is made up, how the winner take

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