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Issues With Electoral College

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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 …show more content…

People’s largest complaint is that it is highly possible for a candidate to lose the popular vote but to still win the presidency. This has several times twice in the past two decades. In 1824 there were four candidates for president and Andrew Jackson received a plurality of the vote, more than anyone else, but not a majority. That meant the election went to the House and John Quincy Adams won the presidency. In 1876 Rutherford Hayes received less popular votes than Tilden, and only won the electoral race by one vote, due to three contested states all going to Hayes. Again in 1884 Benjamin Harrison received over 100,000 votes less than Grover Cleveland, but won the electoral vote by a hefty margin. In more recent times however the differences between the electoral and popular winner have been more defined. In the election of 2000 George W. Bush lost the popular vote by almost half a million votes, and Bush only winning the electoral race by 5 votes thanks to him narrowly securing the Florida electoral votes after disputes about who really won Florida. This election sparked many people into believing that the Electoral College system is not good for the nation because the candidate that most Americans are voting for is not winning the office. This issue was clearly shown again 2016 in the race now President Trump, and former Secretary of State Clinton. President …show more content…

This would stand to reason that without the Electoral College a candidate would have to meet the same requirements with the popular vote. This presents a challenge because in both of the recent elections where the popular winner not winning electorally has been an issue neither candidate from the main two political parties won a majority of popular votes. In 2000 when Al Gore won the popular vote and lost electorally he only had 48.85 percent of the popular vote which is not a majority which would’ve meant the election would’ve gone to the House of Representatives which at the time was controlled by the Republican Party. Again in 2016 when Hillary Clinton won the popular vote she only had 48.5 percent which again is not a majority which would’ve sent the election to the House of Representatives which again was still controlled by the Republican

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644 Words | 3 Pages

The Electoral College exists, according to the Federalist Papers, in order to account for the opportunity of the tyranny of the majority or factions. It gives us the responsibility of choosing the President and members that are the best for us that prevents from bias opinions on who is chosen. The reason that the Constitution calls for this extra layer, rather than just providing for the direct election of the president, is that it will harm us a whole. James Madison worried about what he called "factions.” Until today, we are afraid of what Madison called, "the tyranny of the majority" – was that a faction could overgrow 50% of our population, at which point could sacrifice the rights of other citizens.

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331 Words | 2 Pages

People who are against the electoral college often argue the point that many presidents have been elected without winning the popular vote. To date, 6 presidents have been elected without winning the popular vote, most recently Donald

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753 Words | 4 Pages

According to the National Archives, the Electoral College is, “...a compromise between the election of the President by a vote in Congress and election of the President by a popular vote of qualified citizens.'' The Electoral College was created in the late 1700’s, and was used as a buffer between the voting population and the official selection of the president. For the founding fathers, this solved a wide array of problems: the possible risk of leaving the power of choosing who the leader of the country to ill -informed voters, unequal representation and distribution of votes between the North and South of the U.S., and supported the idea of separation between powers in the government. In this country, it has been believed that the government has been built off of popular sovereignty, the theory that the government is created by and is subject to the will of its citizens. But how is this concept valid when the people of the United States don’t directly vote and decide who will govern them?

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1049 Words | 5 Pages

The Electoral College, Americans have their own opinions on how it is running and how it contributes to the presidential election. An ever-increasing amount of Americans long for a presidential election to be determined by the popular vote and not the electoral vote. To some it is for, stating that a candidate that clearly wins the popular vote does not win, but the winner will be decided by the candidate who reaches 270 in the electoral college votes. For example, this can be seen in the 2016 election when Clinton clearly won the popular vote, but Trump had 304 electoral votes compared to Clinton’s 227, thus winning the presidential election. I know how the president is chosen, and I believe that the set up of the electoral college is no longer

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598 Words | 3 Pages

Electoral College: For the Lose One view to consider that when voting for a president through the electoral college , voters are confused about the election process no more than they are unprepared of the consequences they ace of their votes not being counted. Voting by popular vote when electing a president is the best choice contrary to the electoral college; in favor of defying the people. Americans vote in order to elect a president of their preference to run our country. Voting by popular vote surpasses the whole electoral process by giving the people not just what they want, but what Americans need. Direct election of presidents remains solid as opposed to the “faithless” electoral college.

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2065 Words | 9 Pages

The Electoral College: An Ineffective Method of Selecting a President The Electoral College has been a topic of debate in the United States for quite some time, forming a fissure between citizens, especially being fomented given recent and imminent elections (list 6, 11, 15). There have been elections where the winner of the Electoral College did not win the popular vote: 1824, 1876, 1888, 2000, and most recently 2016 (pattern 10). While rare, this can be significant, with the winning candidate losing popular vote margins by as high as 3,000,000 votes, a situation that is often recondite and redoubtable to the average American (list 8, 21). These situations raise concerns (pattern 20).

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1049 Words | 5 Pages

In 1888, Benjamin Harrison lost the popular vote by 90,000 votes to Grover Cleveland yet secured 233 electoral votes in contrast to Grover Cleveland’s 168 to win the presidency (Gore, 2016). Finally, the most recent 2016 election Donald Trump clearly won the electoral votes but lost the popular vote to Hillary Clinton by 2.9 million votes (Gore, 2016). Clearly, in each of these cases if the voting rules were changed to a popular vote, the results would have been different and, today, we would have a woman in the

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608 Words | 3 Pages

These are all reasons why the current electoral college system should be abolished and should be replaced by a popular vote system. One of the biggest problems with the electoral college is that everyone’s vote is not equal. People’s votes mean more in less populated states like Wyoming than a person who lives in California. The system tries to make up for this by giving each state a different number of electoral votes.

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1259 Words | 6 Pages

The United States Electoral College is an American system designed by the founding fathers to conduct elections. However, it has become subject to controversy in the 2016 Presidential election. The unique aspect of the Electoral College is how electors are awarded to presidential candidates using a state-by-state method of determining the number of electors. While the Electoral College is fundamental to the founders of America to protect the nation, its fatal flaws are too damaging to the people of the United States. In my opinion, the Electoral College needs to be reexamined in order to establish a new way of electing Presidents and Vice Presidents.

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1120 Words | 5 Pages

In not one but in four different elections, candidates have won the popular vote, but have lost the election in the Electoral College. The most recent and most controversial example of this occurred in 2000 in the presidential race between Al Gore and George W. Bush.

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109 Words | 1 Pages

Electoral College is the United State’s democratic voting system of determining the next president. However, it poses a problem on how the United States chooses the next president. The Electoral College is a problem because electoral votes are the real determiners of the presidential election, states with more people have more electoral votes, and popular votes do not affect anything. Many politicians, people, etc. have gave their opinions on how to change the electoral college but the best way is to have popular carry significance and to allow each electoral voters to vote individually instead of losing their vote to majority. This way, choosing the president can be improved

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184 Words | 1 Pages

“The Electoral College was created by the Founders because they did not trust people enough to allow them to directly elect the president.” Since the majority of the American people had limited education and communication, the founders felt the “average voter lacked the information to be an informed, unbiased judge of candidates for presidency.” Therefore when voters cast their ballot, the college reviews the peoples’ choices and then decides which of their preferences are best. (Lenz and Holman, 87) Many people feel that this system is undemocratic because they are not able to directly vote for their candidate and because the winner of the popular vote can lose the electoral vote.

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1345 Words | 6 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.

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517 Words | 3 Pages

Dating back to 1787 the Electoral College has been the number one system for selecting our president. Many people wonder why we use this method instead of the popular vote. About 225 years ago Alexander Hamilton said “A smaller number of persons selected by their fellow-citizens from the general mass, will be most likely to have the information and discernment requisite to such complicated investigations.” (3)This was true in 1787 because many of the people were uneducated and it was quite possible that they would select a president that would really threaten the federal government. To prevent this they selected educated electors to go and vote for their state.

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900 Words | 4 Pages

The most recent Presidential election, this last year in 2016, marked the fifth time that the winning candidate did not receive the popular vote. As Los Angeles Times author Savage (2016) explains, “For only the fifth time in U.S. history, the presidential campaign has ended with an electoral college winner who won fewer votes than his opponent” (para. 1). The fact that Donald Trump became the President of the United States was not due to the lack of effort of some “65,794,399 citizens” who voted for Hillary Clinton (U.S. National Archives, 2017). The idea that a person can become the President of our great country without receiving the popular vote can be troubling for some people, me included. Common sense would dictate that the person who

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