Persuasive Essay Over The Electoral College

Rush Limbaugh once said, “The primary purpose of the Electoral College is to maintain the power of the states and to support the idea that the election is decided by the states. It’s not decided by the general population, and it never was.” Rush Limbaugh is describing exactly why the Electoral College was created- so that power could be divided amongst the states without one person holding more power than another. Although some people think that a national popular vote would be a better way to have elections, it is actually the exact opposite. Getting rid of the Electoral College would mean that not only would the bigger, more populated, cities hold all of the power, you are just one vote that is going up against thousands of others. The Electoral

Why change a perfectly good system that took so long to create just to use another system that the Founding Fathers ruled out so quickly? “In the first presidential election in 1789, the Electoral College had 81 members. As the nation expanded, this number grew. Today, the Electoral College has 538 members, equal to the nation’s total number of senators (100) and representatives (435),” (The Electoral College Explained). The system that they came up with has had little issues throughout past elections, and it maintains a fair way of voting leaving bad personal bias aside. The Founding Fathers ruled out a national popular vote because back then there was no good way to communicate information about candidates so they thought that people would only vote for candidates that they knew or the most popular person in the group and not the most eligible candidate. Even now, with all resources available to them, many voters- mostly younger people- vote for a person without knowing anything about their policies; the electoral college prevents voters like this from electing a leader they know nothing about. “According to Alexander Hamilton, the Electoral College is if ‘not perfect, it is at least excellent,’ because it ensures that the office of president will never fall to the lot of any man who is not in an eminent degree endowed with the requisite qualifications.” (The Electoral College- Top 3 Pros

The people who live in Wyoming, Vermont, and Rhode Island all have a heavier hand in the election due to their low population, this is unfair because although the point of the Electoral College is to keep power out of any one person’s hands, it is not fairly dispersing power to the people within the different states. According to Chris Derosa, he too believes this, “The first problem with the Electoral College is that it gives more weight to voters in small states than those in more populous ones, says DeRosa,” (Nuemann). Yes, the point of the Electoral College is to keep the fate of the election out of any one man’s hands, and it still does that; this is exactly why citizens have voted for themselves for 200 years. The population might be smaller in these states but think about the uses of their land; Wyoming’s unpopulated land is used for mineral refining and national forests and parks. Vermont’s land is used for forestry that allows people to build homes across the country, North Dakota’s unpopulated land is mainly used for agriculture. All of the work is being done by the people that live in these states. These workers understand what type of leader would do harm or help their work; the things that they have to think about when voting is very different than what you do, their population is low, so those few hundred thousand voters have to