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Pros And Cons Of Abolishing The Electoral College

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Abheek Nath Kathleen Rothman Introduction to American Government 1 March 2024 The Electoral College: How it Perpetuates an Unrepresentative Democracy The struggle for democracy and managing the delicate balance between a rule of the people and of governing institutions is perpetual. One important, current form of this struggle is how the United States elects its next president. To resolve this, the Electoral College should be abolished. This electoral system is inherently undemocratic, as it fails to adequately represent the collective opinion of the nation, and it, in turn, disadvantages citizens that do not live in large swing states. The system of the Electoral College violates the tenets of democracy in several ways. In the 21st century …show more content…

Due to the “winner-take-all” nature of the system, regardless of how narrow or wide the margin of victory is within each state, all of the electoral votes go towards the victor, ignoring their true distribution. Another consequence of the Electoral College is how it incentivizes candidates to unfairly direct their attention to specific states. Even for a large country like the United States, it is only fair that every state has their concerns voiced and addressed by potential candidates. Once again, due to the “winner-take-all”, candidates will try to focus their campaign on the few millions that, under this system, could decide the election. This doesn’t necessarily end with the campaign phase, either. Presidents could continue to pander to the swing states to earn their vote for the next election cycle rather than, for instance, states that also have a significant number of their supporters, but will likely have their electoral votes go towards the opposite party. A nation with no Electoral College could mean a nation where every citizen is given the proper attention they

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This makes the presidential candidates campaign across all of the United States and forces development across the country. Thus limiting the dangers of region problems that is extremely common in all larger country like china and even afflicted great empires like the Romans. Another large selling point to keeping the electoral college is without it, it effectively destroys one of the most important pillars to the founding fathers, federalism. Federalism is the political idea that allows for a central government, in our case the national government, and regional government, the states, to coexist and contain similar levels of power. The states will no longer need congressional delegates because the interests of the states will be ignored in favor of appealing directly towards the

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