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Pros And Cons Of Electoral College

580 Words3 Pages

Nathan Palm
Mr. Baker
American Government
Electoral College or Not In the 1787 Constitutional Convention, one of the hardest questions to resolve was how to elect the president. (Roos) The Founding Fathers debated for months and came up with the compromise known as the Electoral College. Alternatives such as Congress picking the president and a democratic popular vote were discussed, but the electoral college was the method agreed upon by the Founding Fathers. In the Electoral College, each state gets a number of electors based on its representation in Congress. The Electoral College is the best method for electing a president for the country right now. The first reason the Electoral College is best, is that it ensures that all parts of the country are involved in the …show more content…

Many great presidents were elected through the Electoral College such as George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and Theodore Roosevelt. Though it may not always be ideal, everyone knows the rules which makes the complex process simpler. It also promotes the building of coalitions, as support from a broad basis is needed, which allows political parties to compromise. Coalitions would increase decisions made and more would get done which would support the general election and even the needs of households at local levels. (Gaille)
The third reason the Electoral College should continue to be used, is that it reduces problems such as fraud, recounts, lawsuits, and runoff elections. Because of the structure of the Electoral College, fraud becomes isolated and more difficult to attempt. It reduces recounts and lawsuits as it sets a threshold for a candidate to win and makes the winner apparent at the end. Also, by setting a threshold, it can eliminate runoff elections. In 227 years, the winner of the popular vote has lost only five times, which shows that the electoral college is working.

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The Electoral College helped to protect and promote the two party system seen throughout the United States government. The electoral college helps to keep the two party system be forcing a third party into moving into one of the two main parties: Democratic or Republican (3) This can be seen as an advantage because votes would end up being spread among the different party candidates that it could make it difficult to count the votes, lead to a possible number of recounts, and make the whole process much more difficult. This leads to another advantage of being able to prevent enormous amounts of voter fraud. The electoral college can prevent this because no matter how many voter's ballots are counted, the electoral college keeps only a set amount of electoral votes. Another Advantage that can be seen is that the Electoral College motivate compromise among the parties but also help to promote moderation of political beliefs.

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The United States government is one of the most admired and complex in the world, On the contrary one of the fundamental components that has an extensive impression on the American People and the Election is the Electoral College. Our founding fathers created The Electoral College over two hundred years ago, and it is still in effect today. They feared that having just the Popular Vote would give too much power to one person. In this paper, we will be discussing what the Electoral College is, the benefits and disadvantages of the Electoral College as well as if the Electoral College should be abolished or reconstructed.

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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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An example of this occurring is from the most recent which was the 2000 election between Al Gore and George W. Bush. Furthermore, there are pros and cons for the Electoral College. Some arguments for the Electoral College is it would allow cohesiveness throughout the country since it requires a distribution of popular support for the elected president. As well as, it helps enhance the status of minority interests, helps encourage having a two-party system and maintains a federal system of government and representation.

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Should the Electoral College Be Replaced by the Direct Election of the President? A Debate The presidency and election of the presidency is often viewed as the main focus of the American political system. In recent years the election process and Electoral College have come under scrutiny and reconsideration due to how important the election is. In this paper we will examine the two different arguments about whether or not the Electoral College is a democratic and useful system.

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The electoral college, created in 1787 and written into federal law in 1845, is a system in which citizens of the United States vote in general elections to choose a lineup of “electors” who pledge to vote for a particular party. Established by our Founding Fathers, it is made up of 538 members and is used by the people to indirectly elect the president of the United States and the vice president of the United States. Each state, however, does not obtain an unlimited amount of electors to choose from; the number of electors is equal to the number of members of Congress (House of Representatives and Senators) each state in entitled with. A candidate must receive a majority of 270 votes in order to win the presidency, an ideology that has begun to spiral down as the years, and presidential elections, go by.

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During the constitutional convention of 1787, the attending delegates decided to develop a system in which “the president was to be chosen by electors picked by the states” (Patterson

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As the mode in which electing a president needed to prevent the possibility of “cabal, intrigue, and corruption”, stated by Alexander Hamilton, and thus the Electoral College was born. Our current system follows the regulations dictated by the US Constitution and 12th amendment: each state is assigned a number of votes based off said state’s population and whomever receives the majority of the votes wins that year's election. The system was crafted in attempts to make sure bigger states did not hold an absurd amount of power over smaller states; it was crafted to serve the republic. The political and socio-economical climate is completely different than the one in which the Electoral College was created in. In fact, the original design was “supposed to work without political parties and without national campaigns”, giving more choice to the public.

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America's founding fathers were obviously incredibly intelligent. In addition to composing the masterful works of writing that sculpted The United States, they also planned and arranged a system to elect the president unlike any other on Earth. Wary of human nature, the Fathers avoided implementing a simple majority election, and instead developed the electoral college. This system of voting for the president has seen its share of disputes and critics, yet it remains relatively unchanged since its first uses. Those that oppose the electoral college do so because it represents the states unfairly, it has a negative effect on voter turnout, and it occasionally fails to elect a president that represents the majority.

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The electoral college gives citizens the impression that their votes would not matter after all, causing them to just stay at home rather than going out and participating in the elections. This can discourage people from educating and informing themselves about our country

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However, the best way to elect a president is through the Electoral College process. This is because the Electoral College has continued to produce a president, it is fair most of the time, and other methods aren’t as good. First, it has worked for a long time. Hamilton does a wonderful job of explaining the pros of the electoral college.

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The electoral college system is made up of several different electors. It is a system that is misunderstood by many individuals. It contains a few faults, that discourage some people when placing their votes. The electoral college was created to establish a balance of selection between the people and Congress by dividing their power. It also helped form a balance between the federal and state power to help form federalism.

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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 is a longstanding organization in place in the United States of America that was originally established by the Founding Fathers in create equality in presidential elections has become a topic of harsh criticism and controversy over the years. The Electoral College was established by the Founding Fathers of the United States at the Constitutional Convention of 1787 in order ensure there was representation of the people while keeping the best interests of the nation in mind (“What is the Electoral College?”). At the time of the writing of the Constitution, there were two main ideas on how to elect a president. The first was that there should be a simple vote of all eligible people and who ever gets the most votes becomes

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