Pros Of The Electoral College

Historically, the United States uses a plurality voting system where the rule of the majority wins the election (Levine, 2004, p. 312). Citizens choose one preferred candidate out of many that are running on a particular ballot. In the general election for the President of the United States, an electoral system is also used to determine the winner. In an electoral system an Electoral College ensures that each state has the same number of electoral votes as they have represented in Congress (Schulman, 2017). This essay will examine the Electoral College system in light of the presidential election of 2000 where Republican candidate George W. Busch and Democratic candidate Al Gore squared off in an election that ended in controversy. Ultimately,

In essence, the founders did not trust the general public to be able to make the right choice (Schulman, 2017). They believed that if the presidency was left to the popular vote, they felt that a tyrant could manipulate the general public and come into power (Schulman, 2017). The founders believed that a small group of qualified electors in each state would be able to have the “necessary information” and better discernment to elect The President of the United States (Schulman, 2017). Additionally, they felt that this group of electors could not be manipulated by a tyrant or other foreign powers. Therefore, The Electoral College served as a buffer between the popular vote of the citizens in each state and the electors of each state in the selection of the President of the United States (Schulman,

However, besides the 2000 election, there have only been four other times in history, and only two in modern history, where the winner of the Presidential election lost the popular vote (Gore, 2016). In 1824, John Quincy Adams won the presidency without the popular vote nor the electoral vote. Andrew Jackson won both yet did not reach the majority of the electoral votes. Therefore, Adams was voted in by the House of Representatives (Gore 2016). Rutherford Hays won the election of 1876 by only one electoral vote and lost the popular vote by 250,000 votes to Samuel J. Tilden. 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