The Electors Don T Care About Bud Johnson

569 Words3 Pages

The Electors Don’t Care About Bud Johnson In the 2008 movie Swing Vote, directed by Joshua Michael Stern, the fate of an American presidential election comes down to one man’s vote, which has to be recast due to a power outage at the polling place. However, this man, Bud Johnson, did not actually try to vote-- his young daughter snuck into the polling place to vote for him. Bud is uneducated about politics and current events, but begins to accept gifts and bribes from the two presidential candidates. They are desperate to win his vote. Citizens from all over the country are also writing Bud, encouraging him to vote for their candidates. He quickly becomes the center of attention of the nation. Eventually, with the help of his daughter, Bud educates himself about the election and casts his vote. The movie Swing Vote depicts American elections in an unrealistic manner because the electoral college is set up in a way which allows for faithless electors, and the critical votes are those of the electors, not the citizens. …show more content…

The votes which truly matter are the votes of the electoral college members. They are supposed to vote according to the popular vote of their state, but they do not have to. Therefore, I believe that it would have been the electoral college members, and not Bud Johnson, which the presidential candidates were concerned with. With the popular vote of the state being so incredibly close that it came down to one person’s vote, it would have been very easy for the electoral college members to be faithless