There are many proposed plans to run the government and decide the next president. Ideas including the District Plan, the Proportional Plan, the Direct Popular Election, the National Bonus Plan, and the National Popular Vote plan are in mind to fix the current system yet none have been decided. Currently, the president is decided by a method known as the Electoral College; however, this method has many disadvantages. In the United States today, the government runs a system known as the Electoral College.
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.
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.
The Electoral College was founded by, ironically, the Founding Fathers. It is a process which is established in the Constitution, and serves one purpose: to elect a President by fair means. This method involves a combination of votes from both the Congress and the citizens of the United States. The Founding Fathers believed that in order to prevent tyranny, or oppressive government rule, a sort of system should be established. Along with the lack of trust, the Founding Fathers also were concerned about possible manipulation by foreign governments, thus creating the Electoral College (History Central).
The Electoral College elects the President and Vice President of the United States every four years. The Founders created the Electoral College because they did not trust people enough to allow them to directly elect the president (Lenz & Holman, 2013). Neither one of the candidates are elected from the popular vote. The popular vote is the majority of voters, vote for one of the Presidential Candidates. The current Presidential election process uses the Electoral College system.
Throughout this time, our views on the Electoral College have went in all kinds of ways. The big reason for the Electoral College, was so that the whole country had a more equal say on choosing the national president. In each state the electors gather on the Monday following the second Tuesday of December. Each state has electoral votes according to the number of House members and Senators it has in Congress.
“Electors aren’t officially picked until election day. When voters go to the polls, they’re actually casting ballots for their party’s slate of electors, rather than a presidential candidate. And the statewide popular-vote winner determines which party sends its slate to the Electoral College.” (Cheney) What this statement means is that voters, they are choosing which party and presidential candidate they favor, but their vote actually goes out to the Electoral College.
Electoral College has been in United States for a long period of time. The system was formed to select a president through an indirect election and to avoid suspicion of corruption and belief of compromised votes, but the Electoral College never worked as it was intended to work by founding fathers. There are many pros and cons for this system but one of the major con of this system is that people in the U.S. doesn’t think that their opinions about choosing president really matters because of the Electoral College and I also feel the same way about it. I think there are more cons of Electoral College than pros. One the major con is that people in U.S don’t feel that their vote matters because Electoral College redistributes its vote every
The electoral college is a system where people vote for electors. Then the electors communicate with the people and the electors pick the candidates. Next the people vote between democrat and republican parties. The problems with the electoral college voting system is that the electors do not listen to what the people want and they just make their own decisions, there is a chance of a tie in the electoral college, and also the people don't even get to vote on who the electors are. Furthermore, a very large problem with the electoral college is that the electors are not listening to the people.
Do We Need the Electoral College? Following the 2016 election many individuals we shocked to find Donald Trump had won the Presidency while not having the popular vote. They were unaware of how the electoral college works and how the president is actually elected through the electoral college rather than the popular vote. But, before we find out if we need the electoral college, we must look into why it was created, and look at the pros and cons of the electoral college as well as the pros and cons of the proposed system to replace it.
The textbook definition of the Electoral College is “a unique American institution, created by the constitution, providing for the selection of the president by electors chosen by the states parties. Although the Electoral College vote usually reflects a popular majority, less populated states are overrepresented and the winner-take-all rule concentrates campaigns on close states” (Edwards and Wattenberg 643). In the definition itself it notes disproportionate representation which is one of the many flaws within this system. The National Popular Vote Plan is an alternative system that would still use electors to cast their votes but instead it would give each state’s votes to whichever candidate wins the national popular vote. This plan has
Recently, especially after the 2000 elections where Al Gore won in the popular vote with 500,000 more votes but lost the electoral vote to George W. Bush, has the public began really arguing if the Electoral College should continue to be the major deciding factor in elections. “The Electoral College, the assemblage of state electors constitutionally charged with electing the president, also limits third-party growth. With the exceptions of Maine and Nebraska, states award all their votes to the plurality winner within the state,(a term commonly referred as winner-take-all)” (AM GOV). Each state receives an electoral vote for every member they have in the Senate and House of Representatives.
I must preface this discussion with the fact that I am anything but, pro Electoral College. Nonetheless, the Electoral College is a method of voting within our democracy, which each state is allocated a certain amount of “electors” who are sworn to vote for the candidate who wins the popular vote in their respective state. However, there are two exceptions to this rule, the states of Nebraska and Maine, which bifurcate their respective electoral votes in proportion to the popular vote. The quantity of electoral votes in any given state is grounded in the state’s congressional representation. Respectively, each state is afforded two votes for every Senator with an added vote for every member of the House of Representatives, which is in-turn grounded in volume of the state population.
The Electoral College While some people believe their votes are contributing directly to the election of the President, most people are aware that their votes mean almost nothing compared to those of the Electoral College. The Electoral College consists of the electors who cast each state’s electoral votes. It is made up of 538 electors, each state having the same number of electors as Senate and House members combined, plus three votes from the District of Columbia. “To win the presidency, a candidate must receive at least 270 votes” and win the majority (Patterson 359).
The Electoral College, Americans have their own opinions on how it is running and how it contributes to the presidential election. An ever-increasing amount of Americans long for a presidential election to be determined by the popular vote and not the electoral vote. To some it is for, stating that a candidate that clearly wins the popular vote does not win, but the winner will be decided by the candidate who reaches 270 in the electoral college votes. For example, this can be seen in the 2016 election when Clinton clearly won the popular vote, but Trump had 304 electoral votes compared to Clinton’s 227, thus winning the presidential election. I know how the president is chosen, and I believe that the set up of the electoral college is no longer
