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The Pros And Cons Of Electoral College

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Even after the signing of the 1965 voting rights act, which was intended to help African Americans and other racial minorities to have the constitutional right to vote, some laws still in the books throughout the United States discriminate against those who are not property owners. Of course, to be fair, this is exclusively certain election. But could this have a psychological effect on the non-property owners and depress turnout for other types of election in which virtually everyone above the age of eighteen could vote? In a district election, some officials are appointed, some are elected by property owners only and others are elected by everyone in the district. Roughly 40% of such district throughout the United States of America have …show more content…

Each state has different amount of Electoral College votes based on the number representatives it sends to the United States Congress. Each state has two Senators in the United States Senate. The number of members a state can send to the United States House of Representatives is determined by population which is measured by a census that will be conducted once in a decade. But each state send at least one congressperson to the lower house. So, a minimum of Electoral College vote a state can have is three. In the 2000 election. Former president George W. Bush won the election while losing the popular vote due to the Electoral College. Electoral College will lead candidates to the presidency of the United States to focus on a number of states with high number of Electoral College votes to win at least a majority. It is currently 270 of 538. There is a concern whether the fact a person lives in a “safe” v. “battleground” state has an influence when it comes to whether or not to vote at all. A study has shown if the election is not competitive nationally, the gap will not be shown but otherwise it will be. It is not the case that citizens in the “safe” states participate less, but it is the case that those in the “battleground” states do so in a higher percentage. Those citizens in a “battleground: states are more likely to be contacted by the candidates than those who live in the “safe” states. Those who …show more content…

Population size and its density is a topic that started to be studied recently. This is especially the case in terms of local elections. There seems to be a positive relationship between voting and the size of a jurisdiction that is to vote. The smaller a jurisdiction’s population is, the more likely it is that the rate will be higher for local election in comparison to a highly populated jurisdiction’s rate for local election. The reason of this result is said to be a discouragement in highly populated cities to focus on local elections and instead focus on national elections. The exception to this case is people from the largest cities in the largest metropolitan areas. Large metropolitan areas vote at a higher rate than metropolitan areas with smaller population size. People who live in a larger jurisdiction believe that the local government is not responsive to their needs.People who live in a larger community usually live in a gated community, making it harder for them to know their surroundings. Without that knowledge and the feeling of belonging, getting involved in a local government is hard. Different kinds of political activities like volunteering and voting have different magnitude of the relationship between the activity and the population size of the jurisdiction in question. Voting seems to have the least

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The Electoral College is a system that was established in Article II, Section 1 of the United States Constitution. It is a system that is used to elect the next President of the United States. The number of electors are based on the number of seats a state holds in the Senate and the House of Representatives. So, when a voter places his ballot. It cast a vow for the elector of that state to vote towards that voted candidate (1).

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This is one of the many reasons why the Electoral College is unfair, past elections have shown that bigger populations have more electoral votes, concluding that smaller states’ votes become insignificant. This leaves people in question, is the Electoral College now based on where you live? Even though the purpose of the electoral college is to ultimately decide who will occupy the position of the president, there was an Electoral Commision of elite representatives, established to determine the 19th President, because of the situation the electoral college caused. The commission included five representatives from the House, another five associates from the  Senate and five justices from the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court Justices in the Electoral Commission were David Dias

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There are a number of differences in the demographics between the ones that are and are not politically involved. Older people tend to vote more than the younger people by their concern toward the government, as well as the number of white Americans voting more than the other minority races would. The educated will vote more than the uneducated by having more knowledge of the election, along with families with higher income of over $65,000 having time to vote than the low income ones of $35,000 or under. The ones who shows party identification would want to get involved in politics, whereas independent individual would not care as much. People who grew up with specific ideology would want to have a say in politics, in contrast to those who did not.

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Advocates of the presidential election have considered the idea of direct population as a tool for repairing the defects in the electoral system as it exists now. Consider the most recent election in 2000 where George W. Bush won the presidency by a recount of electoral votes, but lost in regards to the popular vote. With Florida being the key state as the election drew close, consisting of nearly 6 million voters, Florida was officially won by a margin of 537 votes (Unknown, 2002). But Florida felt betrayed, and complained about confusing ballots and accidently voting for the wrong candidate. In this essay, I will discuss the occurrences during the 2000 election, the deception felt by Florida voters, and the ways to avoid this reoccurrence in the

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According to Tyler Lewis (2017), every state, including D.C., receives votes based upon their population; the minimum number possibly received is three. If the number of votes received was directly correlated with the population of the state, small states would become irrelative (New York Times, 2016). Lewis continues to explain that this unfair system allows the residents of Wyoming to have three times more voting power than the citizens of Texas hold per person. How can we proclaim America a land of liberty when this unjust voting power is considered constitutional? Therefore, the electoral college is a ground for which allows the residents of smaller states to have more votes per person than the more populous states: creating unbalanced voices.

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Through this method of choosing, the candidates with the most votes win, thus not equally representing a possible larger majority that could have been fragmentized by many candidates. It is possible that the candidate that wins just won because they are the larger of the minorities that ran in the election. Under this model, a majority of people could end up being represented by someone they did not vote for as their representative. A solution to this would be to incorporate proportional representation during elections to represent the composition of the public more accurately, but still apply a moderately high minimum percentage threshold in order to prevent extensive fragmentation and a massive amount of new parties. A truly proportional representation isn’t completely necessary, but can be incorporated more into state elections to form a more mixed system.

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Historically, there has been many examples of factors influencing voting including poll taxes and literacy tests which made the poor and non educated have a much harder, argumentatively impossible, time voting (Hershey 2009). Those barriers were removed by court legislations and today voting identification laws are what may possibly be affecting voter turnout. The low educated and low-income groups of society have a lower turnout because of these types of laws (Hershey 2009). When looking at the majority of that certain population, it is primarily minorities. It is difficult to register or even get to a polling place, which leads to their absence of appearing to vote.

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As long as a candidate gets just over 50% of the popular vote in a state they win all of that state's electoral votes. In other words winning by a million citizens votes is no different than winning by one vote. This is why candidates spend more time on states that have close races, otherwise, known as swing states. Another failing of the electoral college is how it gives out votes to the states. All states get three votes to start and the rest are given based on population.

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Many Americans hold the philosophy that they are drops of water in an endless ocean, so what’s the point in voting? The answer is, there is power in numbers. Every vote adds up. In 2000, President George W. Bush won by only 537 votes.

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The United States currently faces a severe problem with one of their governmental processes. In the democratic system of the United States, politicians are elected by voting from the citizens, in most cases. The problem the United States is facing is that people are no longer voting in elections for officials. This problem is discussed in the article, “In praise of low voter turnout”, written by Charles Krauthammer. The main idea behind this article is that voters are no longer interested in politics, as they were in previous generations.

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Introduction ‘An estimated 88.7 million people cast ballots in the 2010 midterm election. Expressed as a percentage of those eligible to vote, the turnout rate was 40.7%’ (McDonald, M. P. 2010. p.1). This essay looks at the important aspect of the United States election, which is solely based on voter turnout.

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Voting is the most basic and important right given to its citizen by each democratic country and government. Various types of polling help the government in knowing whether citizens are happy and satisfied with their way of working and if not, they use these public opinions to guide their public policy decisions. The voting turnout in the United States of America has fallen and there are many reasons for this which mainly includes the individual characteristics of voters such as the socioeconomic status, electoral rules and laws. People are mainly provoked and inspired because of the political parties and interest groups. Hereafter, I am going to talk about how the factors of the lower turnout rate, the role played by political parties and interest groups and the individual characteristics of the voters are interrelated and why they play an important role in the voting turnout of the country.

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There have been numerous proposals for structural changes that could increase voter turnout. Past research has addressed voter mobilization. However, the core of our motivations rests on how we care about politics and turn-out-to-vote issues. These motivations necessitate further analysis and at minimum, 90% of the registered voters should be able to vote on general and midterm elections, regardless of the election’s popularity and perceived influence. It should be noted that gubernatorial elections and the election of the House of Representatives and the Senate directly affects a citizen’s life more than the presidential election does.

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It is clear that American voters tend to avoid local elections and off-year elections. Run-off elections are also likely to register lower voter turnout as compared to first-round elections. The larger the gap between first round elections and run-off elections, the higher the decline in voter turnout. Moreover, there are lower percentages of young people voting as compared to the older population. This is an important point to note since it highlights that young people do not have information guiding them on the importance of voting.

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Within the electoral college, the potential winner could be the popular votes loser. Meaning the less popular candidate could win based on the electoral vote. An electoral college takes away from the one person, one vote standard. This is because some of the smaller states have less votes based on the number of congressional seats. According to, (Grofman & Feld), authors of Thinking About the Political Impacts of the Electoral College, "it has been argued that one party may develop a “built-in” advantage in the Electoral College if its strength comes disproportionately from the smaller states" (Grofman, & Feld, 2005).

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