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 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).
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 2017 election has chosen Donald j. trump as the president of the united states. Donald trump as the president, just think about how the election process really works and how its chooses our commander and chief of the military. The way the united states chooses who will be the next president is by the electoral college is a process when people vote for electors who then vote for the president or vice president of the united states. The electoral college was created by our founding fathers as a compromise between the “election of the president by a vote congress and the election of the president by popular vote if the qualified citizens.” (source1: what is the electoral college).
The Electoral College is pretty much a process that was established in the Constitution by the founding fathers which was suppose to be a compromise between election of the President by a vote in congress and by the popular vote of citizens. This process consists of the selection of electors, the meeting of the electors is where they vote for the President and Vice President, and the counting of the electoral votes by Congress. In the Electoral College it contains 538 electors and to win the majority they need to have 270 electoral votes. As well as, the number of electors for every state is equal to the number of Representations that the state has in congress which is based on the population and there is also one vote for each Senator. So, each state has at least three electors and votes.
I think the Electoral College was a decent idea in the past when the government was just starting out. Now, I believe we should get rid of it and move to a direct voting system. The reason being that there are several things wrong with the Electoral College system. To start out the candidates already have a good idea what states they are going to win. So a republican’s vote in a democratic state such as New York is not going to matter at all.
The electoral college was defined in the book of Sidlow as the group of electors who are selected by the voters in each state to officially elect the president and vice president (2016, p. 194). This is the so-called "Committee of Eleven" in the Constitutional Convention proposed an indirect election of the president through a College of Electors. Based from my readings, I think the founding fathers put the electoral college in our Constitution as the solution to the problem that they were trying to solve. They faced the difficult question of how to elect a president in a nation that was composed of thirteen large and small states. This is to create a buffer between population and the selection of a President.
These unknown electors are the true people who determine the outcome of the election, not the citizens of the United States. Furthermore, these electors have no Constitutional provisions that require them to follow the will of the citizens (“About the Electors”). Some states do have laws which require electors to vote in accordance to the popular vote of each respective state.
This can either be a great or a bad thing for many citizens who are not aware of how the Electoral College takes part in the presidential voting process. There are quite a few reasons why the process is ineffective, but there are three in particular. The first being there are no types of guarantees that the popular vote will win, because there is still the possibility that the defeated by popular vote can be elected for presidency. The second being it can often discourage citizens from voting because there is more to the process than meets the eye which creates the idea that there votes are unworthy. The third being it is harder for smaller states, because of the smaller population one citizens vote will not equal as one vote.
In light of recent presidential elections, more and more of the public as turned their attention to the process in which the president is elected. Four times in history the president was elected due to votes in the Electoral College instead of the popular vote. (Wheeler, 2007) Most agree that the Electoral College is unfair because the candidate who wins the majority of the popular vote is not necessarily who the president will be on inauguration day. (Gringer, 2008)
As of last year’s election we all can say there were surely disputes, but who do we blame? Well, many articles have come out stating their opinions on the Electoral College whether it served its purpose or not. For example Corrie Goldman from The Humanities at Stanford say that “Why do we still let the Electoral college pick our president?” And his point of view clearly states he is strongly against the idea, he claims that “I could say fatal – flaws.
“America’s election systems have operated smoothly for more than 200 years because the Electoral College accomplishes its intended purposes. America’s presidential election process preserves federalism, prevents chaos, grants definitive electoral outcomes, and prevents tyrannical or unreasonable rule. The Founding Fathers created a stable, well-planned, and carefully designed system—and it works.” This was written by Tara Ross in a Heritage Foundation memorandum (Stepman). The electoral college is a body of people representing the states of the US, who formally cast votes for the election of the president and vice president.
Another variation of the electoral college is the proportional system. This system splits the state’s electoral college votes by the popular vote percentages. It is like a mix of the electoral college and the popular vote. The winner of the state gets two votes, like the Congressional District Method. According to FairVote.com, “This way, a candidate who comes in second place in a state with 45% of the popular vote would receive 45% of the state's votes from that state, instead of 0%.”
In the question of whether the Electoral College was or still is a good idea, I would have to say no. Why the Electoral College was made goes back to the Founding Fathers of America, who had been arguing for months on whether Congress or the majority vote should pick the next president. Their compromise led to the Electoral College. However, to me, it seems like a band-aid to an actual solution because they couldn't agree on anything else.
The Electoral College was created by the founding fathers, founders who have nothing in common with us today and did not experience the same social milieu having digressed from that of their time (pattern 9, 12, 21). While many Americans likely blanch at the possibility of altering tradition and are tenacious toward change, we have no obligation to maintain this system, and keeping it on this basis is a banal, hackneyed excuse (list 6, 8, 9,
