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Essay about electoral college
Problems with the electoral college
Problems with the electoral college
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More handpicked essays just for you.
Essay about electoral college
Problems with the electoral college
Problems with the electoral college
Don’t take our word for it - see why 10 million students trust us with their essay needs.
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 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.
The number of votes a state receives in the Electoral College is based on the state’s population. The presidential candidate who reaches 270 electoral votes is declared the winner. This system was designed in order to prevent large states from overpowering smaller states. However, there are many flaws that come with this unique system.
The Electoral College system, written in the U.S. Constitution, holds each state entitled to some of its electors according to its representation in Congress. According to Fortier, the number of electors is similar to that of the congressional representation for the states (Fortier, p. 6). On the day of the election, the voters do not directly vote for the national presidential candidates but rather vote for an elector pledged to a particular candidate. Suppose the person who is a major popular vote in a state wins. In that case, all of that state's electoral votes are planned to go to the EM, except Maine and Nebraska, where the electors are allocated proportionately.
Every four years we hold an election to decide who will be hold the office for the President of the United States. The founding fathers established the Electoral College to keep a candidate from manipulating the publics opinion and keep them from gaining absolute power. It also was set up so that smaller states would be able to have same power or say as the bigger states (Why the Electoral College). Each state is giving “Electors” based on the number of members it has in the U.S. House of Representatives, and also gets a 2 Electors for the two members they have in the U.S. Senate. Washington D.C. however only has 3 Electors.
When you go and vote for president, do you think your vote goes toward the decision of who becomes president? If you do, think again because the system is not as clear cut as it seems. In 1787 during the Constitutional Convention, the delegates discussed a way to vote for president without having the passions of the people and average voters getting in the way. The Electoral College has 538 members total which are divided among states, with each state receiving the amount of electoral votes that corresponds with their population. The outdated system known as the Electoral College, should officially be abolished from the process of the presidential election in the United States.
The Electoral College is a system stated in the Clause 2 of Section 1 in the Article II of the United States Constitution to elect the President of the United States. According to the Constitution, each state needs to appoint electors, who in turn vote to select the President. The number of electors from each state should be the same as the number of Senators and Representatives that the state entitled in the Congress. Citizens from each state choose the electors through elections. The electors then cast the citizens’ votes for the candidate they prefer.
It’s Election Season in some obscure year, no different than 4 years ago, or 4 years before that, still Republican v Democrat, maybe a 3rd Party mixed in there somewhere. Where are you right now? Sitting at your desk, or at your desk? Watching TV. Well, whatever it is you're doing, it can’t help but think about the election.
The Electoral College has been a confusing subject and is now rising up some serious questions. Does your vote really count? What is a faithless elector? How are they chosen? What is a direct democracy?
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.
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 - how can it be good? In a fair democracy everyone's vote should be counted equally, however the way that the United States elects its President violates this right by making sure some people have more voting power than others. The Electoral college is in fact the 538 votes that determines who wins the presidency.
The Electoral College is a terrible system designed for electing the president of the United States. For the people who do not really know or understand the Electoral College, it is a body of people who ultimately decide who wins the presidential election. Each state holds an election for the popular vote. The candidate who wins of the state's popular vote gets all the states allowed electoral votes. How many electoral votes a state gets is determined by the population of the state.
The number of electors in each state is equaled two plus one for each member of the House of Representatives, and Washington DC has three votes, bringing the total number of electors to 538 (“What is the Electoral College?”). It’s a well-known fact that when the public goes to vote for a candidate they also vote for the corresponding vice president. A much less well-known fact is that they are actually voting for the electors as well; by voting democratic or republican the corresponding electors for the party are elected as well (“Electoral College” 2010). Then on the Monday after the second Wednesday of December the electors assemble in a central location in each state and cast their votes for president. In forty-eight states, there is a “winner-take-all-system” where the highest vote getter in the state gets all the electoral votes, however in two states, Maine and Nebraska, there is a proportionality system in place; where if one third of the votes are for one party and two thirds are for another, the electors will split and one third of the state electoral votes will go to one party and the rest will go to another (“What is the Electoral College?”).