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The Pros And Cons Of The Electoral College

910 Words4 Pages

The electoral college has controlled the voting system within the United States since the writing of the United States Constitution. The system promises to fix problems that would otherwise exist in a popular vote system, but also exhibits many problems of its own that are often overlooked. In this essay, I will argue that the current model of the electoral college should no longer be in place in the United States of America. I will begin with the most common and obvious reason that the electoral college is criticized. The ideas that make up the electoral college directly conflict with those of a true democracy. Why does this matter? Well, our country subscribes to a democratic system, and while this wouldn’t be the first time our country has …show more content…

The reasoning behind the electoral college giving more voting power to those in smaller states is to protect the smaller states from the bigger states. The thought process goes like this: if we don’t give smaller states enough voting power, then no presidential candidates will pay these smaller states any attention in their campaign because the big city states capture enough majority to win the race. When applying the electoral voting system to fix this it causes other issues to arise. When looking at campaign data from the 2016 election, we can very quickly tell that campaigning is not spread evenly amongst the states. In fact, twelve states made up 94% of campaign events during the 2016 election (National Popular Vote, 2016). The reason this is occurring is because of the way the electoral college is designed. When a candidate gets a majority vote in a state, the candidate gets all of that state’s electoral votes. So, in order to effectively campaign under the electoral college system, presidential candidates don’t bother campaigning in states where they are winning by large margins or losing by large margins. They only care to campaign in states where the polls are close. In other words, the electoral college forces candidates to campaign towards states, not people. So as a side effect of protecting smaller states from larger states the electoral college

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