The Pros And Cons Of The Electoral College

For better or worse, the United States is a global superpower; while it has only been around for about 200 years, its influence on the world and its citizens is relatively overbearing. To guide a nation, strong leaders must step up and protect the citizens’ inalienable rights. In the United States, the president is chosen by the Electoral College, which is made up of votes from dozens of states. But as decades fly by and the world advances and improves, how is it possible that a system made hundreds of years ago can still serve its citizens equally? Is it possible that regardless of the intention and thought put into the system, that the Electoral College causes more harm to the ones it is supposed to protect? Or perhaps has the Electoral College

As the mode in which electing a president needed to prevent the possibility of “cabal, intrigue, and corruption”, stated by Alexander Hamilton, and thus the Electoral College was born. Our current system follows the regulations dictated by the US Constitution and 12th amendment: each state is assigned a number of votes based off said state’s population and whomever receives the majority of the votes wins that year's election. The system was crafted in attempts to make sure bigger states did not hold an absurd amount of power over smaller states; it was crafted to serve the republic. The political and socio-economical climate is completely different than the one in which the Electoral College was created in. In fact, the original design was “supposed to work without political parties and without national campaigns”, giving more choice to the public. Yet as people began pledging loyalties to candidates and their respective political parties, the election process was altered with the 12th amendment, but it was not enough. As of recently, there has been over 700 proposals in favor of reforming or abolishing the

voting system is not only rooted in white supremacy and oppression, but also perpetuates it. While not obvious at first glance, there was another reason that the Electoral College was created: the slave population. James Madison, a promeninet American icon, was incredibly aware that both the South and North had an equal amount of people, but the same anot be said of eligible voters. About one-third of the Southern population were enslaved, therefore the South would have been at a disadvantage. Even after slavery had ended, it was difficult to have your vote be counted if you were anything but a white man. As each state could regulate their own laws, many southern states took to systemically disadvantaging black people and allowing white supremacy to prevail. Unfourtantely, these elections have also caused intense violence across the country, especially recently. The 2020 U.S. presidential election caused many election administrators distress over death threats, online radicliation, the circulation of white supermacist ideas, and most notably, the January 6th attack on the U.S. Capitol. All of these attacks can be attributed to how terrifying loyal America citizens are to their political parties. The future of democracy in America seems bleak. With the last three years being horrendously fuilled with a lack of organization, riots, petty campaigns, and impeachments, it get harder to