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The Pros And Cons Of The Electoral College

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Even though the United States is supposed to be a democracy, the people do not actually elect the president directly. Instead, a group of electors from each state vote for the president through a process known as the electoral college. Through this system, a group of state-elected officials from each state, not the people, decide who wins the presidency. The number of electors a state has is relative to its population size. For example, a state with a smaller population receives less votes than a state with a greater population. However, this is not entirely the case. Smaller states are actually given more electors than they otherwise should have, and larger states are short a few electors. If a candidate wins the majority of the citizens’ …show more content…

It operates on an “all-or-nothing” or “winner-take-all” system. This means that if a candidate wins in a state, they receive all of its electoral votes. As a result of this, the voters who voted for the other candidate are ignored. “The winner-takes-all system skews the results and also makes the voting minority of each state under-represented” (“Problems with US Elections: Winner-takes-all Electoral System”). The gap of the win does not matter, so even if a person wins 51% of that state’s votes, they will still get all of that state’s electoral votes even though almost half of the state voted against them. “There is a huge payday if you win 51%+ of the vote, and no benefit if you don’t” (“Problems with US Elections: Winner-takes-all Electoral System”). Candidates who do not win in a state get nothing if they do not manage to win the majority. By ignoring most of the population’s votes, the electoral college fails to accurately represent the will of the nation as a whole. By doing this, the electoral college further discourages people from voting. The over-complicated process makes voters feel as if their votes do not actually matter or make a difference. In a survey conducted by Lydia Saad, “Sixty-three percent would abolish this unique, but sometimes controversial, mechanism for electing presidents that was devised by the framers of the Constitution”. Furthermore, “between 61% and 66% of all major party groups saying they would vote to do away with the Electoral College if they could” (Saad). Most Americans as well as politicians are ready to get rid of the extremely flawed electoral

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The United States of America Electoral College is a team who’s accountable for choosing the President as well as the Vice President, virtually every four years. The United States is known not to be a “true” democracy because of the electoral college. There are rules within the United States Electoral College that are straightforward. Every state is provided several electors.

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I. The Electoral College is an unnecessary institution that undermines democracy by not ensuring the victory of the presidential candidate who wins the plurality of the popular vote, by creating a system in which not all votes are equal, and by incentivizing politicians to focus on the needs of specific states while ignoring others. II. A. The Electoral College is a body of people that represent each state within the United States and formally cast votes for their state in the election of the president.

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Supporters of the Electoral College system normally promote it on the philosophical view that it contributes to the cohesiveness of the country by requiring a distribution of popular support to be elected president(which does not make any sense), it enhances the status of minority interests(which is not true), contributes to the political stability of the nation by encouraging a two-party system, and, maintains a federal system of government and representation (Bates, 2004). Under the proposed new electoral system, each candidate’s election showing would be a weighted average of his or her popular vote in 51 states , each state’s weight would be comprised of its proportion of total electoral votes as tallied by present conventions. The final score for candidates would be expressed as a

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As long as a candidate gets over 50 % of a popular vote in a state, that candidate wins all of the Electoral College votes for that state (239). This allows for an unpopular candidate to win as long as he plays his cards right, and wins the right states with the most College votes. This causes candidates to focus on just a few states with close races rather than the majority of the U.S. to the detriment of most Americans. The Electoral College encourages third-parties to cause political unrest in an election.

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This means that whoever takes majority, plus one vote, will win it all. For example, If the state of Nevada was voting between two candidates and the popular vote was 49.9% to 50.1%, whoever had the upper hand would receive all of that states slate in the electorate. This then shows for the extreme support of the two party system. It is undeniable that the current Electoral system is quite fond of, and does a good job at supporting the fundamental ideas of our democracy like a 2-party system which then legitimizes the candidates- as Documents C and E explain, but it is this very system that absolutely crushes and hope for a third party or independent candidate. Document D also reveals percentages of the popular votes and electoral votes in two major elections.

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It was conceived in part as a firewall against majority will in case the mob ever elected someone grotesquely unqualified for the office. ”[3]But this is just one of many problems with the Electoral College, which a major problem being the fact of the Electoral College: It’s a winner-take-all system. a “feature that defines the character of American presidential elections. ”[4] Another one of these problems involves how some peoples votes are better than others, I found that a YouTuber by the name of CGP Grey put it the best, “If these votes were split evenly across the population, every 574,000 people would be represented by one

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This way, electors are still awarded, and a candidate still must reach 270 to win the presidency. However, these electors are not won on a winner-take-all basis. Instead, they’re awarded by Congressional district. The idea is that in a solidly red or solidly blue state, there are huge pockets of voters in the minority party who make up entire districts but who never have a say in the election result. Recent data from the Office of the Federal Register reported that in 2012, over 3 million Texans voted Democratic, and almost 5 million Californians voted Republican.

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vote for president based on the popular vote of their state. The electoral college is a system that definitely needs reform but is a central part of our government. In the electoral college there can anywhere from 3 to 54 electors per state based on The State’s population. The District

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The electoral college is an institution that can be found deeply rooted in the functionality of both the state and federal government. Due to this fact, calls for the abolition of the electoral college may cause for many changes to occur in these systems of government. In order to be able to decide whether or not we as a nation should update our electoral system, we must compare both the positive and negative effects that the abolition of the electoral college would have on these institutions. To start the paper, I would first bring to attention the history behind the winner-takes-all system and the intention of the states to move to this system. I would explain that the electoral college promises two electoral votes to every state, and how this disproportionately advantages smaller states.

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Nonetheless, the electoral college should be abolished because citizens’ votes should all count equally all states should get the same attention from presidential candidates, and everyone’s voice should be heard. The electoral college system ultimately fails the citizens of bigger states because their votes don’t count as much as those in smaller states. How? Well, as previously mentioned, there’s 538 electors who are distributes

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One of the many benefits for having the electoral college is that the system provides the people with the minority interest most of the time. According to Breana Noble of NewsMax, she mentions that, “urban areas tend to be more populated, but the Electoral College saves the interests of farmers and those found in less bustling locations,” (Noble). Adding on to this, the electoral college also provides the smaller states with more power. For this reason, states are able to select their delegates for their parties to the Electoral College. Thus, the states take a part in electing the president, because ideally, the elected delegate is supposed to elect in favor for their political party.

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In a twenty-first century environment, the Electoral College is unfair. Caroline Jenkins makes this case against the Electoral College: In testimony before Congress in 1997, the League of Women Voters pointed out that apart from the public outcry that would be caused by circumvention of the popular will, there are a number of other serious flaws in the Electoral College system. The Electoral College system is fundamentally unfair to voters. In a nation where voting rights are grounded in the one-person, one-vote principle, the Electoral College is a hopeless anachronism.

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Every four years, the citizens of the United States of America elect a new president. Not everyone knows exactly how the president is elected. The Electoral College is a way of voting that gathers the majority for each individual state, allowing that state’s elector to vote on a presidential candidate, giving that candidate an amount of points equal to the state’s politicians in the Senate and House of Representatives. Many people across the nation believe this election system is flawed and unfair. Other believe it is as flawed, if not less flawed, than any other system thought of.

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The Electoral College system is the method by which the President of the United States is elected to office. Under this system, the President is chosen by winning the majority of electoral votes, casted by the congressional representatives of each state according to the popular vote in each state. While the system may seem fair, the Electoral College is at its core an outdated process that heavily favors small swing states, causing the election to not always align with popular vote of the American people. The necessity of the Electoral College for the means of electing a President is no longer relevant in the United States, as the motivations for establishing the system were specific to the time of early America.

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the highest popular vote in each state receives all of the electoral votes in states with a clear favorites voters often feel their vote will have no effect. Those are the disadvantages of the electoral vote but the primary disadvantage is inequalities among different states. The electoral college gives states the right to determine how electors are apportioned. The system allows each of the states the freedom to design its own laws in regards to voting and offers each the ability to effect change. Many consider the Electoral College’s negative effect on third parties to be a good thing.

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