Abolish Electoral College

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The electoral college is the way the president is picked, but should it remain that way? The electoral college has too many ways to go wrong and as time goes on we 'll just see more of them, and in many ways, it smacks the idea of democracy in the face. It has picked candidates contrary to popular opinion and gives states disproportionate amounts of power in picking the president, along with other problems. In a country to supposed to stand for freedom and each citizen having a voice, how is that possible when people in one state are given more power over choosing the president than someone in a bigger state. As was previously stated, it gives certain states more power and makes the votes of people in certain states worth more than a vote …show more content…

This means that there has been five times where the electoral college has elected someone that the majority of people didn’t want, in some cases, they have won by staggering amounts, like the 1888 election where Harrison lost the popular vote by about 100 thousand votes but won the electoral college by 65. That shouldn’t happen if America is truly about democracy. Also, America has been around for about 240 years by now. Since there have been five times when the president lost the popular vote, that averages to one every 48 years. It isn’t actually that frequent, about once a modern lifetime, but seems to have gotten more frequent the closer we get to now. In the last twenty years, we have had two times when the system has given a winner that wasn’t supported by the majority of voters, yet we didn’t have any in all of the 20th century. This could mean that it is getting more and more likely that the electoral college will have someone that the majority of voters didn’t vote for. All of this contributes to the idea that one vote is worthless, which is why the electoral college is antithetical to a democracy. Congressmen aren’t elected through a slate of people voted by citizens to vote for citizens, so why is the president? If the government is truly to be by the people, why can this happen? If the answer is, it isn’t, that’s not the way the founders intended it, then we shouldn’t use a hastily created system made by people who came from a time when the common man was illiterate. It was a system created because the founders believed that the average person couldn’t truly be trusted electing the leader, so they created a system to separate their decisions from how the president is picked. Whether or not the founders were