What Are The Pros And Cons Of The Electoral College

Without a doubt, most people know about the elections that had taken place only a couple of years ago. However, some people are unaware of what caused our current president to win. To put it simply, there is a system called the Electoral College that has been around ever since the U.S. Constitution was made, where certain people (electors) are selected in each state to vote for a candidate. However, it operates on a different scale than popular votes, where if a candidate gets the majority of electoral votes, they win the election, regardless of how many popular votes they earned. Obviously, this system has caused many conflicts within politics due to how it overrules the popular vote, essentially making it useless, and complicates presidential

As an excerpt from an original document about ‘The Pros and Cons of the Electoral College System’, by William C. Kimberling, states, “...the distribution of Electoral votes in the College tends to over-represent people in the rural states” (10). In 1988, people from less populated states combined had the same voting strength as a more populous state that had three times as many people (Kimberling 10). As a result, the more populous state’s potential votes held less weight than the potential votes in the other, less populated states. Many states’ votes are deemed less important than other states due to the Electoral

In fact, in ‘Why the Electoral College Should be Abolished’, the author argues how the Electoral College doesn’t isolate “...the effects of illegal voting (or unfair vote counting) to the state in which it occurs”, but instead, “...the “winner take all” arrangement of the Electoral College actually magnifies the effect of the voting fraud tremendously” (8). Fraudulent voters would completely overtake all the legitimate voters in the whole state if they tipped an election (“Why the Electoral” 8). Therefore, the “winner take all” arrangement isn’t the most reliable, due to how it could be influenced by dishonest voters who could tip the scales in their favor, and would completely undermine the legitimacy of the election. Voters in certain political parties might go as far as to manipulate the Electoral College in order to have their candidate win the