Analysis of the Electoral College

The term Electoral College gained a vast amount popularity in the presidential elections of 2012 and 2016 which brought many controversial arguments in favor and opposed to the Electoral College. If you haven’t heard or don’t know much about it, as a voter and an American citizen, it is important to know what it is and how it affects our community.

If the electoral college was abolished, then America would have a more pure vote. The electoral college delegates how much say a state has in government and limits some states while promoting the powers of others. The electoral college also has many deformities, including the winner take all system, a less pure vote, and a more concentrated support for a candidate from certain states that make it perfectly reasonable to abolish it.

The electoral college is a system that was put in place by the framers of the constitution for many reasons. The main reason the electoral college is that the framers did not fully trust democracy for they believed that people were not educated enough to vote. After reading an article from Business Insider called The Electoral College Is Brilliant, And We Would Be Insane To Abolish It by Walter Hickey, I agree that the electoral college is necessary for our presidential elections. According to the article the electoral college is good because it keeps errors local, is a testament to a candidate's desire to win, and most importantly, forces majority. In the article opposing the Electoral College I found many of the arguments to be invalid or full of what ifs or buts, and that is why I do not have any reason to believe the electoral college is good.

Established in Article II, Section 1 of the Constitution, the Electoral College is a system utilized in The United States of America to select the President and Vice President. This process was established by the Founding Fathers in 1787, when the Constitution was written. The original purpose of the electoral system was to ensure that those who select the leaders of this nation were the most knowledgeable and informed people that America had to offer. The electors - the elected officials that make up the Electoral College - are elected to office through a general election wherein the entire national population has the right to vote. The President of the United States, however, is actually elected to office by the Electoral College only, regardless of the popular vote of the citizens in general. Thus, the Presidential election is the only federal election in our nation where the vote of the citizenry does not directly determine the victor. Despite the fact that this electoral system has been in place and operational for over two hundred years, the Electoral College is looked upon by some as an honorable system, whereas others view it as faulty. The Electoral College is not fair and equitable because it is based on population, it is not trusted by the people, and it is unjust to the wishes of the citizens.

The Electoral College is not the best solution to elect the president, as it has become obsolete (Dayen). The Electoral College was a solution for the problems that were relevant when it was first established. Now, these problems cease to exist. The Electoral College was an idea that was feasible when first instituted, because communication was limited and national political parties had yet to be established. Travel and communications are no longer problems. The Electoral College needs to be replaced to fix the current problems, not the problems of the past.

The article, “Electoral College: An Overview,” written by Ballaro, Beverly, Bourassa, and Cheryl, explains how the electoral college is used and why people do not support it. This article targets anyone who is able to vote in the 2016 election. The purpose of this article is to inform voters that their vote does not always choose the president and explains how the president is chosen and the system behind it. The thesis of this article explains that many people abroad are still unaware that the president is not elected directly by the people. The president is chosen by the electoral college. The electoral college is a body of electors chosen to elect the president and vice president of the united states. This setup allows the chance for an

I choose to agree with the Electoral College. I don’t want a direct popular election because I want the smaller states to still have a voice, but, if America switches to direct popular election, the way things are, might just go worse. There are some good reasons for a direct popular election, and there are not good reasons for one too. I like the Electoral College a lot, and I would like the voting system to keep it that way. However, our founding fathers created the Electoral College, being the geniuses they are, created a good way to elect a president that would not cause chaos or havoc in the country.

When the Founding Father first wrote the Constitution the only way news got around were the newspaper and written works or word of mouth. In the 1700s most Americans were illiterate and only learned about candidates for president by word of mouth which isn’t the most reliable source of information. So they created the Electoral college to “protect” the American public from their own ignorance. This is an outdated notion for the modern American citizen and the Electoral College should be removed from the constitution in favor of the popular vote because the Electoral College is not the Democracy the framers worked so hard to create, it creates disparency in representation, and voter decisions ultimately don’t matter.

In order to fully understand the underlying problems of the Electoral College we have to look back at the time that the idea of the Electoral College itself was proposed and see how the culture of the time and the ideologies of the people involved helped shaped the final outcome. Life today is much different than it was two hundred odd something years ago, and it’s fair to say that the political ideals and social norms around our society have changed drastically.

The Electoral College is the system the United States have used to elect the President for the past two hundred years. In this essay, the reader will see that although it did the best way to represent the will of the American people, and in this essay a better alternative will be proposed to the reader. The Electoral college was created in September sixth, nineteen-eighty-seven, and was described as (founder definition) and was meant to allow a stronger South, who by using the three-fifths compromise of 1787 to allow themselves more votes and ensure they are given the most federal power (Amar). This paper will show the reader that the Electoral College is flawed in the way that minority candidates can be elected, less populated states are overrepresented, and swing states are given the most attention.

The Electoral College was established with the best of intentions of representing the American people; however, over time, this antiquated system has failed the American people. The people of the United States deserve better as the Electoral College is no longer a representation of the nation’s voices and concerns. Instead, the political machine has corrupted this deep-rooted system with each modification. The way the people of the United States elect the President and Vice President, requires an update for this timeworn democratic process.

In the article “Electoral College: An Overview” Ballaro and Bourassa state that, “Before the controversial 2000 presidential election focused a spotlight on the electoral college, many people both within the United States and abroad remained unaware of the fact that the U.S. president is not elected directly by the people.” This is what seems to be their thesis statement. The electoral college is a group of electors in each state that have the ability to elect or keep a candidate from winning even though he/she has the majority of the votes across the U.S. The fact that the Electoral College is able to do this is proven throughout this article very thoroughly, and is looked at from both those who support the Electoral College and those who

The electoral college system is unnecessary at this point in time. When the electoral college system was thought up in the 1700s by the framers of the constitution, they believed that electors to represent the peoples’ vote would be more efficient since it was extremely difficult to get information to and from places quickly, meaning that citizens would be late on news. To to combat that, the framers created the electoral college system, a system where electors elected by a political party would represent the peoples’ vote, gather in Washington, and vote on their behalf. Because of the lack of technology, this method wasn’t a bad way to vote for presidents efficiently. But technology improved, negating the problem of Americans not knowing the news in Washington and concerning their candidates. Today, Americans have access to current and reliable news regarding their candidates and are generally up-to-date with politics. So with the technological advances present today, why do we still employ an electoral college to vote for our next president? There isn’t a pressing reason to keep it.

The United States, where everyone is protected under the awe-inspiring constitution. Every American has the right to bear arms, the right to speak out for what they believe in, and the right to vote for their chief executive. However, are Americans actually responsible for voting for the face of the United States? The same document that granted Americans the right to vote, takes away that very right by implementing the electoral college. The creation of the electoral college, thought to be a brilliant new way to elect the president, stripped every American of the opportunity to vote for who they truly desire to be the next president. Instead of voting for who they want, citizens vote and put their trust in representatives who could very easily

The Electoral College is a very important process to the American voting system however deciding who gets to be a part of the Electoral College is a two-step process. First, the political parties in each state choose slates of potential Electors sometime before the general election. Second, on Election Day, the voters in each state select their state's Electors by casting their ballots for President.