Electoral College Dbq Essay

First off, what is the Electoral College? The Electoral College is the process put in place by our Founding Fathers in which America votes for its President and Vice President every four years. The Electoral College was put in place to help prevent abuse of power and corruption by having a separation of government. The Electoral College is made up of representatives from each state based on how many Senate and House of Representative delegates that state has. These numbers range from 3 to 54 with the total number of electors being 538. This system has taken much scrutiny over time. According to Lenz and Holman, “The Electoral College may be the least-known and most misunderstood government institution in the American political system.”

The Electoral College has been instituted since 1787 and is a group of people that elect the United State President and Vice President. The United States citizens do not directly vote for the president, but their vote is considered by electors that have pledged to vote for the winning candidate. There are 538 electors which corresponds with the 100 senators and the 435 representatives plus 3 electors for the District of Columbia. An elector is nominated or appointed by their state’s party and are usually well connected. Congressmen and high ranking U.S. officials are prohibited from being electors. In most states they follow a “Winner takes all” format, where the elector votes for the candidate who wins the popular vote. The Electoral College systems is outdated and illogical for the present and should be abolished.

Beginning in America in 1787, the Electoral College was originally created during the Constitutional Convention to help make a fair way for the president to be elected without giving too much power to either the national government or individual states. Over the years, the Electoral College has undergone a few changes in attempt to make it more fair, but there is still much debate about whether or not the Electoral College is the most effective way to elect a president. Some people believe that the Electoral College does an excellent job of creating an equal distribution of votes across all ethnicities and social classes of America. In contrast, others think that the Electoral College does not give an accurate portrayal of the popular

The Electoral College was created during the Constitutional Convention in 1787 when the framers of the constitution debated many options for determining how the President of the United States would be chosen. The Electoral College was created to give smaller states a voice in the process of choosing a President for the United States. If a President was chosen through popular vote, people feared numerous candidates would be receiving votes and a candidate would win the most votes from a populous state instead of votes from smaller states. Another option for voting for the President was that Congress would

The electoral college, per Wikipedia, is a mechanism set up to select the president and vice president of the United States. (The Electoral college, 2016) It was during the Constitutional Convention of 1787 that the founders established Article 2. Article 2 Section 1 details the innerworkings of the executive branch of government. The constitution states, “Each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors, equal to the whole Number of Senators and Representatives to which the State may be entitled in the Congress”. (The Constitution of the United States, n.d.) The framers of the Constitution had many different ideas about how the selection of our president should go but ultimately

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 makes it possible for citizens’ votes in certain states to essentially not matter at all. Since all of the electoral votes go toward the candidate that wins the popular vote in a state, if a state has a majority of people who vote for a certain party and a voter votes for the other party, his vote does not have any effect on the election outcome. The Electoral College system is leaving hundreds of thousands of vote’s discounted and irrelevant. The Electoral College twists each vote’s worth per state, causing the nation’s desires to be misrepresented. The Electoral College does not always show a distribution of support. A candidate could win the electoral votes

It was Speaker of the House Clay, who was eliminated from the selection process because he came in fourth, that wrapped up the election for Adams by openly supporting him in the House of Representatives. The issue did not end there, however. The populace was none too happy about this incident; four years later Jackson defeated Adams (Longley and Braun 36-37).In the 1876 election, Samuel Tilden gained about 250,000 more popular votes than Rutherford Hayes, but still lost the election by an electoral vote of 185 to 184 (Longley and Braun 33-34). The contest had been so close in South Carolina, Florida, and Louisiana, with both sides claiming fraud, that each of these states cast their electoral votes for both candidates. Congress eventually set up a commission which, with a bit of politicking, chose to give Hayes the electoral votes of all three states, thus securing his election. Later, Congress passed a law that gave the states the right to determine the legality of their own elector choices and required a majority vote in both the House of Representatives and the Senate in order to reject the electoral vote of any state (Kimberling 9). By far, the most disturbing instance of Electoral College failure is that even in the year 2000 a minority president was able to be elected. In the 2000 election, Al Gore received over 500,000 more popular votes than George W. Bush,

Electing government officials is a major part of being an American. The citizens of the United States have the privilege of voting for their officials , representing America’s democracy. Although a big misconception on this is that the people actually do not vote directly for who becomes elected president but rather who gets to elect the next president. The Electoral College has been in place since 1804 and continues to be the system the United States uses to elect the president. The Electoral College is filled with history, a lengthy process , and questionable arguments on its validity.

The 1876, 1888, and the 2000 election share a striking similarity in that the candidate that won the election lost the popular vote, but won the electoral vote. In the 1876 election, Tilden won the popular vote to Hayes, but Hayes received one more electoral vote than Tilden so Hayes became the nineteenth President of the United States. This shows that the popular vote does not matter in the presidential election because you can still lose the popular vote, but win with the electoral college. The 1824 election is unique because no candidate won the majority of the electoral college votes, so the House of Representatives chose the president. Adams should have won the presidency because he had won the popular vote and the electoral vote, but he did not win the majority of the electoral vote, so the government picked Jackson instead.

However, there have been several elections where the president did not win the popular vote, but still became president because the candidate received over the bare minimum of two hundred seventy electoral votes. Just recently the election between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump took place in November of 2016. As stated in the article, Time to End the Electoral College, “Hillary Clinton beat Mr. Trump by more than 2.8 million votes, or 2.1 percent of the Electorate” (Doc L). Hillary Clinton won the popular vote of the people but she never became president because she did not receive more than the required two hundred seventy electoral votes. The system that we are using today goes against our democracy and does not reflect the people's ideas on what kind of leader they want to rule the United States of America. In fact, the Electoral College favors minority voters and the majority is at a disadvantage in winning elections. Since the popular vote can’t win someone an election, many candidates choose to spend a large deal of time in states that have high numbers of electoral votes and are undecided on which party to vote for. It is up to the candidates to sway voters in these states to win all of the electoral votes with this winner take all system. These states are known as battleground states and are almost always the deciding factor in an election's outcome. In the

The founding fathers of the United States developed the Electoral College as a way for electing our President every four years. Every state in the United States is assigned a number of electors depending on the number of Senators and Representatives in the state. The Electoral College should be abolished because it is an outdated system of electing our president. The presidential election should be decided based on the popular vote. The Electoral College was created at a time when communication across the United States was difficult.

The Electoral College is a process established in the constitution to select the president. The electors (selected by each candidate’s political party) votes directly for the president and vice president. I am in favor of the Electoral College because it plays an important role in electing the president. Three reasons for supporting the Electoral College are: it provides a certainty of the election’s outcome, the president is elected by voters from different regions, and informed voters in swing states decide the election.

With the electoral college, someone can win the popular vote but still lose. This quote from an author describes what they think about the electoral college. “It creates the possibility for the loser of the popular vote to win the electoral vote. This is more than a theoretical possibility. It has happened at least four times out of the 56 presidential elections, or more than 7 percent of the time, which is not such a small percentage, and it created a hideous mess every time.”

thinking of the 2000 U.S. presidential election -- Gore won the popular vote (more Americans voted for him), but Bush actually won the presidency, because he