Essay on Electoral College is Wrong

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 The Electoral College systems is outdated and illogical for the present and should be abolished.

The Electoral College is an excuse of the electoral process, proving itself to be undemocratic, false in representation, and harmful to third-parties. Although the Electoral College may keep the peace between states and their representatives, the Electoral College makes it so that the winner of the presidential election is not what the nation truly

If the majority of Americans are voting for one president to take the power in the presidential office, than it does not make sense that the other candidate would win the election. However, the Bush versus Gore election was not the only time that a candidate with the minority of the votes to win. A similar election occurred in 1876 between Samuel J. Tilden and Rutherford B. Hayes. The Gale Encyclopedia of American Law states that “when the election returns came in on November 7, 1876, Tilden had clearly received the majority of the popular votes. However… with fewer than 48 hours before Tilden’s scheduled inauguration, the commission announced that Hayes had won the necessary electoral votes” (Gale Encyclopedia of American Law). The fact that Hayes won the presidential election with a minority of the popular votes is purely illogical and preposterous, because it does not accurately portray the opinions of the people. Because of the ability of a candidate to obtain the presidential office without the majority of the votes, the Electoral College should be abolished in America.

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

A change in the Electoral college should be the number of electoral votes for each state's. Now they are based on the population, for example the Electoral Vote chart shows the higher the population in each state the more electoral votes that state has. The less populated states have less Electoral votes than the bigger more populated states. (Doc. 2) This shows that the less populated a state is the less say the have with the voting. Each state needs to have the same number so that it is appointed accurately. This majority would help with which state and show that more of the population chose a certain candidate.

The Electoral College is the indirect election of the President of the United States. We, the people, vote for the president which determines the popular vote, but we don't truly elect the president, it just selects the electors so THEY choose the president. That is the second-part process of choosing electors. The first-part process is that the political parties in each state select electors. Although this assembly was needed back when the constitution was first established, because people didn't know much about the requirements of a President and they didn't know much about the presidential candidates because of the very little technology back then, we no longer need the Electoral College, and we should no longer have this assembly of electors.

The decision on how to choose who these electors would vote for was left up to the states. Most states eventually decided to use the general ticket system where all of that state’s votes go to one candidate, whoever receives a majority of the votes in that state. The system for solving ties or failure to win a majority in the electoral college is to send the vote to the House of Representatives. There, each state is given one vote to cast for president. A vote is taken until one candidate has a majority.

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.

This past election has raised several questions and issues, one of them being on the effectiveness of the Electoral College. Though Clinton won the popular vote with a margin of 2,868,692 votes, Trump won the presidency because his electoral votes were greater. Many were confused as to how this could happen, but looking at a map of the U.S. county-wise, it is somewhat more believable. Most of Clinton’s votes were concentrated in major cities,unlike Trump’s which were more widespread. This allowed him to cast a wider net to collect more electoral votes. Despite this being the reasoning behind it, many question if this is the right path. In truth, the Electoral college system is very faulty in the sense that it misrepresents a large portion of American Citizens. Therefore, it requires several changes, i.e. converting to a proportional system rather than winner-take-all, to be made so it could better reflect the will of the people, without dismissing the entire establishment as a whole.

The world of politics has changed since the framers created the electoral college and we need to eliminate this old system and bring it up to date. In a comprehensive study the Pew Research center found that in the 2016 election 80 percent of people thought a lot about the election and 85 percent are following news about the presidential candidates. People today are becoming more and more socially aware of politics and the vote of the people is what should be considered. The electoral college creates a chance that the loser can win the electoral vote and this creates problems like we seen in the 2016 election and even the 2000 election. This resulted in having many Americans questioning the purpose of the electoral college, having a “divided nation, and creating problems with candidates. Secondly, the system isn’t base on population. We have some big states and we have some really small states but those little states aren’t getting all the representation its deserves and even some of the bigger states because each state begins with three electors. For example, the states of Ohio has a population of 11.59 million (2014) so it should get about 20-22 electoral votes but it only has 18 because each state still has to have 3 votes so the votes go to other states. The electoral college can either underestimate or overestimate and this simply isn’t fair. To better support my stance on eliminating the electoral college some

The electoral college is a system designed more than 200 years ago, in a vastly different political, economic, and social landscape, that has somehow managed to remain in use in the United States complete unchanged for so long a period of time. To understand the Electoral College, one must first understand where it came from; in the earliest days of America democracy as radical as exists in America today was neither the intention nor the norm for American politics. Instead, the electoral college was put in place so that a small group of faceless party officials could overturn the will of the people in the case that mob rule ran amok, and this group of people felt strongly enough about the

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

The Electoral College is the process in which electors vote for the president of the United States.

Under the current system there are five hundred and thirty eight electors. Each state gets one elector, each representative, and a senator. A presidential candidate needs two hundred and seventy votes to win the election. The electors meet after the November popular election to cast their votes and officially elect the president. Electors may vote for whomever they wish. Each state's electoral votes are awarded on a winner take all bases.