Essay About Electoral College

Despite the Electoral College system being founded by the founding fathers in America and being there as long as the Constitution exists, many people still do not have sufficient knowledge on how it works. The Electoral College does not provide honest presidential elections rather it has the potential to undo the will of people at any point from the selection of electors to the vote tallying in Congress (Shaw, 3). Electoral College in the United States has played a major role in depressing the voter's turnout. Every State is given an equal number of electoral votes despite the population and in turn, the system has put in place no measure to encourage the voters to take part in the elections. Besides, the system distorts

The Electoral College: a system that the U.S. has used over the years to choose representatives and is a compromise between election by a vote. The Electoral College should not be abolished for three reasons. These reasons are: The system helps candidates who struggle with winning the Popular Vote; with Electoral Votes, it gives the little states enough power and votes, and if we abolish The Electoral College, we weaken the Political Two-Party-System. And if not weakened, then destroyed. These reasons will show that the Electoral College should not be abolished, and should be kept.

First of all, the Electoral College ignores what most citizens want and undervalues their votes. Because people in each state are voting for electors that are assigned to each party rather than the actual candidates, the decision for president is really up to 538 electors instead of the population of more than 300 million Americans (The Electoral College: Top 3 Pros and Cons). 48 states use a winner-take-all system, where the dominant candidate in each state gains control of all the electors. The only states that don’t use this system are Maine and Nebraska ( ). This system the election about winning states in order to gain electors, and not about each citizen's individual vote. It’s so focused on winning overall states that it completely neglects the popular vote. It is mathematically possible under the Electoral College system that a candidate can win only 21.8% of the popular vote and still win the presidency.. This is due to the fact that the 39 smaller states have too many electoral votes for their population, and because of the winner-take-all system in every state except Nebraska and Maine, all a candidate needs to do is win 50.01% of the popular votes in those states, and he/she can clinch the election (Why We Should Abolish the Electoral College). Events similar to this have happened in history where the candidate who received more popular votes didn’t win the election. For example, in 1876

In June of 1804 the states had ratified the Twelfth Amendment which enacted the Electoral College in time for the 1804 election. When election time comes, Americans vote for the President and Vice President who are chosen by Presidential electors, who as a whole are known as the Electoral College. As a decision was needed for a method of choosing candidates, the Constitutional Convention of 1787 contemplated many different ways of electing the President, but toward the end of the proposals and ideas the matter had to be taken to the Committee of Eleven on Postponed Matters which is the committee who conceived the original Electoral College. In recent years, much debate has been stirring regarding whether or not the Electoral College has a place within this country's elections. For many states this method of tallying and casting votes is great because every state receives a minimum of three electoral votes considering each state has two senators and at least one representative (Lewis). However, these minimum electoral votes make the distribution of electoral college votes uneven throughout the fifty states, making each American citizen's vote count less or much more which is cause for change. If the information on these weighted votes is analyzed it can be concluded that states with a population similar to Wyoming has one “elector” for every 177, 556 persons while Texas has one “elector” for every 715,499 persons. While the Electoral College has worked for generations, there are some negative factors that give cause to abolish this practice, such that are; faithless electors, the winner take all system, and finally, safe and swing states.

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

The Electoral College has changed dramatically since its institution in the 18th century, thus creating a disruption to modern elections. Therefore, the electoral college must be eliminated.

The constitution, in the 12th amendment, sets up the system by which we pick a president and vice president. The amendment lays out all of the specific guidelines concerning the electoral college, such as the requirement to only vote for the elected nominees. It lays out emergency plans in the case of a tie, and how electors are chosen. Replacing the guidelines in Article II, Section 1, Clause 3, the 12th amendment states, “The Electors shall meet in their respective states, and vote by ballot for President and Vice-President, one of whom, at least, shall not be an inhabitant of the same state with themselves; they shall name in their ballots the person voted for as President, and in distinct ballots the person voted for as Vice-President, and they shall make distinct lists of all

The electoral vote allotment is based on the population of each state, collected from the census. This method of division leads to severe imbalances between the decisions of small states and the decisions of the larger states. In 2010, Alaska, Delaware, DC, Hawaii, Idaho, Maine, Montana, North Dakota, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and South Dakota, Vermont, and Wyoming had a total amount of 44 electoral votes. Illinois, a single state, had 20. This means that one sole state had as many electoral votes as six states put together. While the electoral system is usually unfair to smaller states, in the case of ties, the larger states suffer the most. When the electoral vote is tied, each state can only cast one vote for the final decision, meaning that a “representative from Wyoming, representing 500,000 voters, would have as much say as the 55 representatives from California, who represent 35 million voters,” according to Bradford Plumer, author of the article “The Indefensible Electoral College.” No matter what happens during the election, one group is always being cheated out of their rightful votes. The choice of our country’s leader should not be based on a system that is unfair to a specific group of voters simply due to their state

The Electoral College is a group of people who are “appointed by a larger group” of people to represent each state in the U.S. who then vote for the presidential elections (Dictionary.com 2015). The founding fathers created the Electoral College so that qualified citizens could vote for the president. They believed that the average American is uniformed, so they decided that a few educated people would make the correct choice for the entire population. The founding fathers also thought the Electoral College would be effective because at that time the only way of communication was through word of mouth and through letters. With the Electoral College, it was a more simple way to get the votes to one place and count them. A major criticism of the Electoral College is the popular candidate may lose to the electoral vote. This means that if majority of the population voted for candidate A, but majority of the electoral votes were for candidate B, the president of the nation would become candidate B. This situation has occurred four out of the fifty-six presidential elections that have been held in the United States. I believe that the Electoral College should be abolished so that the popular candidate would win the election, people would feel that they are making a difference in the society they live in, and we should replace the Electoral College with popular choice or allow our house of representatives to vote for the presidents instead.

The Electoral College is currently the system the United States employs to elect our president. However, the Electoral College should be abolished due to the fact that it can go against the choices of the majority of people, it brings too much attention to swing states and states with large populations, and it annihilates political equality. First of all, the Electoral College goes against the will of several citizens. There have been five instances (including the 2016 elections) in which the candidate who won the popular vote did not become the president. According to Doc.

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 should be abolished because it overpowers the people’s vote. As stated in the Document G in the presidential election in 1876, 1888, and 2000 the winner of the election didn’t actually win the popular vote. For example, in the presidential election in 1888, Hayes got 5,443,892 popular votes and 233 electoral votes. Tilden got 5, 534,488 electoral votes and 168 electoral votes. Given this evidence, the popular vote (the people’s votes) doesn’t actually count towards the actual election. The Electoral College is what actually decides the election. Therefore, if the majority of the people vote for a president, the president might not be chosen all because only the Electoral College votes count not the people’s. Furthermore, the population of Illinois was more than the population of the 12 states and the District of Columbia combined, yet Illinios only had 20 Electoral votes while those 12 states and the District of Columbia had 44 electoral votes, according to Document D. This proves that the Electoral College doesn’t make everyone’s vote equal. The votes of the people who live in the 12 states and

Everybody likes to point fingers at a bad guy and many people are pointing fingers at the electoral college. Many argue that the electoral college is an insult to modern democracy, but most of those are usually fanatics, not knowledgeable in politics, or are simply mad that their vote isn’t very important. As it is stated in In Defense of the Electoral College Five reasons to keep our despised method of choosing the President, (paragraph 15, lines 1-3) “widely regarded as an anachronism, a non-democratic method of selecting a president that ought to be [overruled] by declaring the candidate who receives the most popular votes the winner.” The electoral college is a better way to get educated citizens to choose wisely for the people. Most of the time the delegates vote for who the majority of their state chooses, so there is no reason for people to

The Electoral College Voting System is outdated and deeply flawed. First, it was created as a temporary solution to citizens not being educated enough vote, which doesn’t apply to the views many have today. Second, There is danger of having a tied vote, which would make it almost impossible for us to know who to vote for.. Third, many people today already want abolish it, which shows that the majority wants a change. If we want to make a change about what’s going on, we have to do something about. We can’t continue to be silenced by the opinions of others. As Dr. Seuss said, “Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, Nothing is going to get better. It's not.”

During election day millions of Americans are going to cast their vote for who they want to be the next president of the United States. Except is a lot more complicated than it seems. The electoral college is the collection of 538 delegates that have the power to determine who the next president will be; the number of total representatives in the House and Senate. These 538 votes aren’t given to the citizen directly, but they are instead divided among the 50 states in America. Currently, people are suggesting who their state should pick for president. Simply put, if a state has a majority of votes for one candidate (however small the majority is) that candidate gets all the electoral votes from said state; winner takes all. So, a candidate must win over half of the voting population in enough states to get the majority of electoral votes to win the election. But that’s not all, these said electors aren’t nailed down to vote for who their state constituents want at all; millions of votes can be thrown in the trash and forgotten forever.