Essay On The Electoral College Should Be Abolished

Though our founding fathers created the Electoral College over 200 years ago, it has been changed with time to accommodate modern needs and is still an important and necessary part of our electoral system. The Electoral College ensures political stability in our nation by encouraging the two-party system and also protects the interests of minorities. Furthermore, the Electoral College helps maintain a united country by requiring widespread popular support of a candidate in order for him or her to become president.

How would you react if you learned that the Presidential candidate you had cast your vote for, had actually received more of the popular vote than his competition, but was not elected the next President of the United States? Every four years in November over 90 million Americans vote for the presidential candidates, then in the middle of December the president and vice president of the United States are actually elected by the votes of only 538 citizens. Wouldn't you think there was an obvious flaw in the system? I would be willing to bet that the majority of you would, but in the case of the Electoral College apparently the majority doesn't count.

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.

What would you do if you didn't have a say in who runs America and how it is ran. What if you were promised freedom, and told that you had a government ran by the people but you didn’t get any input in the decisions? The direct popular vote doesn’t give the smaller parties a chance, but the electoral college does. Some people believe that the electoral college should be abolished; however, it gives people in rural communities a stronger voice, it allows the President a mandate to meet people’s needs in every state, and it reflects the political opinions of more Americans. Therefore, America should keep the electoral college.

Your vote should mainly matter! Yes, the electoral college should be abolished. The delegates did not believe the president should be chosen by a direct population vote (of the people). They didn’t trust voters would have enough information to make a good choice. The Electoral College is where the president and vice president are chosen indirectly. This system is where all states and the District of Columbia get one electoral vote for each of their US senators and representatives. Also, each state has a slate of electors for each presidential candidate. Another way this system works is by winner-take all method. The winner-take all method is where whichever candidate wins the most votes in the state, wins the state electoral votes. Lastly a candidate must receive a majority (one more than a half) of the electoral votes to be declared president. That is how everything goes in the electoral college. The electoral college should be abolished because 12 states and D.C. total have double the amount of electoral votes but less people than Illinois. Also, the winner of the 1876 presidential election isn’t what people wanted, it was based on the number of electoral votes. Another reason the electoral college should be abolished is that the states with the same representatives dont have the same number of voters. All these issues that continue to happen, need to be resolved by getting rid of this system.

The popular vote and electoral vote are two different things. Popular vote, shows how many people in the state wants the candidate. For example, The results from the Election of 1824 shows that the popular vote for each candidate differs by a large amount. The smallest popular vote candidate was William Crawford with 11.2% and his electoral vote was 41 then take a look at candidate Henry Clay with a popular vote of 13% and his electoral vote was 37. (Doc 3)This shows that the Electoral vote trumps the popular vote and it really should be the opposite. The more people that vote the more say you should have to who is the

The Founders built certain protections for individual rights into this country's founding documents. The United States Constitution was one such document. In particular, such protections guard Americans who hold minority viewpoints from those who side with the majority. For example, the First Amendment protects the right of free speech to ensure that people who hold unpopular views have just as much freedom to express those views as do people who tend to agree with the majority. The United States Constitution, therefore, was intended to protect the individual rights of Americans from a tyrannical government and majority. However, today, the Electoral College does not represent the vibrant democracy into which the United States has grown.

As citizens of the United State of America, one of our most important rights is that of which to vote. By voting, the general population has a say in who its leaders are. Votes for local, state, and even federal representatives directly reflect who the constituents want in office. However, America’s highest office is not elected by a vote of the people. Instead we use a confusing and outdated system called the Electoral College. Our president is not elected by the people, but by 538 electors who can legally vote for whomever they choose. Several times in our nations history an elector has voted against the people’s will. Three presidents have been elected into office by the electoral college and

If a candidate wins the popular vote but not the electoral, then they do not win the election. This is unfair. If the people want a certain person for their leader

It is crucial to understand that when the electoral college was first developed it was different time, lacking certain thing that we currently possess today. In the specific era of time, it may have been the best option, but times change and technology advances, leaving no area of need for the electoral college current day. The electoral college was first devised during the Constitutional Congress of 1787, almost 230 years ago (Jefferson- Jenkins). In a new country, weary of any national government power and states possessive over their own rights and powers, it seemed to be the most suited option for the new country. It’s goal was to reunite feuding states and ease the mind of less populous states with the addition of senatorial electors. Overtime and even more so today, the power of the of national government has greatly expanded,consequently removing the need to accommodate the suspicions of the people.

If we remember back to the last election, we can remember that the current president did not win the majority of the popular vote. Some have screamed that this is a miscarriage of justice, that it violated the concept of one person, one vote (Darling-Hammond). I argue that the system worked exactly as it was designed to. We have a very cumbersome election system in this country: a system that was designed for the very purpose of being cumbersome. The Founding Fathers could have created a system that would have allowed for a direct vote of the people for president or even left it in the hands of the Congress to pick one, and yet they chose not to do any of these. They understood that a nation like the U.S.A was going to grow and even in their time they had a diverse group of people with differing ideas of how the nation should be governed. Given all the options the Electoral College is the best system for a nation as large and diverse as the U.S.A.

The current issue regarding the Electoral College today is that many people do not understand its purpose and the reasons behind it. What most people see it as is a faulty way of electing a president that lowers the worth of their vote. Recently, doubt of the fairness of the Electoral College has been in the minds of countless individuals. Many questions have been asked about the Electoral College, questions like “Why does it exist?” “Does it really work?” and “Should it still exist?” Many of these questions have arisen due to the recent 2016 election results. In this election, Donald Trump won the Electoral College vote by a significant amount, yet he lost the popular vote to Hillary Clinton. The fact that this could even happen baffles many people. “In addition to 2016, there have been four other times in American history – 1824, 1876, 1888 and 2000 – when the candidate who won the Electoral College lost the national popular vote” (Speel). This has deeply separated people who know the subject into

Every four years on Election Day, millions of Americans flock to ballots in every state, anxious to cast their votes. Who could blame them? After all, voting is a very important part of our democracy, especially when it comes to choosing our next president, since it will be him or her who represents the people of our country. Every vote counts. Or does it? What if I told you that your vote didn’t count? Would you be surprised? Outraged? In our current voting system, the electoral college, a group of people chosen by each state to vote for the country’s next president and vice president, ultimately decides who will win the election. We do not even have the federal right to vote for president. For a fairer and more logical election, the electoral vote should not decide on who becomes the President of the United States of America.

During five presidential elections, the winning candidate won the electoral vote but lost the popular vote. Many call for reform of how elections should be done, a system in which the popular vote determines the winner. I call for abolishing the Electoral College for many reasons. A system that goes by majority rule is how a democracy should function. Asking people to cast votes and then having the elite override it with electoral votes is not how a true democracy should be. The Founding Fathers intended for America to be a democracy in some way, but unfortunately, cannot be considered a true democracy.

The United States presidential election, it’s a huge event in the United States and its been seen by some as an example of our democracy, but should it be? In truth, “American citizens do not cast their ballots directly for their favorite candidates for the presidency. Instead, they vote for electors ostensibly (but not always) committed to a given candidate.” (Levinson, Page 83). But, why not let the citizens vote directly for the president themselves? This old idea of not trusting the American people more with knowing how to vote isn’t fair anymore and while at the time it may have been okay and even made sense because it made voting easier since, “Never in the history of the world had a comparable election been conducted in a territory as large as the United States” (Black, Paragraph 14) it’s now (in my opinion) outdated and no longer necessary. This isn’t to say that I would completely get rid of the system we have though, I do agree with how, “Above all, the Founders feared power, the domination of some men over others.” (Critchlow, Page 19), they knew that in this case something would have to be done to keep the few large states from controlling the elections if presidents were elected with the popular vote. I think that we do need to make some changes to take the more of the people's opinions into consideration, though instead of giving all of a states’ electoral votes to the most popular candidate and ignoring the rest of the states residents votes.