preview

Persuasive Essay On The Electoral College

Decent Essays
Open Document

On August 18th, 1920, Congress passed the Nineteenth Amendment, giving women the right to vote. After countless protests and speeches over many years by dedicated women suffragists, women finally gained the right to take part in the US government after an absence of nearly 150 years. The fact that women could not vote at the conception of the US government shows that many aspects of it are outdated, one of these being the electoral college. The electoral college is the system of voting used in the US in which each state receives a certain number of electors, based on population, with a total of 538, who ultimately decide which presidential candidate is victorious. Although it may protect the interests of small states, the electoral college has troubling origins, allows for the misrepresentation of voters, and treats voters unequally. First of all, the electoral college has troubling origins. It was created over two hundred years ago, and, in that amount of time, many historic changes have been made in the United States. Slavery was abolished, African Americans and women gained the right to vote, prohibition began and ended, yet the same archaic voting system has been used throughout these two hundred years. Although some argue that the electoral college was created for the sole cause of protecting small states, the underlying cause for its creation was slavery. As Akhil Reed Amar argues, “...the deepest political divisions in America have always run not between big and small states, but between the north and the south...” (Amar). Essentially, at the time of the creation of the electoral college, tensions ran higher between pro- and anti-slavery states than in high- or low-population states, and this tension led to the argument for the electoral college. The reason why southern states favored an electoral college is further explained by Amar: “...the Electoral College...instead let each southern state count its slaves, albeit with a two-fifths discount, in computing its share of the overall count.” With the electoral college, the southern states were able to count ⅗ of their slave population towards the number that would decide how many electors their state would receive. However, these slaves were not allowed

Get Access
Related
Get Access