Aimee Ojeda
December 1, 2017 Abolishing the Electoral College
The Electoral College system was created in the constitution by the Founding Fathers. This system forms the beginning of the United States' national elections and is therefore, considered to be important to this country's history. It is made up of 538 members and a candidate must receive a majority of 270 electoral votes to win the election. Electors usually get selected to one of the presidential candidates running. When people go to the ballot on voting day and pick their favorite candidate, they are really choosing the electors for their state and then the electors are the ones that vote for the president. The Electoral College should be revised or abolished because it is both undemocratic, is not beneficial to the nation, and may weaken the validity of elections and the elected President.
To start off, the electoral college system is undemocratic because instead of everyone being involved only a small group of people are able to make the decisions which is the electors citizens pick when voting. This Electoral College System has limited democracy to people because it holds an ability to alter result of Election over popular votes and creates high voter turnouts. The Electoral College betrays American values of majority rule: a candidate can win the election without a majority of popular votes and some states are overrepresented so a large number of citizens get left out. This can create a situation
For as long as American citizens can remember the assigned method of election for the United States presidency would be the use of the Electoral College. The Electoral College is a process not a place or institution, in this essay I will briefly describe the Electoral College process as well as describe some pros and cons of the electoral college and lastly, I will attempt to answer the controversial question, if you could improve the electoral college, would I choose to abolish or reform the 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.
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.
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.
The electoral college is a system that was put in place by the framers of the constitution for many reasons. The main reason the electoral college is that the framers did not fully trust democracy for they believed that people were not educated enough to vote. After reading an article from Business Insider called The Electoral College Is Brilliant, And We Would Be Insane To Abolish It by Walter Hickey, I agree that the electoral college is necessary for our presidential elections. According to the article the electoral college is good because it keeps errors local, is a testament to a candidate's desire to win, and most importantly, forces majority. In the article opposing the Electoral College I found many of the arguments to be invalid or full of what ifs or buts, and that is why I do not have any reason to believe the electoral college is good.
The Electoral College is the name given to a group of electors who are nominated by political activists and party members within the states. The electoral college really isn't necessary and should be abolished. There are numerous reasons why this is so. With the Electoral College in affect third parties don't have a chance to become the president, which isn't fair. Electors are expected to be honest but in the past our country has caught some untruthful ones. The electoral College was created so long ago that it is now outdated, so we shouldn't even have electors. People of the U.S. may think that they are participating in a direct election for the president, but with the Electoral College system
The Electoral College has been in place for hundreds of years and it has sparked the debate of if it should be abolished from presidential elections. I believe that the Electoral College should be abolished because it gives unfair treatment to low populated states, it gives Congress more power in the election, and causes unfair election results. Document A shows that California and Texas have the most electoral votes with fifty five and thirty eight respectively but lower populated states such as Delaware and Alaska have only three electoral votes. If you split the map of the United States into four sections using horizontal and vertical lines, one can draw the conclusion that candidates running for president do not have to go to certain sections of the United States due to their low electoral votes and
The argument that the Electoral College is undemocratic is correct, the system is undemocratic due to the fact, that it is the electors who elect the president, not individuals. While the Electoral College is technically undemocratic it is still a fair system. “Virtually all states award all their electoral votes to the winner of the popular vote in the state’, even so it is possible for the winner of the electoral vote to lose the popular vote which we’ve seen in the 2000 election between Bush and Gore. This is an example of a flaw in the system, but a single flaw does not justify abolishing the system altogether (Posner).
Those who are for the Electoral College have their own interesting host of points to make on the subject. They make mention of it contributing to the cohesiveness of the country, that it enhances the status of minorities, that it encourages political stability, and that it maintains a federal system of government and representation (Leip) . Regarding the Electoral College affecting the cohesiveness of the country, the concern is that without the Electoral College states with lower populations are devalued and that having the college ensures that they have some value and stake in its votes towards the election. This makes some sense, but it is just worth noting that the votes of the college are determined in some degree by population anyway.
The Electoral College began as a solution to the argumentation of how the United States should elect an executive during the Constitutional Convention in 1787. This system to the election provides a way for citizens to have an influential impact while also providing those within politics to hold some power, which may help guide and provide more insight on political knowledge. The Electoral College helps represent minorities’ interests, which help to benefit different groups of people allowing them to hold power. This system benefits the U.S. in helping it stay strongly together by forcing a distribution of the popular support. The Electoral College has been beneficial to our government by keeping a well-balanced system of representation within
According to the University of Missouri-Kansas City, the system isolates election problems like illegally extending voting hours or irregular voter turnouts. But to act as if we cant reform the voting poll place policies to prevent lines from outide poll places and from illegally extending voting hours is just lazy and unresponsive to issue that have repeatedly had a negative impact on the United States for some time now. The Electoral college also keeps us from avoiding a recount, a recount can easily increse the odds of fraud. With the ammount of voters in the United States a recount would be a utter mess. It also provides a canidate focus in the election which makes campaign organization a much more achievable thing rather then a way to for canidates to strategize how they go about going out on the campaign trail. Dates and amounts of time spent in certain states are typically planned and are in place for months prior to when most canidates declare they are even running. The last issue, would of course be giving smaller states a voice. Without the electoral college these states would be completely forgot about. All of these issues hold true in that they preserve the fairness of the election process, but what they don't do is provide a comparacent on if the solotions of the process outweigh
Today the Electoral College is used to find out who becomes president. The Electoral College system is used in most states and this means that everyone who is eligible to vote can go vote in the state that they live in and then the majority vote for that certain state gets all the electoral college votes which is what counts more. Different states have a different number of electoral votes depending on the state’s population. The system that is being used is unfair to the independent candidate and bigger states, therefore the Electoral College should be abolished.
The electoral college system is unnecessary at this point in time. When the electoral college system was thought up in the 1700s by the framers of the constitution, they believed that electors to represent the peoples’ vote would be more efficient since it was extremely difficult to get information to and from places quickly, meaning that citizens would be late on news. To to combat that, the framers created the electoral college system, a system where electors elected by a political party would represent the peoples’ vote, gather in Washington, and vote on their behalf. Because of the lack of technology, this method wasn’t a bad way to vote for presidents efficiently. But technology improved, negating the problem of Americans not knowing the news in Washington and concerning their candidates. Today, Americans have access to current and reliable news regarding their candidates and are generally up-to-date with politics. So with the technological advances present today, why do we still employ an electoral college to vote for our next president? There isn’t a pressing reason to keep it.
The electoral college is an outdated rigid system of voting for president made by the founding fathers of America. In 1787 the constitutional convention approved the federal Electoral College System based on the lack of education of the colonial people on politics. Times have changed and people are more familiar with the political system. Presidential candidates promote their campaigns through social media, television and news articles which allows people to gain knowledge of the candidates and their presidential duties, themselves instead of relying on elected officials to make the decision for them. The electoral college should be abolished for reasons of it disenfranchising the people, unconstitutionally defying the 14th amendment, popular sovereignty, and
Democratic theorist, Robert Dahl once said, “…every member must have an equal and effective opportunity to vote, and all votes must be counted as equal.” This quote greatly summarizes what the Electoral College system means; every person in the United States is guaranteed one vote. Everyone should have an equal opportunity to elect who serves in the government, and we are given that opportunity through this system. This is what the Founding Fathers came up with in order to solve the problems they faced over 200 years ago. However, some have opposed this system is not fit for this democracy, and argue that other systems would work more fairly. On the contrary, I strongly believe that the Electoral College system should be kept because it is the fairest way to elect the President.