The Electoral College in The United States

The political system many of us know today as the Electoral College is one that has been in place in our country for over 100 years. The Electoral College is a system that helps determine who is elected as President and Vice President during major elections. The Electoral College is the primary source of determining who is elected. This system although having withheld through the times and stayed in place is not effective to me, and can lead to unfair elections in the eyes of some American People.

When Americans vote for president, they are actually voting for presidential electors, who are known as a whole to be the electoral college. These electors, who are elected by citizens of the United States, are the ones that elect the chief executive. The electoral college has shaped the past, present, and future of the United States ever since it was constructed by the Constitutional Convention of 1787. The electoral college was created with fair and good intentions.

The 2000 President Election isn’t considered to be the typical election that occurs every four years in our society. I am opening up the discussion of this important topic in American presidential history by first sharing a fact that not many people may know: there have been three previous presidential elections in which one candidate won the popular vote but not the electoral vote and lost the election. The 2000 Presidential Election was considered to be one of the most highly contested elections in presidential election history (Summary). The election was between Governor George W. Bush (R-TX) and Vice President Al Gore (D-TN). On Election Day night, news stations across the country were all giving an early win of Florida to Gore and

the framers of the constitution debated many options for determining how the President of the

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.

In presidential elections, citizens do not actually vote for the candidate of their choosing, instead citizens are voting for electors known as the Electoral College. The Electoral College chooses a President, and Vice President. The Constitution gives each state a number of electors that equals the number of House of Representatives and Senate, which totals five hundred and thirty eight and also includes three electors for the District of Columbia. Each state receives a certain number of electors based on population size. The results in a state determine which electors are chosen. All electoral votes in a state go to the candidate that gets the most votes, and after state elections appointed officials certify the popular vote of each state. Two hundred and seventy votes are needed to elect a President; the candidate with the majority of the votes becomes the president.

There are many controversial arguments regarding the Electoral College. After the controversy of the 2000 election, people across the country wanted to do away with the Electoral College. Many people

The 45th President if the United States of America will be sworn in on January 2017. So let’s examine the election process leading up to this momentous occasion.

Five of the fifty-eight total United States Presidential elections in history have ended in discrepancies between the popular vote and the electoral vote; on average, the president elected into office was not actually favored by the majority of Americans almost ten percent of the time. We need to acknowledge the fact that this, along with the Electoral College system as a whole, undermines our foundation in democracy. Additionally, the Electoral College is based in slavery and oppression and is therefore not indicative of the social progress that America has made since the Constitution’s ratification. Because of this, I am proposing an amendment to eradicate the Electoral College and instead elect presidents by direct popular vote. This would end an antiquated, obsolete, and arguably undemocratic practice that continues to plague us despite centuries of progress as a nation.

The Electoral College in the United States is not a place but a process. It was a process our founding fathers established in the Constitution. It is a complicated voting system that most citizens today do not understand. The Electoral College has been in place for well over two hundred years and is unfortunately showing its age. Most people believe that when they vote in a general election for the President, they truly believe they are voting for the president. This has shown to be the case many times in the past elections, but it has happened that the candidate who won the popular vote was not elected President by the Electoral College. The Process spelled out in the Constitution as written by our founding fathers known as the Electoral College needs to be replaced with a better method that truly represents the will and vote of the American people.

What is the electoral college? For those of us who are just starting out to vote and for the ones that just don’t pay attention to how elections work, which is most of us. You will be surprised to know that you as a voter don’t vote for the President or Vice-President directly. At the polls, voters choose which candidate receives their state’s electors. Then, those electors are the ones that vote directly for President. The electoral college was established in 1787 and has been used ever since. Over the years this system has evolved and for the past 20 years the college has closely mirrored the popular vote. A lot of people use this as a rationale for saying, why keep it? In my opinion that is an argument for “Why get rid of it?

The constitution lets the Electoral College choose the winner, versus Time to end the Electoral College.

The 20000 presidential election remains and has been described by many as one of the worst scandals of the US democracy (Jacobson and Rosenfeld, 2002). The democratic contestant Albert Gore won a large number of votes than his Republican opponent, but he ended up losing the presidency bid (Montjoy & Slaton, 2005). The result of all this relied greatly on the vote tally in Florida whereby a great figure of voters were denied the vote, confusing butterfly ballots were used, vote recounts were mishandled as well as manipulated. The last verdict regarding the election was made by a 5-4 majority of the unelected U.S Supreme Court that issued a tainted as well as an adherent ruling (Heppermann & Friedman, 2013). The American constitutional structure

The Electoral College is a group of people representing the states who casts votes for the President and Vice President of the United States every four years. There have been debates over whether or not the process of how we elect the President is democratic.

Roughly twenty-five percent of the popular vote is all that is needed to win the most prestigious, powerful, and coveted position in the world. With the Electoral College and the disproportionate voting power of populations, seventy-five percent of the United States population could vote for one candidate and he wouldn’t win the election.