The Importance Of The Electoral College

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.

Another problem surrounding the Electoral College system is that it allows one-party states, states that almost always go to one party. In this context, a Democrat who casts a vote in a mostly Republican state feels that his vote is wasted because of no way that state will be won by a Democrat. Besides, the system is based on two-party elections, the Democrat and the Republican leaving Americans with two candidates to choose (Belenky, 364). The voters end up picking the candidate with fewer issues rather than the one they support. In my opinion, people feel that Electoral College has single-handedly defeated

The voting process in America appears straightforward, but it is a very complex, complicated system. The Electoral College is America’s current voting system. The Electoral College still serves its intended purpose, but with increasing political activity among Americans it has caused a need to reform this process. Research suggests that the Electoral College system should be amended because it poorly illustrates democracy, is outdated and the majority of Americans are in favor of abolishing the system.

When the Constitutional Convention gathered in 1784 they had the difficult task of determining how our government should be assembled and what systems we should use to elect them. They quickly decided congress should have the powers to pass laws and the people should elect these people to ensure they are following the will of the people. But who should elect the president?

The Electoral College has a significant role in the government in the United States. However, many people don’t actually know what the Electoral College is, some think it’s an undemocratic way of electing our President while some think it to be an actual college. To understand the Electoral College and the possible reform, we need to look at the historical context such as why our Founding Fathers put this system in place and how this system has affected our growing nation.

In this week’s discussion we talked about if the Electoral College and if it is important or not in our country today. Do we really need to have the Electoral College? I believe it is important in our country today and I believe we should try to keep it in our country for as long as we can.

Another reason that the Electoral College is a good way to choose our president is because it provides states rights and popular sovereignty. The people are still voting but not directly and states have some power as well because of their electoral votes.

Throughout the time line of America, the electoral college has made a negative impact. There are several negative out comes from having the electoral college. The United States has states that have a larger amount of electoral college. There are states several states that are worth more electoral votes than others. Presidential candidates need at least 270 votes to win an election. This creates the problem of paying little to no attention to states with small electoral votes. Candidates often focused on states with higher amounts of electoral votes such as: California (55), Texas (38), New York (29), Florida (29), Illinois (20) and Pennsylvania (20). It was often the strategy to have rallies in these areas to get ahead in electoral votes. “The system of the Electoral College offers power to the small, less populated states, which is unfair with the larger states. It improves that small

Presidential elections in the United States are commonly unfair. One might think that the presidential candidate who receives the majority popular vote would be elected president. This is not always true, because of the Electoral College, which is a “winner-take-all” system. Ever since the election of 1824, when Andrew Jackson ran against John Quincy Adams who did not win the popular vote and was elected into office because of the Electoral College, many other candidates have been cheated out of winning. The Electoral College should not stand any longer because in many elections it has prevented the candidate that the majority of the citizens voted for from winning. It would be difficult if there were to be tie in the Electoral

Since past and current Americans have given so much for our right to vote, the Electoral College serves as a way to make sure every ballot counts. There are two main reasons why I support this governing body. First, this group has existed since the Founding Fathers created it in 1787 because it adds on to the system of checks and balances our country was built on. Michael W. McConnell, a professor at Stanford Law School, writes, “The Founders opted for the Electoral College because the two leading alternatives, election by Congress and by popular vote, were thought to have serious defects”(McConnell 23). If we were to eliminate it, the system of check and balances so carefully composed over 100 years ago would be ruined. In addition, this section

The question of how to select the president was one of the most contentious considered by the Constitutional Convention in 1787, with big and small states, slave- and free-states pushing their interests. As a result, in Article 2, section 1 of the Constitution, the Electoral College is set up. The delegates of the Constitutional Convention decided on this system of indirect election of the president. This resulted because some delegates supported a direct election by citizens while others favored having Congress choose the president. Still others thought that state legislatures should make the choice. Originally, each state would choose electors equal in number to its representatives and senators. The electors would vote for two candidates each, at least one of whom had to be from another state. The person that would end up receiving the most votes would become President; the runner-up became the Vice President. If no person received a majority, the House of Representatives would choose from the leading three candidates, somewhat similar to our current rule in case of neither candidate garnering at least 270 electoral votes. However today, to become President, a candidate must win 270 electoral votes, an absolute majority. The College currently consists of 538 electors, the total number of representatives and senators, plus 3 electors for the District of Columbia. Also, candidates are now nominated to run only for president or only for vice president. Electors vote for

The United States of America will henceforth, in elections, use only the majoritarian process to decide the electors. Instead of the Electoral College, and to insure a popular vote of the candidates, votes will be cast and counted as per regular protocol, but the majority vote will be taken as the elected member by the US citizens.

All around the world there are many different ways through which countries decide their leader, in America for instance we use a unique system called the Electoral College. Every person in the U.S. who is 18 years old and above can vote in the presidential elections, this is called the popular vote. A person while voting may think his and every other person’s vote would determine the next president, but this isn't entirely true. What really happens is that the system called the Electoral College takes place which then decides the next president. It consists of 538 electors who cast votes to determine the next president and vice president, which is known as the electoral vote. When people vote, their votes aren’t really gathered up and counted to see who won a certain state but what happens is that these votes determine which candidates would receive the electors of the state. Different states have different number of electors which depend on the number of the state's Senators and the House Representatives which in turn depends on the population as the number of the House Representatives depends on the number of people in a state. Most of the time the electors vote for the person who won the popular vote either because of the law of the state or because of the pledge they took but sometimes this does not happen and the elector who doesn't vote according to his pledge is considered a faithless elector. (“What is the Electoral College” , n.d)

Merriam-Webster’s dictionary defines college as a noun meaning “a body of clergy living together and supported by a foundation.” This word, though, is used to represent two of the most important institutions in American society: our Universities and the Electoral College. Why, then, does the lightest amount of research reveal this word is steeped in hatred and bigotry? Why does something that denotes two pillars of American life embody our deepest and darkest regret as a country? Irony aside, it is important to note why and how people of color, especially those whose family tree can trace back to times of enslavement, have been disenfranchised by the elite in America for years. In fact, both the Electoral College and American Educational Colleges were set up in a way to discourage participation in “white” society by black people.

In 1787, the Founding Fathers implemented the Electoral College into the United States Constitution as a safeguard against allowing the common man to elect the President. Alexander Hamilton wrote in “The Federalist Papers,” the Constitution is designed to ensure “that the office of President will never fall to the lot of any man who is not in an eminent degree endowed with the requisite qualifications” (Miller, 2008). The forefathers held strong to their belief that there needed to be a barrier between the people and election of the president, and to not let direct democracy overrule the will of the people. Prior to this, our government had been based on the Articles of Confederation, which had no executive branch or even a single leader for that matter. After eleven years of independence, the delegates realized our struggling nation needed to change the way it elects its Commander in Chief. More recently however, the Electoral College has come under large scrutiny in the 2016 Presidential Election in which Donald Trump lost the general election to Hillary Clinton by over 2.8 million votes and won the Electoral College by 74 votes. Prior to this, it only occurred four other times in this nation’s history: 1824, 1876, 1888, and in 2000. No other democratic country has a similar system as ours, where voters chose an intervening body whose only function is to choose who should lead the country. So that begs the question: Why do we still need the Electoral College? While a vast