Electoral College Flaws

The Electoral College has been our presidential election procedure since 1787. This system was created to indirectly choose the president in a way that fits the desire of the citizens, which also prevents uninformed voters from deciding upon the country’s leader. Each state receives one electoral vote for each member of Congress, which totals up to 538 electors.

The amount is composed of the amount for each state’s U.S. Senators, including the amount of their participants that are in the U.S. House of Representatives. The electors meet in their individual state capitals to place their vote for the offices of President and even Vice President. These electors are intended to signify the desired vote which occurred the prior month. The votes are then counted and a winner is announced.

The electoral college, created in 1787 and written into federal law in 1845, is a system in which citizens of the United States vote in general elections to choose a lineup of “electors” who pledge to vote for a particular party. Established by our Founding Fathers, it is made up of 538 members and is used by the people to indirectly elect the president of the United States and the vice president of the United States. Each state, however, does not obtain an unlimited amount of electors to choose from; the number of electors is equal to the number of members of Congress (House of Representatives and Senators) each state in entitled with. A candidate must receive a majority of 270 votes in order to win the presidency, an ideology that has begun to spiral down as the years, and presidential elections, go by.

The United States government is one of the most admired and complex in the world, On the contrary one of the fundamental components that has an extensive impression on the American People and the Election is the Electoral College. Our founding fathers created The Electoral College over two hundred years ago, and it is still in effect today. They feared that having just the Popular Vote would give too much power to one person. In this paper, we will be discussing what the Electoral College is, the benefits and disadvantages of the Electoral College as well as if the Electoral College should be abolished or reconstructed.

There are several ways to elect a president who received a minority of the votes. The main way to have this happen is to have three or more candidates split the electoral votes between themselves and then have the house of repersentives vote to determine the winner. This has occurred only one time history which was in 1824 in the presidential election between: John Quincy Adams, Andrew Jackson, and Henry Clay, with the winner being John Quincy Adams. Another issue people often have with the Electoral College is the risk of a faithless elector. A faithless elector is a member of the Electoral College whose state has pledged their vote to one candidate and then the elector then votes for another.

The US’s Electoral College has always been a controversial topic. When it was written into the Constitution, it was meant as a compromise between the small and large states, and between Congress and the states (M. West). Since then, the Electoral College system has been how the United States elected its presidents. However, it continues to face criticism and many want the system to change, favoring systems such as a national popular vote instead (National Conference of State Legislatures). Despite how the US’s Electoral College effectively balances power between the states and the federal government, it is still a deeply flawed voting system due to it being based on unrealistic expectations and outdated ideals that should be changed to reflect

They would ignore the less populated areas in between. They also argue that it would be dangerous and unnecessary to replace a system that has functioned for over 200 years. Proponents of the Electoral College system defend it because they believe that the Electoral College contributes to the cohesiveness of the country by requiring a distribution of popular support to be President, enhances the status of minority interests, contributes to the political stability of the nation, and maintains a federal system of government. Proponents say that the voters of even small miniorties in a State may make the difference between winning all of the State’s electoral votes or none of the State’s electoral votes. They argue that the original design of the federal system was thought out and wisely debated.

In a twenty-first century environment, the Electoral College is unfair. Caroline Jenkins makes this case against the Electoral College: In testimony before Congress in 1997, the League of Women Voters pointed out that apart from the public outcry that would be caused by circumvention of the popular will, there are a number of other serious flaws in the Electoral College system. The Electoral College system is fundamentally unfair to voters. In a nation where voting rights are grounded in the one-person, one-vote principle, the Electoral College is a hopeless anachronism.

The United States is a government republic, with chose authorities at the elected (national), state and neighborhood levels. On a national level, the head of express, the President, is chosen in a roundabout way by the general population of each state, through an Electoral College. Today, the balloters essentially dependably vote with the well-known vote of their state. All individuals from the government council, the Congress, are straightforwardly chosen by the general population of each state. There are many chosen workplaces at the state level, each state having no less than an elective Governor and council.

America was molded by a group of individuals who felt that their voice was being drowned out by a tyrannical monarchy. After the revolution, this was resolved by creating a system that attempted to allow all people to have a say in the country’s government. The Electoral College was established as a representative way for the citizens of America to elect a leader; however, many are not satisfied with the results.

The Electoral College is established in Article Two of the U.S. Constitution, it states that “Electors shall meet in their respective states, and vote by ballot for two persons. The person having the highest number of votes shall be the President, if such number be a majority of the whole numbers of electors appointed”(Hardaway 79). The twelfth amendment modifies this procedure to require balloting for president and vice president be done separately. Although there were sixty-nine electors who participated in the first election, we now have a total of five hundred and thirty-eight. To win the presidency, a candidate must receive two hundred and seventy votes.

Being a person of politics yourself, you of all people should know that many compromises have been made over the course of the establishment of the United States. However, some of the compromises, like the electoral college, were made because of factors in the past and are now not needed in today’s modern democracy. While the electoral college once worked as a compromise in the past, it is an archaic system that unfairly represents the votes of citizens all across the nation. A popular vote should instead be utilized to fairly choose the people of power in this country and would better represent voters’ opinions. In implementing the electoral college, most states’ votes either go to one candidate or the other, leading to candidates to only campaign in swing states (Bradford Plumer 13).

The number of electors in each state is equaled two plus one for each member of the House of Representatives, and Washington DC has three votes, bringing the total number of electors to 538 (“What is the Electoral College?”). It’s a well-known fact that when the public goes to vote for a candidate they also vote for the corresponding vice president. A much less well-known fact is that they are actually voting for the electors as well; by voting democratic or republican the corresponding electors for the party are elected as well (“Electoral College” 2010). Then on the Monday after the second Wednesday of December the electors assemble in a central location in each state and cast their votes for president. In forty-eight states, there is a “winner-take-all-system” where the highest vote getter in the state gets all the electoral votes, however in two states, Maine and Nebraska, there is a proportionality system in place; where if one third of the votes are for one party and two thirds are for another, the electors will split and one third of the state electoral votes will go to one party and the rest will go to another (“What is the Electoral College?”).

The number of votes a state receives in the Electoral College is based on the state’s population. The presidential candidate who reaches 270 electoral votes is declared the winner. This system was designed in order to prevent large states from overpowering smaller states. However, there are many flaws that come with this unique system.

Electoral college has been with us since the birth of the constitution, and to this day we are still using this type of system to this day. The Electoral College is a system that the United States uses to elect our upcoming presidents and vice presidents. Each state has electors equal to their senate member and house of representatives, however who ever gets the highest popular vote in the state gets the electoral vote. The issue is the Electoral College do not give votes to the people, but to the states. Which has some unfair consequences.