The Electoral College Is The Best Interests Of All The People

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?

Despite the Electoral College system being founded by the founding fathers in America and being there as long as the Constitution exists, many people still do not have sufficient knowledge on how it works. The Electoral College does not provide honest presidential elections rather it has the potential to undo the will of people at any point from the selection of electors to the vote tallying in Congress (Shaw, 3). Electoral College in the United States has played a major role in depressing the voter's turnout. Every State is given an equal number of electoral votes despite the population and in turn, the system has put in place no measure to encourage the voters to take part in the elections. Besides, the system distorts

Most states are always republican or democratic in the way they vote. So the amount of votes is already in favor of one candidate or another before voting actually arrives.(Document 7). Since the candidates are always insured a certain number of votes, the candidates only have to worry about “swing states” or states that change their decisions every election. Since the non-swing states never decide in favor of one candidate or the other by themselves the power to elect a new president resides with whom the citizens of swing states vote for. Without an electoral college, each citizen's vote would be worth more and everyone could help determine a new president instead of the select few who are living in “swing states.” All of these reasons help to make it clear that the electoral college is a corrupt

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.

Our Founding Fathers had great concern over the topic of the government obtaining too much power over the people and with that in mind they constructed a system of indirect election where citizens would choose an elector. That system would distant the citizens from directly electing the president, avoiding any possibility to create tyranny. Their fears were about whether citizens could exercise the best judgement and their capability to fully understand and make good choices in voting. They did not want a group to go off in the wrong direction and take control over others. They thought that a chosen group of more educated and elite individuals elected by the people would be able to better interpret the situation and exercise better judgement. In a way, they were trying to safeguard democracy by instituting the Electoral College as the method to elect our presidents.

The Founders built certain protections for individual rights into this country's founding documents. The United States Constitution was one such document. In particular, such protections guard Americans who hold minority viewpoints from those who side with the majority. For example, the First Amendment protects the right of free speech to ensure that people who hold unpopular views have just as much freedom to express those views as do people who tend to agree with the majority. The United States Constitution, therefore, was intended to protect the individual rights of Americans from a tyrannical government and majority. However, today, the Electoral College does not represent the vibrant democracy into which the United States has grown.

In the “Point: Abolishing the Electoral College,” Benjamin Bolinger, a licensed lawyer who can practice law in Colorado and Pennsylvania, argues that the Electoral College needs to be abolished for the American democracy. Bolinger examines that some states with a little population have large number of electoral college compare to those states with larger populations. He believes that the Electoral College damages the value of democratic government by leaving

The continuation of the Electoral College is constantly debated. Some want to discontinue the system while others want keep it. There are several arguments used by those who want to continue the system. One argument by Electoral College Advocates is the Electoral College balances the power of the large and small states in elections. These advocates state that doing away with the Electoral College would give the states with larger populations too much power in the outcome of elections. The advocates feel that presidential candidates will spend their resources on the states with the largest amount of voters. These advocates also believe that the Electoral College protects minorities’ interests. Some believe that without the Electoral College candidates would spend their time and resources on the majority of nation because that is where most of the votes will come from. Some advocates also argue that the Electoral College helps maintain the federal character of the United States. They argue that the system gives both the people and the states an important role in the electing of a president.

Rhetorical Analysis: The primary audience for this paper includes every citizen aged eighteen and above eligible to vote in the United States. The proposed topic mostly concerns these individuals due to the fact, they are affected by presidential voting institutions. Throughout this paper, I will be arguing in favor of the Electoral College, with an end goal of persuading my audience of the benefits of the system.

This quote by Holcomb a professor of economics gives a good understanding of the fathers purpose for making the college: “In addition to wanting to prevent a tyranny of the majority, the electoral college was designed to weight smaller states more than proportionally relative to their populations, although as discussed below, the current system actually gives the advantage to more populous states”. Even though the small states do not have as much representation as the larger states they still play an integral role in the election of the president. It also shows how the college stops tyranny of the majority because the fathers knew how easy it would be for the majority to take over and leave the minority behind, and that would be very detrimental to the

“The Electoral College in the US is a body of people representing the states of the US, who formally cast votes for the election of the president and the vice president.” The Electoral College has been the system of voting in the US since 1787, but with the growing and changing of our country, it has been a very controversial topic whether or not to keep the system in place. On five separate occasions in the history of our country, the Electoral College has voted against majority rules for the nation’s president. Many may say that this is an infringement on the rights of the people themselves to vote for their own president, because in these five instances, it truly was left to a small group of people

Two hundred and twenty-nine years ago, our founding fathers had debated on which route to take when electing our President. In 1787, the “Committee of Eleven” had come to a compromise, and created the Electoral College, which is a group of individuals elected by the people to cast votes for the presidency. The Electoral College is described as “a compromise between election of the president by Congress and election by popular vote” (Price). The reason behind the Electoral College was to preserve “the sense of the people,” while ensuring that our president is chosen “by men most capable of analyzing the qualities adapted to the station, and acting under

The Electoral College was created to confirm the next president of the United States in a way that could override the public decision if it was deemed uneducated and not in their best interests by the educated elite (Janda et al. 246). While the Electoral College was meant to serve as a safeguard against the American people and their own downfalls, it has never worked that way (Gardner lecture 12 September, 2017). The Electoral college chooses a president for the people, no longer making the president the “people’s choice” (Levinson 82).

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

The Electoral College has been in effect since the dawn of the United States’ government. This system is composed out of a group of electors that decide the next president of the United States. Each elector pledges to vote for a certain candidate. When the population votes, the ballots go to the electors and in turn the electors of that state vote for the candidate (“Voting”, 2012). The delegates of the Constitutional Convention created the Electoral College as “a means of nominating worthy candidates,” although the original purpose has warped throughout time (“The Electoral College”, 2009). Despite the use of this every election year, there is controversy over the electoral college because it has failed in the past to represent the majority vote of the citizens.