Electoral College Voting

Electoral College has maintained for hundreds of years and it’s time for a change because of the more and more serious problems it is causing. These are some reasons why we should consider replacing this system with a new more efficient one. Firstly, Electoral College creates the possibility for the candidate who loses the popular vote but wins the electoral vote to become president. In the much-publicized election of 2000, Vice President Al Gore beat Governor George W. Bush by more than 500,000 votes in the national popular tally but lost in the Electoral College because of a last-minute, 537-vote margin in Florida .

Voting is important to American Democracy because it provides people an opportunity to voice their opinion and vote for what they believe in, it holds elected officials accountable for their behavior while in office, and it prevents a minority from dictating the policies of a majority. The 15th Amendment has made the American voting process more democratic, African Americans could not vote because of their skin. When the new year began in 1869, the Republicans were ready to introduce a constitutional amendment guaranteeing the black man’s right to vote. For two months, Congress considered the proposed amendment. Several versions of the amendment were submitted, debated, rejected and then reconsidered in both the House and Senate.

Voting is an important activity which is helpful in expressing the insights, ideologies and motivations of a mass for political parties. Voter eligibility in both national and state election has boundaries and limitations. In some states, only adult white male property owners having certain religious believes had the privilege to vote. As a result, only five percent were eligible to vote in 1790. There were other obstructions such as white only primaries, literacy tests, race, gender and age.

The Electoral College is a crucial component of how the President of The United States is elected. The votes cast by the Electoral College can outweigh the popular vote of the American public, so it would be consequential for the American public to be aware of the Electoral College and have at least a basic understanding of how it works. This, however, is sadly not the case. Even some of today’s elected officials are not up to date on how the government works. The Intercollegiate Studies Institute ran a poll of twenty-five hundred randomly selected Americans, out of the members of that poll that were elected officials only fifty-three percent of them answered correctly when asked if they knew what the Electoral College’s function was.

The Electoral College system, in our government today, is made up of a winner-take-all system. The winner take all system demonstrates that whichever candidate that receives the most votes wins all of the electoral points and the other candidate receives nothing. The Electoral College system enacts the candidates of both parties to only visit the larger states, in which they know they will most likely receive the most electoral points. This is not technically fair because each state is not getting proper representation. When states disagree, with one candidate’s views on a particular issue, they can swing and vote for the other candidate causing the other candidate to alter their approach to win back the state.

The Electoral College had an interesting part in the election of 1824. By this time, the Federalist Party was no longer, which meant the United States was being dominated by the Democratic-Republicans, who led the one party system. There were four candidates running for President in the election of 1824. These candidates were Andrew Jackson, Henry Clay, William Crawford and John Quincy Adams. Andrew Jackson was the winner according to the Electoral College, with ninety-nine votes.

t 's said we all have one vote no matter how rich, poor, tall, short, smart, or uninformed, we get one vote and elections are the great equalizer as everybody is reduced to "one vote." (Wrong) When it comes to the US presidential elections, some voters have more influence than others. When we vote, we aren’t voting for the President. We are voting to encourage our state’s Electoral College members to vote a certain way. And if the past and current elections hold, it looks like one candidate will win the electoral vote while another wins the popular vote as we saw in the 2017 election.

The Electoral College is a system stated in the Clause 2 of Section 1 in the Article II of the United States Constitution to elect the President of the United States. According to the Constitution, each state needs to appoint electors, who in turn vote to select the President. The number of electors from each state should be the same as the number of Senators and Representatives that the state entitled in the Congress. Citizens from each state choose the electors through elections. The electors then cast the citizens’ votes for the candidate they prefer.

People are not necessary informative of the voting system right now, the truth is that we, as voters, are not getting our votes counted like they should be. Even if we vote, if our choice of candidacy's number of votes are more than the opposed candiddate's number of votes, clearly, the state's vote is for the candidate with a lot of votes. Now let's say we have 47% and the opposed candidate has 53%. That 47% means nothing because the 53% has outnumbered our choice of candidacy which mean a big lost for us. Which clearly is unjust for the American voters.

Despite the waning support for amending the constitution to alter the way American’s cast their ballots, throughout each election cycle media outlets discuss the fear surrounding the minority candidate, in terms of the popular vote, becoming the President. In an interesting article published by Forbes magazine just before the 2012 elections Taylor Broderick discusses the fifteenth, nineteenth, and twenty-sixth amendments and explains how these create a precedent for altering the U.S. voting system through amending the Constitution (Brodarick, 2012). He also argues that the Electoral College incites voter apathy in states which are not saturated with campaign efforts. In other words, people are more likely to participate in an election if they live in swing-states where candidates are actively campaigning. For these reasons, along with American’s historical opposition, Broderick believes politicians should gain public support for Congressional action, as Bayh did in the late 1960s, to throw out the current voting procedure.

While mandatory voting can violate an American's freedom of choice, the effects of it on the country would be helpful in many ways. Mandatory voting other known as compulsory voting is legal in 22 countries. But there is one country that doesn't follow--America. With mandatory voting, countries receive a greater amount of votes with increasing accuracy. If the United States incorporates mandatory voting in their current voting system, it will improve our country for the better politically, economically, and socially.