The Electoral College Many people do not realize that when they are voting for their presidential choice, they are really just voting for the Electoral College vote. The person who is nominated to hold the position for the Electoral College then votes for the presidential candidate. The Electoral College was put into place by the founding fathers as a compromise between election of the President by a vote in Congress and election of the President by a popular vote of qualified citizens (Archives). The Electoral College is 538 electors and the President needs at least 270 electoral votes to win the election. The number of electors equals the House of Representative and two members of Congress. Many states have the “winner-takes-all” policy, …show more content…
The biggest con to the Electoral College is that the president could win by popular vote but actually loses the race because of the Electoral College vote. This happened recently in the 2000 Presidential race with George W. Bush and Al Gore (Gore). Al Gore actually won the popular vote but because the Presidential election is determined by the Electoral College, George W. Bush became our 43rd President. Another con is the Electoral College distorts the presidential campaign by causing the candidates to focus on states with large Electoral College votes (Black). This means that if a state has little Electoral College voters, the candidates do not spend as much time campaigning in that state because they are out to get the larger states. Another con is that a President and Vice President must be voted together. The Electoral College states that an elector cannot vote for separate the candidates (Black). This means that who ever is running for President and Vice President must be voted together as a team. When you are picking the President, you are automatically picking the Vice President that is with them. The last con is that when voting for the President, you are not actually voting for the President. You are voting for the Electoral College vote and then they are voting for the …show more content…
There are many pros and cons to both sides of this argument. I feel that there is still a need for the Electoral College. It is not very often that a candidate loses by electoral vote. This system of voting allows each state to play the same part in the voting process. Without the Electoral College the biggest problem would be that smaller states would not stand a chance against the bigger states. This system may have some flaws but in the end it is the best way that we can continue to have a two-party system and run our government the way it has continued to work for so
The United States of America Electoral College is a team who’s accountable for choosing the President as well as the Vice President, virtually every four years. The United States is known not to be a “true” democracy because of the electoral college. There are rules within the United States Electoral College that are straightforward. Every state is provided several electors.
Did you know that the Electoral College was created as a compromise between those Founding fathers who wanted the president elected by Congress and those who wanted direct election by the people? Presidents are elected by a group of 538 electors, acting on behalf of the states and not by the citizens. This arrangement is called the Electoral College. Every four years, millions of United States citizens vote for a president and a vice president of the United States.
As long as a candidate gets over 50 % of a popular vote in a state, that candidate wins all of the Electoral College votes for that state (239). This allows for an unpopular candidate to win as long as he plays his cards right, and wins the right states with the most College votes. This causes candidates to focus on just a few states with close races rather than the majority of the U.S. to the detriment of most Americans. The Electoral College encourages third-parties to cause political unrest in an election.
The Electoral College is the intuition that formally elects the president. Each state has a certain amount of electors assigned to it, that number is based on how many representative that states as in congress. It is made up of 538 members which is the sum of the 435representative, 100 senators, and 3 electors given to the District of Columbia. In order to win the election a presidential candidate needs to receive a majority of the votes (270). The topic of whether the Electoral College is still a necessary part of today’s election process is highly controversial.
The Electoral College, in states where they have the winner takes all system, make voters that are voting in states that are strongly controlled by the a certain political party feel like their votes aren’t really important considering that all the electoral votes will just go to the political party that wins. This feeling like out votes don’t count is the biggest argument against the Electoral College that it should’ve been for quite a while already a popular vote decision not an Electoral College decision (Davis). This argument also goes hand and hand where a president and vice president voted into office won because of the popular vote and received a majority of the support. Also removing the Electoral College would remove the power that only a certain states have, the swing states, but the downfall is swing states will just be replaced with high population states. Some people also view the Electoral College as being undemocratic especially in large population states where the votes of the losing political party, are a large number of voters, are essentially
The smallest number of electoral votes that a state can have is 3 (2 for senate and 1 for HOR), however, since all states must have at least 3 votes, this extracts some of the voting power from the larger states (Document A). Furthermore, this system allows for candidates to focus their efforts on certain parts of the country because in order to win, only 12 out of 50 states must vote
The Electoral College has been a confusing subject and is now rising up some serious questions. Does your vote really count? What is a faithless elector? How are they chosen? What is a direct democracy?
The Electoral College is a system where each state is given a number of electoral votes determined by the number of the representatives in the state combined with two electoral votes for the number of senators, and three electoral votes from the District of Columbia, totalling five hundred and thirty eight votes. The people then vote for their candidate as president and the winning presidential candidate in that state wins the electoral vote for that
In the United States, there is a popular belief that the public decides presidential elections directly, as in a true democracy; however, this is only part of the truth, due to the Electoral College. The Electoral College is the system that the United States has in place to decide the president and vice-president, the way that it works is the United States people vote for electors who will represent them in a vote based on each states population (Jost & Giroux Sec. 1 Par. 6). The Electoral College is a widely debated topic among people in the United States, as stated in a document by Jost and Giroux “The Electoral has been controversial throughout U.S. history” (Jost & Giroux Sec. 1 Par.
This is very helpful because some people are not aware of their decision. Finally, the electoral college prevents too many third party candidates from running. Third parties don’t win but they do steal votes. These are the reasons why we should keep the electoral college and why we shouldn’t have a popular vote system.
There are many benefits of the electoral college, but there are many terrible things about it as well. I think that the electoral college needs to be removed from our process of picking the country’s president. The electoral college has some parts
This is called the electoral college. The electoral college allows people to vote for electors, who then vote for the president. They meet every presidential election, usually
Voting Rights Timeline, 2004)), thus making the invention of an electoral college to give the southern voters a chance and an equal vote to that of the northern voters. This clever and innovative way of voting introduced by Madison provides a good insight as to how we could make the entire country have a fair chance against populations of higher amounts of voters, or to voters with a specific bias, but in large populations. The electoral college works as shown: Americans vote for presidential electors, these electors elect the president of the United States. The constitution assigns each state a number of the five hundred thirty eight electors that are equal to the total of the Senate and House of Representatives delegations (Electoral College, 2016). Through this system, we can closely evaluate the real vote of Americans
The Electoral College is the process to which the United States elects the President, and the Vice President. The founders of the Constitution came up with this process. This was done to give additional power to the small states, and it was done to satisfy them. It works by the citizens of the United States electing representatives called electors. Each state is given the same amount of electors, as they are members of congress.
Every four years we hold an election to decide who will be hold the office for the President of the United States. The founding fathers established the Electoral College to keep a candidate from manipulating the publics opinion and keep them from gaining absolute power. It also was set up so that smaller states would be able to have same power or say as the bigger states (Why the Electoral College). Each state is giving “Electors” based on the number of members it has in the U.S. House of Representatives, and also gets a 2 Electors for the two members they have in the U.S. Senate. Washington D.C. however only has 3 Electors.