Electoral College (audience: people of the U. S. ) You walk into the voting booth on the first Tuesday of November to cast your vote for who you think should be President. You take your ballot into the box believing, as most people do, that your vote will be counted along with the rest of the population. You do this because you believe it could be the deciding vote for the presidential race. Well, you are horribly mistaken.
What you may not realize is that the Electoral College actually elects the President, not the individual voters. The Electoral College is an outdated, flawed institution that does not reflect the majority of the country’s opinion, and, therefore, it should be abolished and replaced by a direct election, or at the very least it should be reformed, using a method called “Allocating the Electoral Vote.” This system of presidential selection is the product of a 200 year old debate over who should select the President and why. In 1787, the framers of the Constitution respected the principles of Federalists and Republicans so they developed a compromise between those who felt that Congress should select the President and those who felt that the states should. In 1788, the Electoral College was indoctrinated and placed into operation. The College was to allow people say in who led them, but it was also to protect against the general public’s ignorance of politics (The Electoral College 1).
The Electoral College has remained relatively unchanged in form and function since 1787, the year of its formulation, and this, in itself, poses a problem because in 200 years the stakes have changed, yet the College has not. Today the Electoral College system works like this. Every ten years the census figures determine the number of representatives for each state. This number plus two, representing the two senators, equals how many electors each state has.
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Washington, DC has three electors. Each state has the right to decide how to select these electors, with 48 using the general ticket system, while two, Maine and Nebraska, use the district system. In the general ticket system there is a direct vote election held in each state and the winner of the vote gets all of the states electoral votes. In Maine and Nebraska, there is an election held in each congressional district.
The winner of every district gets one electoral vote, and the candidate with the most electoral votes gets the remaining two electoral votes. In 24 states the electors are required to vote as pledged, while in the rest of the country electors are not legally bound to voting for the candidate who won their state. When all the electoral votes are counted, if a candidate gets more than half the votes (270), he becomes the new President. If there is no majority, then the election goes into the House of Representatives where each state is given one vote and they vote on the top three candidates. If a candidate gets a majority vote, then he becomes President; if not, voting continues until a majority is reached and the speaker of the House becomes the temporary President (How 1, 2).
There are three major problems to the current Electoral College system.
First, a President can be elected to office even if he does not win the popular vote of the nation, which is a direct indication of what the people want. Another problem is that all electors are not restricted by law to vote for the candidate who wins their state, and therefore they have the privilege to put their states electoral votes towards any candidate they so choose. Finally, the system for electing a President if no electoral majority is reached defeats the whole purpose of the Electoral College, by giving every state one vote (The Electoral College 11-13).
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Consider this: in the presidential race of 1888 between Grover Cleveland and Benjamin Harrison, Cleveland won the popular vote by over 100, 000 votes, but when broken down into Electoral College votes, Harrison won by a large margin. This means that many more people voted for Cleveland than for Harrison, they just did not live in the same state. In the more recent election of the year 2000 there was a similar situation.
Albert Gore won the popular vote with 50, 996, 582 votes, while George W. Bush received 50, 456, 062 votes. However, Bush won the presidency because he received 271 electoral votes, while Gore only received 266 (2000 Presidential).
Because of this the argument over the popular vote versus the Electoral College remains at the forefront of the Electoral College reform movement (The Electoral College 8).
Under the assumption that all states used the general ticket system, all electors were faithful, and there were three candidates, it would require only a 15% popular vote to win the presidency. This is because the 39 smaller states in the U.
S. have a much proportionally larger vote than the larger states. If a President receives 49% of the vote in a state, he walks away with nothing to show for it in terms of electoral votes. Under the general ticket system it is possible for a good strategist to ignore 78% of the nation in trying to get his President elected.
Also note that only 49% of the nation actually votes, meaning the outcome of an election, theoretically, could represent only 12% of the population (Frequently 1).
It is commonly thought that the only way to change the voting system is to pass an amendment to the Constitution. There are 39 generally smaller states in the U. S. , which hold a majority in the senate, and also hold a majority in the ratifying of the constitution. The Electoral College gives the proportional advantage to these smaller states, thus it would be extremely difficult to pass an amendment that would take away power from the smaller states and give that power to a direct popular election.
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However, a direct popular election is not the only way to change the Electoral College system (Frequently 1).
There is an easier, but similarly effective, method of change, which is called ‘Allocating the Electoral Vote.’ In this method the states hold a popular election and the electoral votes are allocated by percentage. Thus if a state had ten electoral votes, and candidate A received 70% of the popular vote, and candidate B received 18% of the vote, and candidate C received 12% of the vote, then candidate A would receive seven electoral votes, B would get two electoral votes, and C would get one vote. In a worse case scenario, a President could be elected with a minimum of 42% of the popular vote.
While this is not as accurate as a direct popular vote, it is much more accurate than the current system. The reason this system does not require a constitutional amendment is because it can be imposed on an individual state basis. In order for this system to work properly, however, it must also be part of state legislation to require the electors to vote on what they have pledged to vote (The Electoral College 13).
Although the Electoral College system was appropriate when it was conceived, and worked well according to the desires of the Constitutional framers, it does not conform to the desires of today’s well-educated population. One of the key ideas behind the creation of the Electoral College lied in the framer’s base mistrust in the people of America. In 1787 the people of America were uneducated farmers and merchants, while today the people of America are well educated, well informed, well represented, and more than worthy of being in direct control of the election of America’s highest office, the presidency..
