State electoral vote results are reported to Congress and other designated authorities; they are then counted and declared at a joint session of Congress held on January 6 of the year after the election; Congress may, however, change this date by joint resolution. My stance to abolish the Electoral College has drawn some ire. Legendary commentator George Will once wrote an entire column to criticize me for my concerns that the Electoral College might lead to a new constitutional crisis when I said as much in the presidential contest in 1992. Will himself left the party for this, by Naomi Schaefer Riley, Opinion Contributor, Schumer, Jeffries ask Murdoch to stop Fox hosts lying about 2020 election, Eli Lilly caps insulin costs at $35 per month, Watch live: Garland testifies before Senate panel at oversight hearing, EPA to award $250 million in IRA funds to reduce climate pollution. majority of the people are not always represented in the Electoral College, This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google. Pros And Cons Of Abolishing The Electoral College. When candidates only visit a few states and even a few regions in those few states, you really see a warping of policy priorities. Last week, we released our initial House ratings for 2024. In this All states and the District of Columbia get one electoral vote for each of their US senators and representatives. [5] Sabato, L. J. These issues still affect out modern day political sphere. Calls for reforming the College grow louder every time it produces as the winner a presidential candidate who lost the popular vote. But Madison used an already accepted formula of state representation. Certainly not many of the Republicans I know and respect who have not become Democrats but cannot stand their party under Trump. (04.06 MC) The President of the United States cannot stand above the battle engaging in vague little sermons on brotherhood. The Electoral College is unfair and should be . The site offers no paid services and is funded entirely by advertising. The general ticket system has been favored since the nineteenth century, as it tends to magnify the winning candidates victory margin within states, etc. Four were appointed by Democratic presidents. Although he has virtually no chance of succeeding, he could not care less that he was subverting our democratic form of government. Find out what to do if this happens here. Mission: Providing a framework to improve your investing PROCESS, while collecting newsworthy information about trends in business, politics and tech areas. TheDigitalArtist / Pixabay. Necessary cookies are absolutely essential for the website to function properly. Liberty Mason started this petition to United States Supreme Court and 2 others Abolish the Electoral College I want to keep this short and simple as possible. a. Get updates on the latest posts and more from ValueWalk straight to your inbox. 0 . Why is that a big deal? Protestors demonstrate against President-elect Donald Trump in Philadelphia in 2016. They argue that selecting a President via state Electors is undemocratic because it gives the Electors discretion, allows the loser of the popular vote to become President, and breaks the principle of one-man-one-vote. method is known as the Electoral College. Click to email a link to a friend (Opens in new window), Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window), Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window), Presidential System Much Less Dangerous: ShashiTharoor, Parliament Faces Terminal Decline if Speaker Isnt Independent: ArvindDatar, https://history.house.gov/Institution/Electoral-College/Electoral-College/, https://history.house.gov/Institution/Origins-Development/Electoral-College/, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/19/opinion/time-to-end-the-electoral-college.html?action=click&module=RelatedLinks&pgtype=Article, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/17/books/review/let-the-people-pick-the-president-jesse-wegman.html, https://www.vox.com/21142223/electoral-college-2020-election-jesse-wegman, https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2021/01/the-electoral-college-is-racist-heres-how-to-kill-it-without-a-constitutional-amendment/, https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-electoral-college-saved-the-election-11610133725, https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/europpblog/2012/06/20/duvergers-law-is-dead/, https://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/1909#Elliot_1314-05_2172, https://www.archives.gov/federal-register/electoral-college/faq.html#changes, Nehrus Role in Constitution-Making Far Greater than Ambedkar. Other than that, he says, the history of suffrage has been a very mixed bag: Full of . Will closed his piece by saying what I called a catastrophe can generate moderate mandates for parties that seek a broad consensus., I will concede that the Electoral College might ensure the stability of the two party system. The United States, Presidential elections provide a level of legitimacy to each new administration by following the will of the people (Clayton 2007; Koza 2016). , Because a states number of electors is based on total population, not actual voters, it gives the states no incentive to enfranchise new groups of people, or to make voting easier for those eligible. This builds trust in institutions and the weight of individual voters in a country where faith in the government remains at historic lows. The electoral "college" is an example. Why should the Electoral College be abolished? When every ballot is counted in the same way, then the winner becomes easier to declare. There are two reasons they want to abolish the Electoral College: One, of course, is Trump. Texas Governor George W. Bush, the Republican, was ahead of Vice President Al Gore, a Democrat, by a few hundred votes, So clearly, a full count and a subsequent recount would be needed. The crisis of 1824 then, represented really the collapse of the old system, and an effort to re-institute it in other terms. Both sides agreed to let the U.S. Supreme Court settle the outcome once and for all. Illing: A central focus of your book is this idea that ending the Electoral College would change the way candidates campaign and therefore the sorts of issues they prioritize. Josh Chafetz wrote, Its hard to imagine a political institution less suited to a 21st-century liberal democracy than the Electoral College. And state governments retained the power to appoint the electors. They have long provided what may be, Which of these correctly compares the libertarian and conservative ideals of a model economy? The College is also a brilliant alternative to runoff elections. The term "college" signifies the original intent that it was to be made up of "political wise men." The Electoral College was also the result of a couple of compromises. Everyone gets one vote. They accept that the Electoral College system mays have its faults, but it is the best system to fairly represent the diverse and vast sections of the United States and the people who reside in both city and rural areas (Miller 2012; Miller 2011). It preserved states rights, increased the independence of the executive branch, and avoided the danger of provincialism involved in popular election. The College delivers a Chief Executive vetted not just by the people of every state but also by their state governments. LET'S ABOLISH THE ELECTORAL COLLEGE Are the people smart enough to choose their own leader? After reading the article by Thomas Neale, the Electoral College is fair and gives each state a more equal voice in the presidential election based on population census. This cookie is set by GDPR Cookie Consent plugin. This helped our country pick a winner in many presidential elections where there were multiple candidates. He must have forgotten the math they taught him at the University of Pennsylvania. EssaySauce.com is a completely free resource for students. The Electoral College consists of electors in each state that cast their votes for the president based on how their constituents voted in the general election. The Electoral College was established by the framers of the Constitution as a last-minute deal, a gift to Southern states trying to protect slaveholders power and leverage the three-fifths compromise. Students can use our free essays as examples to help them when writing their own work. Wegman: This idea that somehow small states currently have a voice under the Electoral College system, and that they would lose that voice under a popular vote, is just the exact inverse of reality. They did not trust that voters would have enough information to make a good choice. The Electoral College was and continues to be an undemocratic system that stands as an obstacle for the United States to become a real democracy. Legendary commentator George Will once wrote an, to criticize me for my concerns that the Electoral College might lead to a new constitutional crisis when I said as much in the presidential contest in 1992. The disparity in populations when our founders set up this system was nothing compared to today. New York: Walker Publishing. That is why it was written in the Constitution. We saw this happen in the 2016 election with Donald J. Trump losing the Popular vote but won the Electoral vote and thus the 2016 election. The Electoral College can result in a president who lost the popular vote winning the election, as seen in the 2000 and 2016 elections. Since the 18th century, the United States has used the Electoral College, made up of 538 individual electors, to elect its presidents instead of going by the popular vote. If 60,000 votes went the other way in Ohio, George W. Bush would have won the national popular vote by 3 million votes, but John Kerry wouldve been elected. I am a fan of rural Americans and remain devoted to the success of our farmers and heartland. The extra attention of our presidential candidates to the swing states shows how the Electoral College adds to the countrys democratic vitality. Faithless Electors, those who break their pledge, are rare and have never determined the outcome of a presidential election. In this extraordinarily strange election year, debating the Electoral College . The alternative systems are the district plan and the proportional plan. Please speak to a licensed financial professional before making any investment decisions. Campaigns would focus on large, voter-rich metropolitan areas and media markets, and on appeals to national demographic and occupational groups. Could the BJP adopt the Presidential System? It empowers rural states, allows presidential candidates to moderate their views to form broad. Yes. These cookies track visitors across websites and collect information to provide customized ads. Brennan sees hung jury among intelligence community on COVID origins, Watch live: House panel holds hearing on the fentanyl crisis, Are we headed toward a dystopian online world? In 1787 the Electoral College was created by the framers of the Constitution. This is unfair because the small states are taking more seats than they should dictating the election. Unlike the British and other systems prevalent at the time, it gave American citizens the choice of their own chief executive. The main complaints against the Electoral College are that it can elect someone who didnt win the nationwide popular vote and that it causes candidates to campaign heavily in battleground states while ignoring those they think they are certain to carry or not. But it is not only essential for selecting a chief executive vetted by the entire country, it is vital for nurturing Americas federalism, separation of powers, executive accountability, diversity, and two-party polity. In effect voters in the US never vote for the President but cast their ballots instructing electors . This has heightened calls to abolish what some say is an antiquated system of electors. The problem was fixed by the Twelfth Amendment which required Electors to denote the position along with their vote. The Electoral College is a terrible system designed for electing the president of the United States. Agreeing on a method of selecting the chief executive was one of the most difficult choices made by the Constitutional Convention. The immense moral authority of the White House must be used to. There are several actions that could trigger this block including submitting a certain word or phrase, a SQL command or malformed data. Will you do the same? For example, they created the Electoral College because news traveled slowly, so people werent as informed about the candidates. The Electoral College is, essentially, a vestigial structure a leftover from a bygone era in which the founders specifically did not want a nationwide vote of the American people to choose . SEPTEMBER 15, 2020. The Electoral College aims for presidents who represent the nations great diversity, by obliging them to earn votes across many states and regions. However, technology has made it so that the information . It distorts representation, arguably hinders democratic process and has a large impact on the outcome of a presidential election for better and for worse. Breitbart reported: He called the U.S. system of providing equal representation to Americans across the country in the presidential election, "one of those bad compromises we made at day one in this country." Those who wish to abolish the system have laid out plans to replace the system with a more Popular vote oriented system which counts each individual vote directly (Neale 2004). But I do wonder if he and other defenders of the Electoral College still believe that any of these arguments are worth holding onto. The method was ultimately settled in the last days by the 11-member Brearly Committee, which proposed election by special Electors chosen by the state legislatures. The framers at the Constitutional Convention, They believed it wasnt a good idea for the people to elect the president, They were also working to balance the needs of small and large states, as well as slave and. The cookie is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Other. All our essays are uploaded by volunteers. However, nowadays registered voters can get their news instantly, thus are informed about the candidates. According to Civis Analytics poll, 62 percent of the people that voted in the 2016 election would like to abolish the Electoral College. Sign up below! The Founding Fathers knew that there needed to be a system like an electoral college in place to ensure the USA flourishes. On November 8th, 2016 Donald Trump was elected president because the Electoral College voted for him. Now, with an aspiring autocrat refusing to give up his presidency even after a clear-cut electoral defeat, our democratic form of government is being degraded, if not entirely destroyed. Parliamentary Vs. Presidential Government in Pakistan, The 'Real' British Constitution by Walter Bagehot, Parliamentary Flaws and How Presidential System Avoids Them, Presidential System Will Provide India a More Robust Democracy. And if you have a campaign that is forced to pay attention to everyone in the country and has to treat every vote as equally important, which is what a popular vote election would be, this would solve these problems and it would be more fair to the country as a whole. The 2016 presidential election has sparked an unprecedented interest in the Electoral College. The January 6 committee could have called on Congress to begin the process of amending the Constitution to abolish the Electoral College, while at the same time recognizing the difficulties . Answer key is compulsory to check all the results. Although this is very unlikely to happen, the fact that a candidate could win the elections with only 21.8 percent of the popular vote clearly shows that the majority of the people are not always represented in the Electoral College. It was also a savvy compromise. The Electoral College system benefits smaller states and . The electoral college started with the constitution of the united states, it cited how many electors each state is able to have. Past proposals for change by constitutional amendment have included various reform options and direct popular election, which would eliminate the Electoral College system, but no substantive action on this issue, has been taken in Congress for more than 20 years. Many people have talked about abolishing the Electoral College like president Donald J. Trump as he said I would rather have a popular election but are not taking action. I am not alone in holding this perspective. When Americans vote for a President and Vice President, they are actually choosing presidential electors, known collectively as the Electoral College. 69.163.234.236 * This essay may have been previously published on Essay.uk.com at an earlier date. Your vote encourages the electoral college to vote for your nominee What's the system called when a candidate for president gets the majority of the dates popular vote also gets all that states electoral votes Winner take all What's the other system where delegates are divided based on each districts popular vote Proportional That is a laborious process and a constitutional amendment to abolish the Electoral College would require significant consensusat least two-thirds affirmation from both the House and Senate,. It's electors who decide elections, and there is a . Now, Republicans will have a 222-213 majority once Rep.-elect Jennifer McClellan (D, VA-4) is sworn into the House following her special election win last week. This not only brings federal attention to each state, but provides a fillip to Americas diversity. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. Will himself left the party for this actual reason in 2016. Most states however use oaths and penalties to bind them. They think it antiquated, irrational and undemocratic and argue for scrapping it in favor of a national popular vote. One may say that we should keep the Electoral College in place because the Founding Fathers had valid reasons for it, but some dont apply anymore. Without the College, a candidate could win the Presidency by focusing on just a few large states, or by making populist promises harmful to Americas federalism. The Founders created the Electoral College as a new method of direct election. One thing is for certain though, it's been almost 200 years since Andrew Jackson proposed the abolition of the Electoral College, and yet it is still in place. Small states kept the same number of electors as their representatives in the national legislature. It arose from a convoluted compromise hammered out late in the Constitutional Convention, and the rise of political parties in the late 18th century and the spread of democratic ideals in the early 19th quickly undermined its rationales. The Electoral College is also essential to our nations political cohesiveness. Interestingly, the electoral vote totals of Biden in 2020 and Trump in 2016 were identical - 306. My stance to abolish the Electoral College has drawn some ire. If 60,000 votes went the other way in Ohio, George W. Bush would have won the national popular. When selecting the President, we use the Electoral college as a basis for representing the will of the people. 6. It was compromise between the states and the people. Trump proved in 2016 that you could secure the presidential election by hurling contempt at our cities and blue states, mocking urban ethnic and racial diversity, dividing the country, and losing the popular vote. Wegman: Youre right that the college has typically leaned toward one party or the other that was true in 2016 and almost certainly true for 2020. Abraham Lincoln, for example, was elected in a four-way race, receiving only 40% of the popular vote but 180 of the required 303 Electoral College votes. Despite the new law, some still think the Electoral College is outdated and should be abolished in favor of a national popular vote system. The Electoral College is a favorite punching bag for those who think America should be a more majoritarian country. Save it to your . The electors cast separate ballots for President and Vice President, after which the Electoral College ceases to exist until the next presidential election. 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The choice of their own chief executive was one of the Electoral College already accepted formula of state.... Can use our free essays as examples to help them when writing their own leader paid... College has drawn some ire from ValueWalk straight to your inbox the outcome of a model economy our! Americans and remain devoted to the swing states shows how the Electoral College always represented in Constitution... Of the United states, allows presidential candidates to moderate their views to form broad the. In other terms most states however use oaths and penalties to bind them candidate who lost the popular.... And other defenders of the United states, allows presidential candidates to the success of our farmers heartland! Ensure the USA flourishes College voted for him wonder if he and other defenders of the people are not represented... A basis for representing the will of the people are not always represented in the category ``.. Not care less that he was subverting our democratic form of government have never determined outcome. Voter-Rich metropolitan areas and media markets, and there is a favorite punching bag for those who break pledge! ; S electors who decide elections, and on appeals to national and! The latest posts and let's abolish the electoral college answer key from ValueWalk straight to your inbox according to Civis Analytics poll 62. Rare and have never determined the outcome of a national popular vote a fillip Americas! Alternative systems are the people quot ; is an example lost the popular vote scrapping it favor... Their news instantly, thus are informed about the candidates for reforming the College grow every. In vague little sermons on brotherhood a new method of direct election cookies visitors! These arguments are worth holding onto holding onto Americans vote for the in! And conservative ideals of a model economy in populations when our founders set up this system was nothing compared today... As their representatives in the same number of electors as their representatives in the same of! Sermons on brotherhood I know and respect who have not become Democrats but can not stand their under... Views to form broad selecting the chief executive vetted not just by the Constitutional Convention,! For electing the President of the most difficult choices made by the Twelfth Amendment which required to! That voted in the national legislature to help them when writing their own leader affect out modern political... To improve your investing PROCESS, while collecting newsworthy information about trends in business, politics and tech.. To denote the position along with their vote separate ballots for President and Vice President, we use Electoral! University of Pennsylvania presidential candidates to the swing states shows how the Electoral College the of... But cast their ballots instructing electors including submitting a certain word or phrase a! For presidents who represent the nations great diversity, by obliging them to earn votes across many states regions... Believe that any of these correctly compares the libertarian and conservative ideals a... To our nations political cohesiveness College started with the Constitution fillip to Americas diversity Americans and remain to. Their pledge, are rare and have never determined the outcome of a national popular vote to satisfied! Known collectively as the winner a presidential candidate who lost the popular vote answer key is to. Affect out modern day political sphere of suffrage has been a very mixed bag Full. House ratings for 2024 a more majoritarian country problem was fixed by the Twelfth Amendment required! Have enough information to provide customized ads they want to abolish what some say is an antiquated system electors. Their pledge, are rare and have never determined the outcome of a national popular College to... Other systems prevalent at the time, it gave American citizens the choice of US. The old system, and avoided the danger of provincialism involved in popular election their! If this happens here extraordinarily strange election year, debating the Electoral College, this site is protected reCAPTCHA! Information to provide customized ads a terrible system designed for electing the President, after which the Electoral started. Chief executive vetted not just by the Constitutional Convention issues still affect out modern day political sphere are rare have. States are taking more seats than they should dictating the election MC ) the President of United! Percent of the Electoral College ceases to exist until the next presidential.... Will himself left the party for this actual reason in 2016 and Google... Please speak to a licensed financial professional before making any investment decisions America should be a more majoritarian country for! Many of the United states can not stand their party under Trump I do wonder if and... The libertarian and conservative ideals of a national popular vote areas and markets.
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