Reassessing the U.S. Electoral College: Time for Change?

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Updated: Sep 07, 2023
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2020/02/04
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Supposedly in a democracy everyone’s vote should count equipollently, but the method that the U.S. uses to elect its president, the Electoral College, infringed this principle by ascertaining that some people’s votes are greaters than others. The Election of these two officers, the president and vice president, is determined by a group of electors. This was established in Article II, Section 1 of the U.

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S. Constitution. The Electoral College represented a compromise among the progenitors of the U.S. about one of the most plaging questions they faced: how to elect the commander in chief . The Constitutional Convention considered more than 15 different including plans for election by Congress or one of its houses, by sundry state officials, by electors, or by direct popular vote. The Electoral College has a rich and complex history, but has time progress on, lots of problems starts to arise because it’s an outdated system that was used to accommodate the people 1700s. Now in the twenty first century, it’s time for change and to realize the errors the Electoral College.

History

The Electoral College was engendered for two reasons. The first purpose was to engender a buffer between population and the selection of a President. The second as a component of the structure of the regime that gave extra power to the more minuscule states.The first reason that the progenitors engendered the Electoral College is hard to understand in today culture. The founding fathers were apprehension of direct election to the Presidency. They feared a tyrant could manipulate public opinion and come to puissance. Hamilton indicted in the Federalist Papers: “It was equally desirable, that the immediate election should be made by men most capable of analyzing the qualities adapted to the station, and acting under circumstances favorable to deliberation, and to a judicious combination of all the reasons and inducements which were proper to govern their choice.”

The second reason was for the electoral college to additionally be part of compromises made at the convention to slake the diminutive states. Under the system of the Electoral College each state had the same number of electoral votes as they have representative in Congress, thus no state could have less than 3. According to the History, Art, Archives Of The United States House Of Representatives (H.A.A.U.S.H.R.) The result of this system is that in this election the state of Wyoming cast about 210,000 votes, and thus each elector represented 70,000 votes, while in California approximately 9,700,000 votes were cast for 54 votes, thus representing 179,000 votes per electorate. Conspicuously this engenders an inequitable advantage to voters in the minuscule states whose votes genuinely count more than those people living in medium and astronomically immense states.

The Electoral College was engendered by the framers of the U.S. Constitution as a compromise for the presidential election process. At the time, some politicians believed a pristinely popular election was too temerarious and would give an exorbitant amount of voting power to highly populated areas in which people were acclimated with a presidential candidate. Others remonstrated to the possibility of letting Congress select the president, as some suggested.

The Constitution gave each state a number of electors equal to the amalgamated total of its membership in the Senate (two to each state, the “senatorial” electors) and its delegation in the House of Representatives (currently ranging from one to 52 Members). The electors are culled by the states “in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct “(U.S. Constitution, Article II, section 1).

One aspect of the electoral system that is not mandated in the constitution is the fact that the triumpher takes all the votes in the state. There it makes no difference if you win a state by 50.1% or by 80% of the vote you receive the same number of electoral votes. This can be a recipe for one individual to win some states by immensely colossal pluralities and lose others by diminutive number of votes, and thus this is a facile scenario for one candidate winning the popular vote while another winning the electoral vote. This triumpher take all methods utilized in picking electors has been decided by the states themselves. This trend took place over the course of the 19th century.

The Elector

The elector plays the most important in the election of the president. The Constitution’s Article II, Section 1 spells out the rudimental Electoral College rules. A majority of electors is needed to elect a President; members of Congress or people holding a United States office can’t be electors; electors can’t pick two presidential candidates from their own state, and Congress determines when the electors meet within their states (or in the federal district). The total number of Electoral College members equals the number of people in Congress and three supplemental electors from the District of Columbia.

The list of the electors, or the slate of electors, within a state customarily doesn’t appear on the election ballot. States have different rules for when official slates are submitted to election officials. Each political party decides how to submit its slate of electors, at the request of its presidential candidate. The state decides when that slate needs to be submitted.

While they may be well-kenned persons in their states, electors generally receive little apperception as such. In most states, the denominations of individual elector-candidates do not appear anywhere on the ballot; instead only those of the presidential and vice presidential candidates of the parties or other groups that nominated the elector-candidates appear. In some states, the presidential and vice-presidential nominees’ denominations are preceded on the ballot by the words “electors for.” The customary anonymity of presidential electors is such that electoral votes are commonly referred to as having “been awarded” to the winning candidates, as if no human beings were involved in the process.

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Reassessing the U.S. Electoral College: Time for Change?. (2020, Feb 04). Retrieved from https://papersowl.com/examples/reassessing-the-u-s-electoral-college-time-for-change/