Introduction
In 1991, David W. Abbott and James P. Levine predicted that, “In the not very distant future the candidate who loses at the polls will become the president of the United States.” Abbott and Levine framed this possibility as the “coming constitutional crisis,” and made ominous predictions about the effect that such an outcome would have on the American public. Less than a decade later, George W. Bush became the 43rd president of the United States after losing the popular vote. This outcome shocked and outraged voters and prompted politicians like Hillary Clinton to call for the abolition of the electoral college claiming that, "In a democracy, we should respect the will of the people and to me, [and] that means it 's time to do …show more content…
Additionally, George W. Bush was the seventeenth president in history of the United States to be chosen by a minority of the voters. The 2000 elections merely drew renewed public attention to an area of American government that has been debated since its very inception at the 1787 Philadelphia Convention.
Throughout the history of the electoral college, scholars and politicians have called for reforms or the complete abolition of the electoral college; according to some scholarly counts there have been around 700 attempts to reform or abolish it. Yet, the institution has remained essentially unchanged since its form was finalized by the 12th amendment in 1804. The fact that the electoral college has remained despite the vast amount of opposition to it is an interesting study, and one which Luis Fuentes-Rohwer and Guy Charles explore in their article on the electoral …show more content…
Thus, those in this camp seek to completely abolish the electoral college and replace it with a direct national popular vote, completely undoing the institution as a whole. On the opposite side of the spectrum, the “preservationist” or “federalist” camp believes that the electoral college in fact serves as a bulwark of democracy, and so seeks to preserve the electoral college as it exists because it is “a brilliant constitutional device that deserves the support of the American people.” These two camps sit at the extreme ends of the debate over the electoral college. In the center are other camps of thought that generally focus on different types of reforms that can be made to the electoral college to make the institution more democratic, while still preserving the federalist structure of the institution. I will refer to this as the “reformist” camp. Although these three categorizations of the camps within the literature on the electoral college might be a bit broad, I believe that they capture the essence of most of the major arguments that are being used today in both scholarly and public
In 1991, David W. Abbott and James P. Levine predicted that, “In the not very distant future the candidate who loses at the polls will become the president of the United States.” Abbott and Levine framed this possibility as the “coming constitutional crisis,” and made ominous predictions about the effect that such an outcome would have on the American public. Less than a decade later, George W. Bush became the 43rd president of the United States after losing the popular vote. This outcome shocked and outraged voters and prompted politicians like Hillary Clinton to call for the abolition of the electoral college claiming that, "In a democracy, we should respect the will of the people and to me, [and] that means it 's time to do …show more content…
Additionally, George W. Bush was the seventeenth president in history of the United States to be chosen by a minority of the voters. The 2000 elections merely drew renewed public attention to an area of American government that has been debated since its very inception at the 1787 Philadelphia Convention.
Throughout the history of the electoral college, scholars and politicians have called for reforms or the complete abolition of the electoral college; according to some scholarly counts there have been around 700 attempts to reform or abolish it. Yet, the institution has remained essentially unchanged since its form was finalized by the 12th amendment in 1804. The fact that the electoral college has remained despite the vast amount of opposition to it is an interesting study, and one which Luis Fuentes-Rohwer and Guy Charles explore in their article on the electoral …show more content…
Thus, those in this camp seek to completely abolish the electoral college and replace it with a direct national popular vote, completely undoing the institution as a whole. On the opposite side of the spectrum, the “preservationist” or “federalist” camp believes that the electoral college in fact serves as a bulwark of democracy, and so seeks to preserve the electoral college as it exists because it is “a brilliant constitutional device that deserves the support of the American people.” These two camps sit at the extreme ends of the debate over the electoral college. In the center are other camps of thought that generally focus on different types of reforms that can be made to the electoral college to make the institution more democratic, while still preserving the federalist structure of the institution. I will refer to this as the “reformist” camp. Although these three categorizations of the camps within the literature on the electoral college might be a bit broad, I believe that they capture the essence of most of the major arguments that are being used today in both scholarly and public