The Pros And Cons Of The Electoral College

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The Electoral College is a flawed system in which decides America’s presidential fate. According to Google, the Electoral College “consists of 538 electors. A majority of 270 electoral votes is required to elect the President.” In many elections in the past, Presidential candidates who did not win a majority of the popular vote, or even a plurality, were elected president because of the electoral college. Take Bush vs. Al Gore for example. Al Gore won more popular vote than Bush, but Bush was elected. There are mostly risks of “faithless Electors,” failure to accurately reflect the nation’s popular will, the fact that the Electoral College only aims for strongholds, and tries to avoid run-off elections. First and foremost, there are those in the Electoral College who are considered “faithless.” They say they will vote for a specific candidate, but switch last minute, in spite of giving their word. So far there have only been seven known occurrences of this problem. For example, in 1988, a Democratic Elector in the state of West Virginia changed their vote last second from Al Gore to George H. W. Bush. This caused citizens of America to grow mixed feelings about the Electoral College, leaving them on thin ice. Furthermore, the Electoral College fails to accurately reflect the popular will of the nation. …show more content…
The distribution of Electoral votes over-represents citizens in rural states. Winner-take-all mechanisms are also hard for the third party to deal with. Taking our recent 2016 Presidential Elections, Hillary had been ahead of President Elect Donald Trump in the citizen’s votes, but the Electoral College had the majority vote for the latter. This gives an unfair advantage to the unwanted party that is favored by the Electoral College, basically throwing human voting rights out the window. If the popular vote candidate has less Electoral votes, they are highly likely to lose. By the same token, Electoral Colleges only aim for stronghold cities and disregard the smaller, less populated towns. For example, when there is an Electoral vote in Florida, voters will chose to hold conferences and debates in larger cities, such as Jacksonville over a smaller, less heard of town, like Melrose. Because of this, the Electoral College disregards the thoughts and opinions of those cities to go with the majority, or their own opinion. Electoral voters continuously convince these larger cities to vote for who they find suitable, which can create a huge difference in overall votes. Judge Richard A. Posner gives his opinion on the matter, saying, “The Electoral College restores some of the weight in the political balance that large states (by population) lose by virtue of the mal-appointment of the Senate decreed in the Constitution . . . The popular …show more content…
“The Electoral College avoids the problems of elections in which no candidate receives a majority of the votes cast,” Says Judge Richard A. Posner. He also states that “There is pressure for run-off elections when no candidate wins a majority of the votes cast; that pressure, which would greatly complicate the presidential election process, is reduced by the Electoral College, which invariable produces a clear winner. . . .” Even if there is a majority vote, the Electoral College can cast it off, ignoring human voting rights. If the Electoral College were to avoid being shut down, an intense system change would need to be brought

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