During 1787, delegates, known as the founding fathers, met in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania to form a new system of government. Creating a functioning and fair way to elect public officials proved to be a difficult task for the founding fathers. They attempted to find a way to balance the power between individual states and the national government. This was eventually laid out in Article II, Section 1 of the Constitution, which made the Electoral College the form voting system the United States uses to elect the President and Vice President.
There are people in present day society who firmly believe that he constitution is still very relevant today and believe that it gives a fair and equal representation of all the states. Even though the Electoral College is considered to be the national voting system, there are still concerns to how accurate it is for current society. Many people have considered this form of electing the president to be outdated and no longer needed for the government.
Although there is still an ongoing debate, on whether the Electoral College is still affective, it continues to be upheld and functioning today, despite earlier changes to the constitution itself, including abolishing, adding, and revising ertain amendments. If the presidential elections were simply based on the popular vote, the United States would no longer be represented as a Constitutional Republic, but as a democracy.
As explained in a Washington Post article by Charles Lane, a journalist and editor for the website, there is still need for the Electoral College in the United States, as he stated, “our current system elevates popular-vote losers to the presidency: that’s because popular votes cast in a state-by-state contest for 270 electoral votes do not reflect the national will. Rather, they reflect the results of a ompetition in which candidates tailor their messages and deploy their resources according to the rules of the Electoral College; they would do everything differently if the goal was a popular-vote majority” (Lane).
Winning the majority vote of a particular region, Such as the south, north, or even Midwest will not guarantee that a candidate will win. For a candidate to get at least 270 of the votes, they are forced to pull votes and appeal to various regions throughout the nation. If America did decide a candidate based on the popular vote, the candidate would only need to campaign in about eleven of the most opulous states, some including California, Texas, New York, Illinois, Florida, Pennsylvania, and North Carolina in order to win.
This creates majority rule, a system where states with the largest population control how nation elect candidates, while ignoring the votes in the rest of the thirty nine states, these thirty nine states are considered “fly over states. ” For example, George W. Bush, in the 2000 elections, did not receive a majority of the popular vote against his opponent Ale Gorge, but he did win a majority of the electoral vote, many came from flyover states. This demonstrated how every vote counts, especially in a close election. (Gore).
Similarly, states are constantly switching between the two major political parties, many of these states are known as “swing states” or purple states, such as Ohio and Florida. Even if they are considered “safe states,” known to vote majority Republican or Democrat, candidates still have the potential of losing votes in these states, which forces them to acknowledge the needs and demographics of nearly all of the fifty states. For instance, in the recent 2016 election, Pennsylvania, normally a Democratic state, voted for the Republican nominee.
Pennsylvania has not voted for a Republican candidate since the 1988 general elections between George Bush and Michael S. Dukakis. (“Pennsylvania”) On the other hand, in past practices the electors were sent to certain areas of the states to personally collect ballots from towns and cities by hand and report them back to Washington D. C. to cast the votes of the people of that state. The main problem with this is that there is not protections set in place to ensure the states vote is cast and not the electorate, these lectors are considered Faithless electors.
There is no federal laws prohibiting electors from voting against the people of their state, but there has been reportedly one hundred sixty-seven instances of faithless. There has always been the possibility of an elector would vote against, instead of on the behalf of the state they were elected to represent (“Faithlessness”). For example, during the 2000 elections Barbara Lambert, a Democratic elector for Washington, DC, refused to cast her vote in order to protest the last of congressional representation the district was receiving. Faithlessness”)
Even though problems like this may occur, it is very uncommon, and an instance like this has never affected the outcome of any presidential election. Also, people who oppose the Electoral College argue that it protects smaller states and ignores the ones with a larger population. Each state is granted a certain number of electorates depending on the population size, but despite the size, states are guaranteed to have at least three electors and all states receive two senators.
In an article by Jonathan Turley, he explains why the electoral college gives more disadvantages to arger states, “The greatest irony of the Electoral College is that it does precisely the opposite of what the Framers intended: Rather than encouraging presidential candidates to take small states seriously, it results in turning most states into near total irrelevance. With our two-party monopoly on power in the United States, candidates spend little time, if any, in states that are clearly going to go for the other party — or even for their own party...
The result is that elections are dominated by swing states while campaigns become dominated by the issues affecting those states” (Turley). Some also may argue that it not nly ignores larger states, but United States territories as well as. Territories, such Puerto Rico and Guam do not get votes because they are not considered states and do not have a specific constitutional amendment that recognizes them in the elections, but the people born there are recognized as citizens of the United States.
But citizens that move to a different country and even astronauts are still allowed to participate in the election process. But getting rid of the electoral process would do more harm than good as described in an article by Allen Guelzo, when he stated, “Abolishing the Electoral College ow might satisfy an irritated yearning for direct democracy, but it would also mean dismantling federalism. After that, there would be no sense in having a Senate … o sense even in having states… and do away with the entire federal system and perhaps even retire the Constitution, since the federalism it was designed to embody would have disappeared. “(Guelzo). The system has worked for the United States for over two hundred year and there has yet to be a huge conflict of the transfer of power during each election process. All in all, there are plenty of factors a person can find to dvocate or denounce the Electoral College system.
But for over 200 hundred years, despite’s the changes made to the constitution and the flaws it may have, it does its job at making the elections as fair as possible. The federal government does not have free will to elect the president of their choice and nor do the people have a majority rule. Finding a balance between the two is what made the Electoral College essentially to electing a candidate to the highest office in the United States. The Electoral College is one of the main reasons why Americans cannot be considered a pure democracy, but a Constitutional Republican.
