Question

1. Should We Get Rid of the Electoral College?

2. Why did the founders create the Electoral College system? Is it still a fair way of choosing a president?

3. So let’s say we amend the Constitution and finally get rid of the Electoral College, and go with “whoever gets the most votes wins.” How would this change presidential elections? What would happen if NO candidate received over 50% of the vote?

4. How would eliminating the Electoral College affect the small (or low population) states? How would it affect the large (or large population) states?

(please answer all questions in a 5 sentence paragraph)

Answer 1

1. Yes, we should get rid of the electoral college. Whatever its potential merits, it is a plainly undemocratic institution. It undermines the principle of “one person, one vote,” affirmed in 1964 by the Supreme Court in Reynolds v. Sims — a key part of the civil and voting rights revolution of that decade. It produces recurring political crises. And it threatens to delegitimize the entire political system by creating larger and larger splits between who wins the public and who wins the states.

2. Among the many thorny questions debated by the delegates to the 1787 Constitutional Convention, one of the hardest to resolve was how to elect the president. The Founding Fathers debated for months, with some arguing that Congress should pick the president and others insistent on a democratic popular vote.

Their compromise is known as the Electoral College. They were tired, impatient, frustrated. They cobbled together this plan because they couldn’t agree on anything else.

Electoral college is not a fair system. The system calls for the creation, every four years, of a temporary group of electors equal to the total number of representatives in Congress. Technically, it is these electors, and not the American people, who vote for the president. In modern elections, the first candidate to get 270 of the 538 total electoral votes wins the White House. Five times in history, presidential candidates have won the popular vote but lost the Electoral College. This has led some to question why Americans use this system to elect their presidents in the first place.

3. Well, it would be the tyranny of the cities over flyover country. Candidates would campaign in maybe 10 cities, most states would never see a candidate hold a rally. Other states are basically powerless in the House. National issues would be only issues that effect cities (because of the potential votes in cities). Smaller cities and town would have laws passed that make no sense for them because of their size.

If no candidates recieve 50% of the votes, we need to choose the candidate who is leading the votes margin.

4. Eliminating the electoral collge will affect the small states badly. They would have no voice in the Congress. Most of the times, they would have to accept the decision of bigger states as these have more voters. The bigger states can influence the election outcome more because of their sheer population size. These states will be getting more political , social and economic benefits in the long run.