For the results of U.S. presidential elections, see the table. Whatever its potential merits, it is a plainly undemocratic institution. This spring, numerous candidates for president expressed support for either abolishing or changing the Electoral College, which ultimately picks the U.S. president. It gives each state in such manner as the legislature thereof may direct electors equal to its representation in Congress. Donald Trump could win the presidency without a popular-vote majority only because both parties have been locked into base-turnout strategies that are partially responsible for our governments ineffectiveness and gridlock. She received 65,853,516 votes, and President Donald Trump, 62,984,825 votes. Thus the compromise the Electoral College. The Senate was never an impartial body of wise men serving to check the popular passions likely to be present in the House. Presidential elections have little if anything to do with the subject, even when some candidates claim to be running against Washington.. John Locher/AP He also received 306 electoral votes while President Trump only received 214, according to NPR. Given your understanding, do you believe the Electoral College is democratic? For example, during the recent presidential campaign the candidates focused most of their time on what so-called "battleground states," states in which there 877 Words 4 Pages 4 Works Cited Decent Essays Read More The best alternative is a constitutional amendment offering something for both sides. There are three basic arguments in favor of the system the framers of the Constitution gave us, with little sense of how it would actually work. arguments in defense of the Electoral College or for the abolition of the Electoral College. According to Hank Koransky, an upper school history teacher at Brentwood School, the electoral college was originally made because the leaders of the government did not want to give too much. That close result doesn't bode well for the compact's chances in the Republican-controlled legislatures that still need to approve it. {{currentYear}} American Bar Association, all rights reserved. They are simply party loyalists who do not deliberate about anything more than where to eat lunch. /content/aba-cms-dotorg/en/news/abanews/publications/youraba/2019/october-2019/q--the-electoral-college--is-it-open-for-interpretation-by-the-c, Trade, Sports & Professional Associations, Affordable Housing & Community Development Law. Just like after every election, one of the most frequently asked questions is about the purpose and relevance of the electoral college. Being on a state-by-state basis, and that not strictly according to population, it has some tendency to decrease the likelihood of a President winning primarily through an emotional appeal giving him an overwhelming advantage in one section but probably making him obnoxious to a majority of the voters in other parts of the country. It is unlikely that the electoral college will be abolished any time soon because it entails amending the constitution, which requires 38 of the 50 states to approve the change. "I believe we need a constitutional amendment that. In 1787, when the constitution was written, the only people allowed to vote were white males who owned land. It was a recognition of these diverse and somewhat conflicting policy goals that led them to the establishment of a form of government that made possible the greatest exercise of personal freedom and the development of the highest level of material well-being that has ever been known anywhere else on the earth before or since. hide caption. How did they do it? The candidate must win 270 or more votes from the electoral college this can be done by winning less than a fourth of all states. It helps to account for voices in less populated areas and the issues they face. Much has been made of the unfortunate things that could happen under our present system. 1 0 obj There are several cases in American history where the candidate for President of the United States wins the popular vote but does not win the election because of the electoral college. The politicians are tapping into what's become a popular position with many voters, especially Democrats. endobj The Electoral College is part of that tradition. Frances C. Arrillaga Alumni Center At the Midyear Meeting, the Nominating Committee nominates officers and members of the Board of Governors. Technology, and electronic voting stations, have allowed us to tally exactly how many votes go to each candidate. But the fact that the formal expectations of the Fathers were never realized should not blind us to the fact that the basic framework which they established has served us well for almost 200 years. Now there are voting centers in almost every town, absentee ballots, and early voting making its purpose arbitrary. The important question is under what system can the extent of the dangers be diminished? The Electoral College is racist. The Electoral College Should Be Abolished Essay The U.S. should also abolish the Electoral College because it depresses voter turnout. Reasons to Keep the Electoral College - ThoughtCo Some larger states like California have 55 votes, while smaller or less populated states like Rhode Island or Alaska have only three votes. And if not weakened, then destroyed. But the court has not tackled to what extent states can enforce such a pledge. Both priorities can be achieved by the Top-Two Proportional Amendment, which makes states allocate their electoral votes proportionally to the top two vote-getters in the state and replaces human electors with electoral votes expressed in decimal form. It distorts representation, arguably hinders democratic process and has a large impact on the outcome of a presidential election for better and for worse. But really, scholars say, consensus is constructed through thousands of small acts over generations. Wyoming is 92% white. What's the alternative to National Popular Vote? UChicago scholar discusses ways to make voting process more democratic The outcome of every U.S. presidential election hinges on a few key swing states, whose electoral votes are awarded in a winner-take-all system. Should Electoral College Be Abolished Dbq Essay | ipl.org - The Fulcrum , Election reform advocates regroup, plan next steps - The Fulcrum , Should We Reform the Electoral College? endobj The Electoral College should be abolished because: smaller states are over represented, it is undemocratic, and it violates political equality. National Popular Vote survived a referendum in Colorado with 52 percent of the vote. The pact raises questions of its own for democracy: It creates a situation in which voters in, for example, Colorado, may cast most of their votes for the Democrat in a presidential race but the state might wind up giving its electors to the Republican depending on the national outcome. We should be talking about other things. Many may conclude the creaky Electoral College works most of the time, and that any fixes are just too hard to worry about. It was replaced by party conventions, which eventually were replaced (almost) with strings of single or multiple state primaries and caucuses. The Constitution is silent on whether states or the electors themselves ultimately can decide which candidate gets the electors vote, and the U.S. Supreme Court has not addressed that issue in the handful of cases it has considered related to the Electoral College. If not, why not? On November 8th, 2016 Donald Trump was elected president because the Electoral College voted for him. And in each instance the matter was handled peacefully and without any substantial amount of public excitement. Now more than ever our democracy needs a trustworthy First, there's the Constitutional problem. TheNational Archives reportsthat over the past 200 years more than 700 proposals have been introduced in Congress to reform or eliminate the Electoral College without any becoming law. First, and most obviously, such a system would conform to the dominant democratic value that has prevailed in American politics ever since the one-person, one-vote reapportionment rulings of the early 1960s. Would the federal government get into the business of administering the elections, or leave that up to state and local officials, as it does today? It doesnt matter that Trump won millions of votes in New Jersey or that Hillary Clinton won millions in Texas. The electoral college is still not well explained. If so, how? . It was a scheme for letting the people choose but at the same time avoiding some of the dangers inherent in a direct choice. Preserving Federalism There is no longer the burden of counting out each ballot by hand, thus eliminating cheating and human error. But that isnt politically possible. 8 Tips for Forgiving Someone Who Hurt You. By Michael W. McConnell, the Richard and Frances Mallery Professor of Law, director of the Constitutional Law Center and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. The Electoral College was invented as a part, although maybe only a small part, of this general scheme of separation of powers and division of authority. It's in their campaigns for president and governing in the White House judging by President Trump's treatment of California, New York and other blue states. The 1800 election deadlocked because presidential candidate Thomas Jefferson received the same number of Electoral College votes as his vice presidential candidate Aaron Burr. Do you think the Electoral College should be abolished Why or why not By Jack Rakove, the William Robertson Coe Professor of History and American Studies and a professor of political science. Both the chief executive and the courts quickly developed into something that would probably be unrecognizable by any but the most discerning of the Fathers. By Josh Chafetz. The Electoral College never became the uninstructed gathering of superior and sober men calmly deciding upon a suitable citizen to serve as the Chief Executive for the coming four years. Even if no candidate had received an electoral majority in 1968, is there any reason to believe a peaceful and satisfactory solution could not have been reached? We need to think hard, and quickly, about how to reform three aspects of the presidential nomination process: the debates, the primary elections and the conventions. Many countries convey greater voting impact to less populated regions. According to Koransky, the candidate who lost the popular vote has been elected president five times in American history. Today, many people think that the Electoral College should be abolished and that the total popular vote should determine the president. Both times in 2000 and 2016 it was the Republican candidate who got fewer votes but ended up in the White House. Having the states play an autonomous role in presidential elections, it is said, reinforces the division of governing authority between the nation and the states. our democracy and make it live and work in our everyday lives. Republicans want to keep the small-state advantage and the state-based, rather than national, calculation of results. And it is doubtful if any of them anticipated the emergence of either political parties or the extensive administrative machinery that now plagues the central government. The first time the system was really tested it broke down, electing two candidates of different political parties, but it did its job of electing the two most qualified candidates. A country in which someone is democratically voted Comander in Chief.. Not because the voters of the country picked them, but because of an old, unfair method that brought the person into power. JOHN W. BURGESS, Recent Changes in American Constitutional Theory. Statue of Liberty at sunset. Kevin Johnson is founder and executive director of Election Reformers Network. During most of the Constitutional Convention . One effect is that which is mentioned abovesometimes the Electoral College flouts the will of the public. If that had been done, is there any reason to believe the result would not have been a reasonable one or that it would not have been accepted by the public? Why We Should Abolish the Electoral College 74 Jesse Reed Buy Book When you purchase an independently reviewed book through our site, we earn an affiliate commission. Because the procedure for electing the president is part of the Constitution, a Constitutional Amendment (which requires two-thirds approval in both houses of Congress plus approval by 38 states) would be required to abolish the Electoral College. It's time to abolish the Electoral College and let the . It must be abolished, Robert Reich, the Former United States Secretary of Labor, said in a tweet. In fact, Trump's 2020 Electoral College bonus ended up being the 4th or 7th highest in the 42 elections since 1856, depending on whether you count his bonus as 3.8 points or 3.3 points. In winner-take-all states, all electoral votes cast for the state are assigned to the candidate who gets the most electoral votes. That system worked well until the two-party system briefly died with the Federalist Party. Being on a state-by-state basis, and that not strictly according to population, it has some tendency to decrease the likelihood of a Presi. Trump made a similar argument earlier this week, warning that "smaller states & then entire Midwest would end up losing all power.". According to CNN, Trump won 306 electoral votes when Clinton only received 232 electoral votes. The size of a state does not affect our real political preferences, even though the Electoral College system imagines that it does. President Trump had earned 232 electoral . At its core the true purpose of the electoral college was to aid citizens who were unable to travel to voting centers on the day of election. Our votes would count the same wherever they were cast. There are 538 votes in total. Podcast: AI revolution: Disaster or great leap forward? Additionally, the electoral college does not represent each voter equally because the ratio of population to electoral votes is not equal for all states. The current system is weighted too heavily in favor of celebrity appeal, demagogic displays and appeals to narrow special interests. electoral college, the system by which the president and vice president of the United States are chosen. Take the total of 2016 presidential votes in the 10 largest states, and youd get only 71 million ballots, or about 52 percent of the vote. The founders opted for the Electoral College because the two leading alternatives, election by Congress and by popular vote, were thought to have serious defects. What are the positive arguments in favor of replacing the existing electoral system with a national popular vote? It's just not clear how you could do that.". Now, Trump feels the Electoral College is "far better for the U.S.A." as he wrote Tuesday on Twitter. Terms of Service |Privacy Policy|CA Notice of Collection, The electoral college is not a fair system as it is not a clear representation of the voters. The three-fifths clause became irrelevant with the end of slavery (thankfully! "It really does over-represent some sparsely populated states, and it provides some skew and bias to our system that I just don't think is healthy anymore," said Paul Gronke, a political scientist at Reed College. In Nebraska, two of the five votes go to the popular vote winner and that leaves three votes in play. Two out of the four electoral votes in Maine can potentially be awarded to someone other than the statewide winner. Electoral College Dbq - 909 Words | Bartleby Recently, two Times Opinion columnists have weighed in on the issue. Some larger states like California have 55 votes, while smaller or less populated states like Rhode Island or Alaska have only three votes. Democrats would have reason to maximize their share of the vote in the Deep South, and Republicans would see the same incentive in the Northeast (and the West for that matter). In the U.S., 65 percent of adults think whoever wins the popular vote should hold the nation's highest office, according to an Atlantic/PRRI poll last year. How does it work? . How did they do it? With shares of electoral votes available in every state, candidates will have incentive to campaign nationwide. They had learned from their experience under King George that unlimited power in human hands was a dangerous thing. Once is enough to bring question. Does the Electoral College need to be reformed? Thats when the Founding Fathers crafted a compromise between those who argued for the election of the president by a vote of Congress and the election of the president by a popular vote of qualified citizens. He served on the faculty of New York University School of Law for eighteen years and is now professor of law at Duke University. There have been three: John Quincy Adams, Benjamin Harrison and George W. Bush. Please, enable JavaScript and reload the page to enjoy our modern features. In 1892, the court upheld inMcPherson v. Blackerthat Congress can set the date nationally for the Electoral College to meet, but it also said that the states could determine how electors were apportioned and chosen. [ 3] [ 4] [ 5] [ 6] Due to the Electoral College process, candidates must get votes from multiple stateslarge and smallthus helping to ensure that the president will address the needs of the entire country. At least I havent heard any other system proposed that holds greater promise of permanence and stability than has been demonstrated by the one we have. It is true that the Electoral College no longer serves its original purposes, and that it creates a grave risk that a candidate not favored by a majority of the people will, from time to time, be elected president. Roughly 60 million Americans live in rural counties, and they arent all concentrated in rural states. But explaining exactly how it does this remains a mystery. During World War II, he served as a special agent with the Counter Intelligence Corps. (The 1 percent in Michigan four years ago for Jill Stein probably swung 16 electoral votes; with top-two, her impact would have been .05 of an electoral vote.). But in view of the fact that none of the feared disasters has ever happened, I wonder if the danger isnt more imaginary than real. It is within a states authority under Article II, Section 1 to impose a fine on electors for failing to uphold their pledge, the court said in an 8-1 opinion. Do you think the United States should get rid of the Electoral College? A. It is at least an accounting device registering a summation . Could Washington administer a national recount in the event of a close result? The election of the Vice-President would be by the Senate. Respect for it is still insufficient to secure their true development. Her Campus may receive compensation for some links to products and services on this website. Even though Clinton won the popular vote by 2.1%, Trump won the electoral votes. Concluding Activity: Identify the strongest and weakest arguments Have a class discussion identifying the strongest and weakest arguments for keeping the Electoral College, abolishing it and instituting a direct popular vote, and other voting reforms. Do you think this means the system is broken? If that had been done, is there any reason to believe the result would not have been a reasonable one or that it would not have been accepted by the public? 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. If there were no such system, campaigns could win by focusing all their attention on the largest states. According to The New York Times, Trump won 48.6 percent of the Florida vote, with Clinton close behind at 47.4 percent. To them this meant much more than a separation of the legislative, executive, and judicial departments of government. Corinne is an associate on the integrated marketing team at Her Campus. In her free time she enjoys exploring new museums, going to concerts and traveling to new cities. It is possible that if no candidate had won a majority on November 5, enough electors would have switched their allegiance to give somebody a majority when the electoral votes were cast. Smaller States & the entire Midwest would end up losing all power - & we cant let that happen. Winner-take-all is not in the Constitution and was not part of the founders' intent. Dementia is a term for multiple diseases, known to affect people's memory, abilities, and thinking. And it confines vote-counting disputes to just one, or maybe a few, states. The more serious problem with the Electoral College is that it compels states to allocate electoral votes on a winner-take-all basis, giving swing states their dominant role and enabling the culture of minority rule now metastasized in the Republican Party. In Getting Rid of the Electoral College Isnt Just About Trump, Jamelle Bouie makes an argument for why the Electoral College should be abolished: In February, I wrote about the Electoral College, its origins and its problems. Any present-day student of the American government knows that this system of separation and division of powers with each department and each political unit serving as a check on every other did not work out exactly as intended by the Founding Fathers. We have an Electoral College because that's what the. % E:E: However:CAN WIN POPULAR VOTE AND LOSE ELECTORAL COLLEGE VOTE E: Gore (2000). The electoral college is a voting system established in the 1700s that distributes votes to each state based on the population. The way to abolish the Electoral College is through a Constitutional amendment, which requires a two-thirds vote in both the House and the Senate, then ratification by three-fourths of the states. A second argument holds less populous states deserve the further electoral weight they gain through the senatorial bump giving each state two electors, because their minority status entitles them to additional political protection. "Precisely what it does is proportionately advantages where the people are," Levy said. They had learned from their experience under King George that unlimited power in human hands was a dangerous thing. The Electoral College should be archaic. On March 18, at a CNN town hall in Jackson, Miss., Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts called for shutting down the Electoral College. But reforming the Electoral College does not rank high among our national problems. Stanford, California 94305. Your questions, answered - Vox , Trans women in sports is not a fairness issue, its a political one, Slow: the never-ending meander of democracy. The idea was for the legislatures of each state to select electors who would be temporary, beholden to no one, with the sole duty of picking the . This year, Vice President Joe Biden won the popular vote with 81,282,376 votes, which is more votes than any candidate won in any presidential election. SHOULD THE ELECTORAL COLLEGE BE ABOLISHED ? Flashcards | Quizlet State results would finally reflect our true preferences, replacing the image of warring red and blue with different shades of purple.
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