After insane elections where one candidate will win the popular vote, yet not win the presidency has forced the U.S. to revisit the election process. Such a system does not truly show democracy. Our United State’s system was based on racism. The origin of the electoral college was because the white supremacists did not believe that their citizens could be trusted to make presidential decisions, especially not slaves. The electoral college would be made up of a group of white men who would “count” the votes see who won and supposedly cast their votes in accordance to the winner. In case the people of this country did not know what was best for themselves the electoral college was there to choose the correct person for the presidency.
Our society is much more intelligent than it was back in the day. When our founders made the electoral system humans did not have the information we have today. Every potential-president’s view is at our disposal with the click of button. We never needed a privileged man to oversee our decisions and for sure don’t now. Yet, this system is written in America’s constitution, which is incredibly difficult to amend. Our country knows more of what it means to be a democracy and every single state’s electors vote for which candidate won the popular vote are in their respective state.
Our supposed democratic system has not worked considering the person who received the most people’s votes has not become the president twice in the last sixteen years. That is not democracy. Democracy is doing what the citizens of a country want, which in this case is electing the person they want to govern them. If a majority want one person, yet a different one is elected that is in no way a true democracy. Electing our country’s leader via a middleman, makes zero sense.
Why don’t we get rid of the electoral college? It is in the constitution, which is extremely difficult to change, but can be done. Another plausible option is already in the works that the group National Popular Vote is working hard at. The plan is to pass laws in at least enough states to combine to be 270 electoral vote states. These laws will say that each state’s electoral college will cast their electoral votes for the candidate that wins the United States popular vote. That way we can guarantee that whomever wins the popular vote will become president.
One possible catastrophe with the strange way of casting electoral votes is complete mayhem. Consider a situation where an extremely Republican state finds out that the Democrat candidate receives the popular vote. That state then must cast their electoral votes for the Democrat candidate. The Republicans would most likely be extremely angry about this and cause chaos. Obviously there will be uproar, but that happens with every election. Strikes and protests will occur no matter who becomes elected. We cannot stop rioting from happening.
A downside with an overall popular vote is the possibility that a candidate could win with a mere 33% or even lower. Such a situation could be avoided by continuing to have primaries. The top two candidates from our top parties will face off, with the only thing changing being how the votes are tallied.
All in all our electoral college has got to go. It is an outdated system that serves almost no purpose for our country any longer. The United States are a democracy and the actual people need to be able to decide who governs us.
Hi Haley,
First of all, great post. You made really great points about the flaws of our modern elector system. In my eyes there are two major (almost fatal) flaws with our system. One is that it violates the one person, one vote rule, which should be the proper rule of a modern democracy, because the addition of two electors to each state for its senators produces significant distortions in how much our individual vote is worth from state to state.
The second problem is the whole battleground swing state issue. Once we’re past the primaries, presidential campaigns are preoccupied with the relatively small number of states that are actually competitive. But their competitiveness is just a demographic accident. There’s nothing special about them except that their populations happen to be fairly evenly divided from a sociological standpoint. The electoral college seems to defeat the whole point of the democratic principles that this country was built on. But, at the same time, this is the system that has been in effect since the dawn of our democracy and has elected some our best and our worst leaders. Until there is change to it, we should respect the system our founding fathers put into place while still fighting for a true democracy under the popular vote.