preview

Electoral College Essay

Good Essays

Electoral College

A major conflict concerning the electoral college lingers in America. The
Constitutional Convention created the college in 1789 in hopes that it would be an adequate system (MacBride 29). The electoral college consists of senators and representatives who cast their votes for the state they represent. Those who feel that the college should remain as it is believe that the American people are too uninformed about election issues to vote. The argument for the modification of the college maintains that the people are not actually electing the president, but the larger states are. Ultimately, the majority of the United States citizens support the elimination of an electoral college that serves no purpose in the …show more content…

First of all, the present format of the electoral college manifests the colleges’ insufficient qualities. The current format of the college, giving the edge to the larger states, exhibits the inadequacies of it (Polsby 32).
“The electoral college system, it is claimed, does not guarantee that the candidate with the most popular votes will win, produces great inequalities in voting power among the national electorate, contains a contingency election provision that is not only unrepresentative but that could also result in an impasse or in political duels, permits the will of the majority voters in a state or even in the nation to be thwarted through the constitutional independence of the electors, and permits the electoral decision to turn on fraud or chance in key states” (Best 22). A study conducted by John F. Banzhaf, III revealed that “states like New York and California have over two and one half times as much chance to effect the election of the president as residents of the smaller states”
(Bickel 6). Furthermore, causing confusion amongst the political system, the electoral college raised a question mark in Congress. Passed by more than the mandatory two-thirds vote in 1969, the House called for a constitutional amendment to change the election of presidents and vice-presidents be by nation a wide popular vote rather than the electoral college (Bickel 10). However, the amendment failed to

Get Access