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Electoral College To End Essay

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Opinion: It’s time for the Electoral College to End.

The electoral college is a system designed more than 200 years ago, in a vastly different political, economic, and social landscape, that has somehow managed to remain in use in the United States complete unchanged for so long a period of time. To understand the Electoral College, one must first understand where it came from; in the earliest days of America democracy as radical as exists in America today was neither the intention nor the norm for American politics. Instead, the electoral college was put in place so that a small group of faceless party officials could overturn the will of the people in the case that mob rule ran amok, and this group of people felt strongly enough about the …show more content…

However, proponents are wrong on both counts. The electoral does not at all help the small states. According to Texas A&M university Professor of Political science George Edwards, who was distinguished for his groundbreaking work by Oxford University’s Rothermere American Institute, the electoral college instead encourages candidates to neglect the states that contain most of their constituents to focus on winning the unsure swing states that play a pivotal role in the outcome of the election. Indeed, especially with small states, because of the 13 smallest states in America, only one, New Hampshire, is a swing state, according to Edwards. The all-or-nothing counting system Electoral College forces candidates to simultaneously neglect the largest and the smallest states, instead focusing on the select few that, by happenstance of state boarders, have close to the same number of predictably liberal voters as predictably conservative. In the 2004 presidential election a combined 57% of campaign funds of both tickets were spent in the three states of Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Florida, according to nonprofit organization Fairvote. According to that same report, 70% of a combined metric of

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