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Should The United States Vote For President?

Decent Essays

The method that the United States uses to elect its President and Vice President is known as the Electoral College. Contrary to popular belief, the citizens of the United States do not vote directly for the President. Rather, they vote for designated “electors” who have (usually) pledged to vote for a specific candidate. There are 538 electors because this is the number of seats in the U.S Senate plus the seats in the U.S House of Representatives. Each state receives a number of votes equal to the number of seats it holds in Congress. This leads to a great deal of unnecessary problems. When the Founding Fathers designed the Electoral College, they did so because it was the most efficient system at that time for electing the President. Because …show more content…

Ideally, every citizen’s vote for President should be equal. But with the way the Electoral College distributes its votes among the states, this is not the case. Wyoming, for example, has one electoral vote for roughly every 200,000 citizens. California, however, only receives one electoral vote for every 700,000 citizens. This essentially means that a vote from Wyoming counts for 3.5 times more toward the Presidency than a vote from California. This is because the electoral votes are distributed unevenly among the states, giving small states one or two more votes than it actually should, and populous states like Texas, New York, and California are missing anywhere from five to ten electoral votes had they been distributed fairly. Also, it is easy to predict the winning candidate in a majority of the states. California and New York will always vote Democrat; Texas will always vote Republican, and so on. Candidates will often pander to a small number of swing states while ignoring the ones where they are either certain to win or certain to lose. This essentially leaves the entire outcome of the election up to the few swing states like Ohio, Pennsylvania, and

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