As election season draws closer, we see the candidates debate more and more. These debates are a huge part in the elections, but, there is another debate that has had the hot seat since the 2000 election of Gore and Bush. In 2000, Democratic candidate Al Gore won the popular vote across the United States, but, more controversy was created by the Republican candidate George W. Bush winning the presidential election because he surpassed the 270 electoral votes needed to win. An outcry arose from all across the country saying that the people’s voices are not heard through the Electoral College and that a true democratic country would allow for direct election of the President. So why did the founding fathers not allow a direct election? And why hasn’t the Electoral College been reformed yet if it is so bad? The answers are simple. Our founding fathers didn’t allow for a direct election because they were afraid that the voters would be not well enough informed about the candidates, a reform to the Electoral College would mean a new amendment to the constitution, and because in all actuality, the Electoral College helps keep little states involved with the elections. With today’s technology and social media, the way candidates can reach voters far surpass that of how candidates had to reach voters in the 19th century. So more voters should be better informed than that of voters in the 19th century; right? Although this is a very true statement and that the information about
1787 saw the creation of the Electoral College due to he public lacking enough knowledge to make an enlightened decision on whom to vote for. However, now things are much different in the 21st Century than they were in the 1700’s. Due to new technological innovations, we are able to actually look into our candidate and truly decide if he/she is the one we want to vote for. It for this, and many other reasons that the Electoral College is outdated and unfair, and the Government should shift to the more direct popular vote.
Our Founding Fathers had great concern over the topic of the government obtaining too much power over the people and with that in mind they constructed a system of indirect election where citizens would choose an elector. That system would distant the citizens from directly electing the president, avoiding any possibility to create tyranny. Their fears were about whether citizens could exercise the best judgement and their capability to fully understand and make good choices in voting. They did not want a group to go off in the wrong direction and take control over others. They thought that a chosen group of more educated and elite individuals elected by the people would be able to better interpret the situation and exercise better judgement. In a way, they were trying to safeguard democracy by instituting the Electoral College as the method to elect our presidents.
When the Founding Father first wrote the Constitution the only way news got around were the newspaper and written works or word of mouth. In the 1700s most Americans were illiterate and only learned about candidates for president by word of mouth which isn’t the most reliable source of information. So they created the Electoral college to “protect” the American public from their own ignorance. This is an outdated notion for the modern American citizen and the Electoral College should be removed from the constitution in favor of the popular vote because the Electoral College is not the Democracy the framers worked so hard to create, it creates disparency in representation, and voter decisions ultimately don’t matter.
In order to fully understand the underlying problems of the Electoral College we have to look back at the time that the idea of the Electoral College itself was proposed and see how the culture of the time and the ideologies of the people involved helped shaped the final outcome. Life today is much different than it was two hundred odd something years ago, and it’s fair to say that the political ideals and social norms around our society have changed drastically.
The Electoral College has been disliked by many but also liked by other brilliant people in the United States. Some People have wanted to abolish the Electoral College. Former presidents and American leaders have thought that the Electoral College is a good way to take some power away from the people. The Electoral College has also been a very good way to elect this great country's leader. The Electoral College is here to stay. The founders of the Constitution agree and didn’t want the people to vote on the president directly. Why don’t you?
The Fathers had established a solution between the debate of a election of the President by popular vote of citizens and the election of the President by a vote in Congress and; in the Constitution. The Electoral College includes of 538 electors. In order to win you need to have at least 270 votes. The people of each state vote for their candidate, and the electors vote on the candidate and give all the votes to the candidate who won the popular vote. In my opinion the Electoral College process is not an efficient way, and it needs to be revised. Technology has changed and every vote can be counted buy computers, since Founding Fathers tried to make it easier for them to count the votes, since they traveled by horse. Since candidates only focus on winning over states that have the most electors. The Electoral College doesn't go with the will of the people.
In recorded history there have been five instances where the United States has elected a President that did not achieve the office by popular vote, rather these politicians were elected by the system that our founding fathers enacted known as the Electoral College. This system was made to protect the people, and never to confront the very democracy that makes America the great country we all know and love. The Electoral College in recent years, has not lived up to the expectations that the Founding Fathers once wrote in the constitution. Because of the problems that have arisen, many believe that abrogating the Electoral College will not only benefit the American citizens, but as well as the government as a whole.
But why didn 't the founding fathers make it easy and just let the Presidential candidate with the most votes win the election? The answer is critical to understanding the Electoral College and the United States of America. The founding fathers created the Electoral College as a compromise between election of the President by a vote in Congress and election of the President by a popular vote of qualified citizens.
Two hundred and twenty-nine years ago, our founding fathers had debated on which route to take when electing our President. In 1787, the “Committee of Eleven” had come to a compromise, and created the Electoral College, which is a group of individuals elected by the people to cast votes for the presidency. The Electoral College is described as “a compromise between election of the president by Congress and election by popular vote” (Price). The reason behind the Electoral College was to preserve “the sense of the people,” while ensuring that our president is chosen “by men most capable of analyzing the qualities adapted to the station, and acting under
In my opinion the recent presidential election was beyond lame. I voted but at the polls this guy would give us these pamphlets that I always throw away. My parents would always vote but when they were younger then. At this point in time, they were passed a guide ballot by the dude at the polls but they always do
As the Founding Fathers of the United States gathered their insightful concepts on how to best create a new nation, the Electoral College system arose. Since the birth of America’s Constitution, it has stayed in place. Yet, some question its validity and fairness. I personally believe that the Electoral College, although created for a perfectly justified and valid reason, is no longer concurrent with what the Founders intended it to be, and its use should be discontinued.
The Electoral College, used to elect presidential candidates in the United States, has degenerated into an ineffective and inefficient system. Although the Electoral College had never been implemented before, the Founding Fathers nevertheless built America with this election structure, to not only experiment with this new technique but to hopefully find a solution to an election process that they expected would shortly involve millions of citizens. The Electoral College does include several beneficial advantages to the American election process, but for the most part, the Electoral College is a dysfunctional election method.
In today’s world, the Electoral college is a big debate among the citizens of the United States. Many people disagree with the Electoral College. These people argue that rather than the Electoral College there should be more of a Democratic form of election. The Framers of the Constitution debated this argument even back when it was first developed. If it was still disputed back then, and they still chose it, why do many citizens feel it should be changed? The Electoral College has worked for more than 200 years, therefore this is not a reason to change this form of election to a more Democratic form. However, it is coherent why some feel there should be a change. Although to many this may be questionable, it was chosen by the framers and it has worked since then, so there is no reason to change it.
In 1787, the Founding Fathers implemented the Electoral College into the United States Constitution as a safeguard against allowing the common man to elect the President. Alexander Hamilton wrote in “The Federalist Papers,” the Constitution is designed to ensure “that the office of President will never fall to the lot of any man who is not in an eminent degree endowed with the requisite qualifications” (Miller, 2008). The forefathers held strong to their belief that there needed to be a barrier between the people and election of the president, and to not let direct democracy overrule the will of the people. Prior to this, our government had been based on the Articles of Confederation, which had no executive branch or even a single leader for that matter. After eleven years of independence, the delegates realized our struggling nation needed to change the way it elects its Commander in Chief. More recently however, the Electoral College has come under large scrutiny in the 2016 Presidential Election in which Donald Trump lost the general election to Hillary Clinton by over 2.8 million votes and won the Electoral College by 74 votes. Prior to this, it only occurred four other times in this nation’s history: 1824, 1876, 1888, and in 2000. No other democratic country has a similar system as ours, where voters chose an intervening body whose only function is to choose who should lead the country. So that begs the question: Why do we still need the Electoral College? While a vast
Did you vote in the last election? Do you know anything about the people who were running? One of the main reasons why so many Americans don’t vote is because they think that their vote doesn’t matter or won’t make that much of a difference. The reality is this is not true, the lack of understanding also plays a role is why some people just don’t vote. After all, the next president doesn’t just get picked overnight. The process is very long and complicated, it includes three major issues which are touched on by several candidates coming from two different parties.