The Founding Fathers created the Electoral College in large part because they feared voters would not know all the candidates who would be running for president. Individual votes count, but in a way that is represented by states. Most states are a winner-takes-all system. Under the current rules of the Electoral College, a total of 270 electoral votes is required for an election to be finalized. In the majority of states, whichever candidate gets the most votes, wins that states electoral votes.
Each state receives an allotment of electors that equals the number of delegates that get sent to Congress each year. There is a risk of faithless electors casting ballots. Under the Constitution, the people are empowered to choose, through a direct popular election, the men and women who represent them in their state legislatures and in the United States Congress. This causes the candidates to focus their campaigns and efforts in these areas.
That means the number of delegates with each state changes after every 2 presidential elections in virtually all cycles. ", DiSC Personality Types Explained: D-Style vs I-Style vs S-Style vs C-Style, 100 Confidence Affirmations to Boost Self-esteem, Japanese Blood Type Personality Guide: A vs B vs AB vs O, 101 Motivation Affirmations to Keep You Focused, The 4 Personalities Explained: Type A vs Type B vs Type C vs Type D, Eysenck Personality Types Explained: Extraversion vs Neuroticism vs Psychoticism, 125 Positive Affirmations for Success and Prosperity, Four Temperaments Explained: Sanguine vs Choleric vs Melancholic vs Phlegmatic Personality Types, 125 Powerful Morning Affirmations to Start Your Day, Explaining the 4 Color Personality Test: Blue vs Green vs Gold vs Orange. Popular vote supporters believe that the current system fails to create clear mandates and prevents national unity. In national representation, each state and population district receives equal representation, in either the house or the senate, and that allows individual voters to still have a say in what happens.
Did the Founding Fathers—the framers of the Constitution—not realize that the Electoral College system effectively took the power to select the American president out of the hands of the American people? It doesn’t require a 50% vote majority to create an electoral majority. The electoral college ignores the will of the people. It allows individuals to vote for the candidates they wish and then to have electorates cast ballots based on the voting trends of their region. Though the Electoral College has changed since it was first used to elect George Washington to the presidency in 1789, my research shows that the system continues to give more power to states whose populations are whiter and more racially resentful. (The president cannot veto a constitutional amendment.). At the time of this writing, there are 55 delegates assigned to California. The Constitution allows for anyone who receives an electoral vote to be part of the decision-making process in Congress to select a President if no clear majority is present.
To be ratified and become effective, a constitutional amendment must also be approved by the legislatures of 39 out of the 50 states.
Many people criticize the effectiveness and integrity of this system, saying that skews the actual election results.
To be brutally honest, the Founding Fathers gave the American public of their day little credit for political awareness when it came to selecting the president. There are certain states in the U.S. that traditionally vote for one party or the other. The structure of the Electoral College also discourages candidates from going into states where the votes typically go to the other party. 3. Two of those elections have occurred since 2000 (George W. Bush and Donald Trump). Without this process, the largest states would often influence the elections because they would have a majority of the available votes. There was no other way beyond the newspaper or in-person meetings to let people know what was happening. In order for a person to win presidency, they must obtain 270, or the majority, of the electoral college votes. The advantages and disadvantages of the Electoral College are important to evaluate as the U.S. moves toward the 2020 election and beyond. Only one election in history was close enough that it had to go into the House of Representatives for a decision. The Electoral College was designed to solve the problem of population distribution. Nebraska and Maine do not give their electoral vote to the person with the most votes. That creates momentum towards centrism and moderate cooperation, instead of allowing extremism to creep into political discussions. This has already happened exactly four times in the nation's history: It is sometimes reported that Richard M. Nixon received more popular votes in the 1960 election than winner John F. Kennedy, but official results showed Kennedy with 34,227,096 popular votes to Nixon's 34,107,646. It was Trump who won the White House because of the results of the Electoral College. Most states already have a winner-takes-all format. ], The other reason for the Electoral College was to bridge a major divide among the states: slavery. Listen to the award winning podcast The Blog Millionaire to find out how. The number of elections in each 10-year cycle change for elector counts. How the US Electoral College System Works, Presidents Elected Without Winning the Popular Vote. That means the elections in each 10-year period are based on this information. The design of the Electoral College supports a simplified two-party system. It actually made the problem worse, because Southern state governments were happy to get the representation from their large numbers of Black citizens – while keeping them from voting through discriminatory practices like literacy tests and poll taxes.
Without this structure, a candidate would spend most of their time in large population centers campaigning because that’s where the popular vote would be won. Without that split, Trump may not have made it out of the primaries.
The Founding Fathers knew that as the nation grew and the time required for debating and voting on every issue increased, the public’s desire to take part in the process would quickly decrease. Bush and H. Ross Perot, he only achieved 43% of the vote in 1992. This advantage makes it possible for the average person to feel like their government supports them in meaningful ways. The goal of the Electoral College is to prevent one geographic region from having an undue effect on presidential elections. The electoral college prevents this from happening. You can opt-out at any time. The Electoral College does give disproportionate mathematical weight to small states. Kennedy won 303 Electoral College votes to Nixon's 219 votes.. 3. The Founding Fathers of the United States established a compromise in the Constitution when creating the foundation of their new nation. The Constitution does not contain many provisions that outline the necessary qualifications to be an elector. The cost of conducting a nationwide recount could be over $1 billion, which is cash that isn’t always in the budget. 1. It was part of the reason for the rebellion of the colonies in the first place. 5. In 1803, the 1800 census was about to shift the balance even more toward slave states. That would mean Bernie Sanders, Ron Paul, John Kasich, Colin Powell, and Faith Spotted Eagle all had a shot at the White House from the 2016 results.
One of the reasons the electoral college was established in the first place was to allow states with small populations to have an equal say in the Presidential elections. 2. Finally, the constitutional amendment must get a two-thirds vote from both houses of Congress and be ratified by three-fourths of the states. Al Gore, Richard Nixon, and Hubert Humphrey all lost the popular vote but won the election. Some even switched their vote to a different party. 10. 8.
The Electoral College is a body of delegates which represent each state within the United States. This disadvantage means that if you live in a rural area, your vote could count more toward who gets to become the eventual President. This process stops the other branches of government (under most circumstances) from choosing who will get to serve in the executive branch.
Sign up for our weekly newsletter. Under the Electoral College system, it is possible for a presidential candidate to lose the nationwide popular vote, yet be elected president of the United States by winning in only a handful of key states. But that didn’t fix the Electoral College’s anti-Black bias. Robert Longley is a U.S. government and history expert with over 30 years of experience in municipal government and urban planning. 2. Without the Electoral College, states like California and Texas would have more influence in the government than states like North Dakota, Vermont, or New Hampshire.
Even though many candidates ignore states where they think there isn’t a chance for a successful outcome, the 2016 election proved that every state can be a swing state if given half of a chance. One of the biggest complaints that comes out of any election is that a voter feels like their vote does not count. With Bush and Trump, they were beaten by their opponent in the popular vote.
Washington DC: Office of the Federal Register, 2020. The idea that the Electoral College was proposed to protect Southern slavery stretches the imagination; if anything, Madison seems to be suggesting that an Electoral College would mute unfair sectional advantages. 2. Critics of the Electoral College would say that the elections of Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump are evidence that this impact is no longer present in U.S. politics. There are very few qualifications to be an elector. Sticking to the Electoral College allows us to use elector votes as intended instead of relying on counting individuals votes.
Because of the development of the Electoral College, there was a middle option that eliminated the need to elect the President by popular vote or by appointment in Congress. The rules of the Electoral College allow people to cast ballots for President and Vice President when they have representatives who vote in Congress. Then each set of electoral votes is counted during a joint session of Congress on January 6 of the year following the meeting of electors in each state. Although not everyone is fond of the “us vs. them” format of the Electoral College, it does provide a societal advantage in that it requires each political party to adopt a generalized platform. Each person can evaluate this data to determine if a news story has an underlying bias to it.
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