Are there any good reasons as to why we should keep the electoral college?

Question

It was originally crated due to inferior communication technology. There really is no reason to keep it in this day and age.

Answer 1

YES! It insures that my vote counts just as much as your vote!

Answer 2

There is most definitely a reason, if not many reasons to keep the electoral college. Though it may seem that it either works for or against one candidate or another the electoral college still serves its purpose.

The idea of a federal election is to elect a candidate that best represents the union as a whole. The issue is more complex than simply replacing the college with a popular vote. A popular vote enables a situation where a minority of the union, but the majority of the population hold a much higher amount of power. Though it is possible for this to occur within the college itself, it is less likely.

One way to think of the electoral college is to see it as a compromise between the large and small population states. Large population states give up a small amount of their overall voting power to make sure the union stays stable. The smaller states accept to be part of a union in which they will wield very little power by being given enough of a voice to be heard.

Are there flaws in the system, of course! Whenever you attempt to solicit the input of 300 million people spread non-uniformly across 4 million square miles of land you are bound to end up with problems. I am sure our founding fathers forsaw some of our current issues, but not others. The constituon can be ammended meaning that they knew their wisdom was not perfect, and their knowledge incomplete. They also made is very hard to accomplish this because it does effect so many different people.

Should we keep the electoral college? Yes, simply because we havent found a better way to do it yet. It is unfair to some, but another system might be unfair to another group. For now, its the best thing we've got.

Answer 3

As far as I'm concerned, the college can and should be eliminated by a constitutional amendment. Having a direct popular vote is best. And I am positively amazed at the cynical answers I see above by people who blatantly say that they want to keep the college just because they don't want someone like Gore to maybe win, just because they don't want the big cities dictating who gets elected President. Those answers are positively shameful.

Answer 4

Heck yea! It proved it's worth as recently as 2000. We would have suffered a Gore Presidency without the electoral college system. That was a close one, whew!

Huzzah! Long live the Electoral College!!

Answer 5

It works. Leave it alone. Libs think it needs to be changed because they haven't won.... but once they win, they will hold fast to keep the electoral votes alive... as long as Libs win right? But if the Republicans win, they stole it.

Answer 6

The Electoral College may have made sense in 1789, but it has long outlived its usefulness. In 1789, communication was poor and the average citizen had little access to information about the candidates. Back then, the Electors who voted in the electoral college were not necessarily picked by the voters at all, and they were not necessarily pledged to vote for a particular candidate. The Electors could be picked by state legislatures, and they were expected to carefully consider who to vote for in picking a president. Moreover, the provision giving each state at least 3 electoral votes which theoretically gave the small states (like Delaware and Road Island) a larger influence on who would become president came out of a compromise, whereby the southern slave states were permitted to count each slave as 3/5 of a person in determining the state's representation in congress.

Now, the Electoral College, under which states generally vote as a block - with all their electoral votes going to the winner of the popular vote in the state, is great for people who live in swing states such as Florida, Pennsylvania and Ohio. People in swing states (also known as battleground states) get lots of visits from candidates who pay attention to what they want. The candidates also spend a great deal of money in those states for campaign advertisements.

The Electoral College is great for the Miami Cubans because neither party wants to upset them by easing the embargo on Cuba.

Unfortunately, if you don't live in a swing state, you are just a spectator in presidential elections - The candidates don't even bother to visit spectator states after the primaries except to raise campaign contributions, because it is assumed that the state will vote blue or vote red. Why bother with the needs of Texas or California, when you know that Texas's electoral votes are going to go to the Republican and California's electoral votes are going to go to the Democrat?

One result of the current system, is that after the primaries, almost all the money spent on campaign advertising gets spent in a very small number of swing states.

Some Republicans in spectator states, such as Congressman Ron Paul of Texas, favor keeping the Electoral College. These people claim that getting rid of the Electoral College would favor liberals on the East and West Coasts. But if John Kerry had won just 60,000 more votes in Ohio, he would be president today, even though Bush won the national popular vote by more than 3 million votes. In response, the conservatives who favor keeping the Electoral College argue that this was an anomaly that is not likely to happen again if we keep the present system. (By January of 2009 when the new president takes office, the Republicans will have had control of the White House for 28 of the previous 40 years.)

Republicans tend to benefit when the voter turn out is low, and moving to a popular vote system, would increase the voter turnout, because every vote would count. Republicans have also been active in challenging the right of people to vote in areas where most voters are likely to vote Democratic (based on the claim that the voter is not properly registered or has been convicted of a felony or is ineligible for some other reason.) The current Electoral College system permits Republicans to concentrate their vote suppression efforts in a few swing states. The Texas legislature recently passed a new voter ID bill. It didn't get any Democratic votes and the supporters of the bill couldn't even get all the Republicans to vote for it because its purpose is so transparently to deny voting rights to poor people and minorities. In order to get a bare majority they had to include provisions for free state IDs.

In theory, the Electoral College gives more power to small states like Alaska or Montana, because each state gets at least 3 Electoral Votes, but in practice the candidates don't pay any attention to a small state, unless it is also a swing state with roughly an equal number of Democratic and Republican voters.

The fact that the so called fly over states get a extra representation in the Electoral College is largely irrelevant. The worse thing about the Electoral College is the winner take all way that almost all of the states award their electoral votes - which prevents all but a very few states from being spectator states.

It is very difficult to amend the constitution, but there is a realistic plan to get rid of the electoral college without a constitutional amendment. You can read how it would work here:

http://www.nationalpopularvote.com
http://www.every-vote-equal.com

In early April, the state of Maryland enacted the law envisioned by these web sites - which if enacted by enough states would make the Electoral College irrelevant. . The Hawaii legislature recently passed a similar bill, but Hawaii's governor vetoed it on April 23rd. The Hawaii Senate voted to overturn the veto on May 1st by the required 2/3 majority, but the Hawaii house failed to act before the legislature adjourned on May 3rd. The Hawaii house may return to consider overriding the Veto in July. Nevertheless, the plan has a considerable amount of support among both Democrats and Republicans. The Illinois House of Representatives has passed the bill and the governor of that state has said he will sign it if passes the Senate.

The idea of one person - one vote is an important principal in a democracy. But the greatest evil of the electoral college is that it concentrates power in a very few states, something that people who favor the Electoral College claim that it avoids.

Changing to a popular vote system would not necessarily favor one party over the other. If a popular vote system had been in effect in 2000, Gore would not have necessarily won. Bush might have come to California and other blue states after the primaries, and campaigned as a moderate uniter - enabling him to pick up enough Republican votes to put him over the top.

Answer 7

YES!!...to keep the large cities from controlling the elections...they all lean dem, and are liberal, and contain the largest welfare recipients....I know thats a libs dream...but it would destroy this country.

Answer 8

No. Why not just go by the popular vote?

Answer 9

Our forefathers made it - so it should be fine!

They wrote the declaration and the constitution.