In your opinion, do you think we should even have an Electoral College and just base the elections on popular.

Question

...vote? Why or why not?

Answer 1

But to do so, is to tinker again with U.S. Constitution.

Maybe we should just be talking about having an amendment added to the Constitution saying that the electoral college has been dropped. Not only will the idea get more people to start thinking but also politicians as well.

Answer 2

If the Electoral College goes away, would you accept a requirement that the President receive a Majority of the Popular Vote? Thirteen Presidential Elections were decided without the winner having a majority of the Popular Vote.

Answer 3

I would rather have just a straight popular vote.

But the electoral college is here to stay, I'm afraid. It goes back to when the Constitution was hammered out. The smaller states were afraid the big states would outvote them, so the EC was a compromise written into the Constitution to give proportionately more power to smaller states.

The idea is that every state gets one electoral vote for each senator and congressman. Every state has two senators but even the smallest state has at least one congressman, so even the least-populated states have 3 electoral votes.

There have been over 250 proposals and attempts to do away with the electoral college since the Const. was ratified in 1789, but all have failed because the small states defeat them. That will be the same no matter how many times we try it.

Answer 4

I would drop the electoral college itself. It's severely antiquated.

I'm not sure how I feel about the way the Pres. election is decided -- how each state gets so many electoral college votes. The danger of dropping this system and strictly going by the total popular vote is that the candidates will spend most of their time only in the most densely-populated areas.

I like them being forced to visit even rural areas.

Answer 5

We have to keep the electoral college! If we went with the popular vote, candidates would only focus on the big cities, like New York, LA, San Fran, Chicago, Seattle, Boston, Atlanta, Miami, etc. While rural areas in the midwest, southeast, southwest and others would be ignored. I live in a rural area in Tennessee, so I hate the idea of going by the popular vote.

Answer 6

I think the electoral college is antiquated to say the least

only twice in our history has a candidate lost the popular election and still won the election ... and in both cases the elections were marred by ballot stuffing in key states ... the electoral college supports voter fraud

example; Gore beat Bush by 800,000+ votes, but lost the election ... I don't think thats in the best interest of American voters, thats an awful lot of votes

Answer 7

Recent presidential elections have re-raised the question of electoral college reform, since Bush Jr in 2000 was the presumptive winner of the electoral college yet Al Gore won the popular vote, like Benjamin Harrison did in 1888.

Many are saying that if the loser of the popular vote serves as president, he will (like Harrison) be very weakened by a lack of mandate. I agree and we have seen this over and over and over again for the last 6+ years... it has resulted in an ENORMOUS division in our country.

Therefore I would like to see a constitutional amendment that would elect the president by a pure popular vote. Republicans should like this idea. After all, isn't it Bush Jr that is constantly talking about 'democracy'. Election by popular vote is a pure democratic election.

Answer 8

I say popular vote but the electorate serves a specific purpose. Back in the period of slavery, what was able to limit the expansive power of slaveholding was the 3/5 clause for blacks. Its perceived as a racist thing but its intent was really to limit the Southern Slave holders who were counting slaves as 'people' though they viewed them as property. Why? Because for every 30,000 people...it sent one representative to the Congress. So in places like VA, with predominately slave populations, they could use their 'numbers' to perpetrate the existing slave system and get more Pro Slavery folks in power. The 3/5 clause made it harder-so that it took 50,000 slaves to equal one rep. This helped to stop the advancement of slavery in the political arena.

The electorate is much the same way, is it not? Its purpose is to make sure that the smaller states..less populated, are not drowned out by the big states like mine (cali) and their 'vote' counts.

We dont have slavery issues anymore but in cases of like say, gay rights...if might (numbers) equaled right..then more liberal big states would silence small states and force end coast ideology on middle america. The electorate functions to represent a wide variety of views as opposed to the majority in a particular region.

Answer 9

We need to keep the electoral college.

If you make it about the popular vote, there are entire states that the candidates will simply blow off...along with their concerns. Candidates would simply stick to the major population centers, and the Wyomings and Rhode Islands of the world could just go whistle.

Answer 10

I think that we should keep the electorial college, but also let the people have a say in it and make the popular vote count for something.