Should we keep the Electoral College system or chuck it in favor of the popular vote?

Question

This has been a matter of some debate lately, but I don't know how much it really matters. Rarely has a President won without winning the popular vote. 3 or 4 times I think.

Answer 1

The one thing I know for fact is: Whatever is popular is most always wrong.

Answer 2

Whether we keep the Electoral College matters a great deal because it effects who the candidates try hardest to influence and who is ultimately elected. The popular vote might come out very differently if we didn't use the Electoral College system.

In theory, the electoral college gives more power to the small low population states, and some people think that is a good thing. - but in practice, both small and large states are ignored after the primaries, unless they are swing states like Florida, Ohio and Pennsylvania. The candidates pay no attention to California after the primaries because they know it is going to go Democratic; nor do the candidates pay any attention to the small states of Utah and South Dakota or the large state of Texas after the primaries, because they know that all three states will cast all of their electoral votes for the Republican candidate. If you don't live in a swing state, you are just a spectator in the general election.

On the other hand, the candidates pay a lot of attention to the swing state of Florida both before and after the primaries. - - In Florida, there are a lot of Cubans who hate Castro. - and the candidates from both parties don't want to offend them. That is why Americans can't even visit Cuba, while we trade with Communist China, despite its human rights abuses.

The great evil of the Electoral College is the all or nothing way the states cast their electoral votes.

However, there is a way to make the Electoral College irrelevant without a constitutional amendment.

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

After taking at look at those web sites, if you still think the Electoral College somehow helps the small states, consider this: It takes 270 (out of 538) Electoral Votes to elect the president. - The 11 largest states have a total of 271 Electoral Votes. If 51% of the people in each or the 11 largest states favored one candidate and 100% of the people in the remaining 39 states favored the other candidate, the president would be elected by the Electoral Votes of the large states, even though he received only slightly more than 25% of the popular vote and even though he was overwhelming opposed by the voters in the 39 smallest states. Admittedly, there is not much chance of this happening so long as Texans don't start to vote like Californians, but the problem of elections being controlled by a few swing states is very real.

Answer 3

I recommend keeping the electoral vote system, anyway. Consider the 2000 election: if a vote in any state could offset a vote anywhere else, the Florida recount could easily have spread into a national recount. The margin was close enough. Having the popular vote in each state translate into electoral votes meant that the recount problem did not arise in most of the country. We do not have sufficiently good voting technology to use a nationwide popular vote as a basis; the recounts could last forever.

The alleged distortions are not really major, either. The 2000 electoral vote was split thin enough that one large state (Florida) could swing the balance, and had the Florida vote been counted accurately, the Electoral College result would have matched the popular vote, which was pretty close, too.

There are really two offsetting distortions: Bush received disproportionate electoral votes from small states, because each state has a vote corresponding to each Representative (distributed by population) and each Senator (distributed equally), so the extra two votes per state makes a big difference. Conversely, Gore won a number of big states with winner-take-all rules, thereby picking up extra votes because a close margin translates into a big chunk of electoral votes won. The two effects pretty much canceled each other out: we got thin margins in both popular and electoral votes.

Whether we should do away with the actual College, and just count up electoral votes state-by-state based on the popular-vote results, is another matter. "Faithless electors" generally only turn up when they don't actually make a difference, but I'm a little soured on trusting electors because one from my home state (Minnesota) changed votes in 2004.

Answer 4

It's true that a president has been elected undemocratically a few times, but is this a fact we should condone? To strive towards greater democracy, I think chucking out the electoral college is a good idea, but it's not a panacea. It was created because our founding father elites feared democracy or the masses running their own lives.

Let's say the electoral college is thrown out, then would things change much? I don't think so. You still would have rich people, who've gone to the best colleges, joined secret socieites, etc. supposedly representing the average Americans. Representative democracy is a sham because then people take on a spectator role and let the corrupt elite decide what we can vote on, instead of us partaking in a meaningful way in our own affairs. Voting every year or so and retreating to our consumer roles is pathetic and what our leaders think is adequate for democracy.

Answer 5

Excellent question. But your comment, "rarely has a president won without the popular vote, 3 or 4 times I think", is all the reason in the world it should be abolished. Just look how history would have been different with Gore and not Bush. I will bet there are 4000 American families and their dead soldiers that wish we would have used the popular vote and not the antique electoral college which dates back to around the 1870's. And as long as "one person one vote" is not reality, then people will think, and rightfully so, that there vote does not count. In California for example, it takes 162,000 popular votes to equal one electoral college delegate vote. And the electoral college is awarded delegates predicated on the last complete census. In the 2000 election, the last complete census was in 1990. And, the US census counts EVERY person living in a household, legal or not. So now that 20,000,000 illegal immigrant number becomes a factor in deciding who our president is.

Answer 6

Amazing Person,

The idea of the Electoral College strikes fear in the hearts of the students who have to explain and argue its points and double fear in the hearts of any teachers who have to teach this concept. Of course the original idea was to give the states with a lower population a say in the election. Keep in mind that black people and women were not given the freedom to vote when the College was created. Demographics have changed, and the popular vote is once again being reevaluated, as it has since the College's inception.

Since the most densely populated states are New Jersey, Rhode Island and Massachusetts, I'll be happy to let the people living there vote as they wish. As long as my vote counts as one equal and valuable vote.

Answer 7

i'm a lefty, yet I thoroughly help the Electoral college gadget. It is going back to the theory of the framers and our concept of federalism, and that each state is unquestionably a sovereign and not in basic terms a area. It demands applicants and events to pay some interest to the guy smaller inhabitants states and not basically manhattan and California. on the time of the framers, they traumatic with regard to the disproportionate impact of Virginia. The logical extension of your argument could be to disband the senate. i think of issues have worked for the main section fantastically lots over the final 220 years or so.

Answer 8

As a democrat, I am obviously in favor of the popular vote...

We are reaching an era where a few people in the sticks are trying their best to govern cities that they couldn't even survive in... that's a problem.

But even if you don't do anything about the EC - something MUST be done about gerrymandering!
In south florida, the republicans have been busy little bees - dividing Miami and Fort Lauderdale into lots of little complex webs in order to keep gays and blacks from having a uniform vote.

Answer 9

The Electoral College needs to be kept because without it, a half dozen of the most populated states would always determine the winner. Those states? New York, Pennsylvania, Florida, Texas, Illinois and California.
If you lived in Vermont or Montana, basically your vote would never count. This is exactly what our founders wanted to prevent by instituting the EC.

Answer 10

There is no reason to keep it. We are no longer protecting slave states from being overwhelmed by the populated North East.- to keep them in the union... if the rural RED states that benefit from the Electoral College wanted to succeed,,,I may be willing to go along with that. In all seriousness, we need to get rid of this institution. Its just another way for one party to steal elections.

Answer 11

I say is need to see File 13. EC members are NOT required to cast the vote for whom the electorate in their state selected.