The document discusses flaws with the US electoral college system, including that it gives disproportionate representation to smaller states and can result in a president being elected despite losing the national popular vote. It proposes a three-chamber system for electing the president to address these issues and provide broader representation.
The document discusses flaws with the US electoral college system, including that it gives disproportionate representation to smaller states and can result in a president being elected despite losing the national popular vote. It proposes a three-chamber system for electing the president to address these issues and provide broader representation.
The document discusses flaws with the US electoral college system, including that it gives disproportionate representation to smaller states and can result in a president being elected despite losing the national popular vote. It proposes a three-chamber system for electing the president to address these issues and provide broader representation.
The document discusses flaws with the US electoral college system, including that it gives disproportionate representation to smaller states and can result in a president being elected despite losing the national popular vote. It proposes a three-chamber system for electing the president to address these issues and provide broader representation.
The electoral college is a deeply flawed and unfair system.
It is a system that
makes where you live determines the representation you get, makes it hard for certain
parties to stand out in certain states, and sometimes make it so that the losers can win.
The United States’ electoral college has caused problems in the United State’s so called
democracy that the peoples votes don’t matter but only the electoral votes do.
The United States has a representative democracy, meaning the people get to
choose representatives. There are 538 delegates in the electoral college and depending
on the population of your state your share of delegates varies. The number of electoral
votes per state should be given based solely on population, regardless of representation
in Congress. For earning electoral votes it is generally winner take all, meaning the
candidate only has to win 51% of the popular vote in a single state to receive all of the
electoral votes for that state. This causes the focus of the candidates to be towards not
the people but the close races where all the candidate needs is half the votes and he
gets all the state’s votes. This is a system stacked against certain voters and one where
only a few states truly matter, and thus it is against the true idea of democracy.
In a democracy, where you live should not be a factor in how you can affect the
government you live in, but with the electoral college and the winner take all policy, it
makes it so that certain states have more power. Say for example that you are a
republican voter and you live in Maryland, which is mostly a democratic state, your vote
will more likely count for nothing because you are so drowned out by the population
being majorly democratic, and vice versa if you're a democratic voter in a republican state. This is a huge problem because it also happens to affect who the presidential
candidates actually care for and who they care to represent. If the president thinks he
will definitely win certain states and definitely lose some he will end up only
campaigning where votes matter in swing states, leaving some states to feel like they
are not being represented and causing certain people in certain states to matter less to
the candidates.
The votes from the electoral college are given out based off of the amount of
representatives each state has in Congress. This means that some states will not
receive equal representation in their state. In Wyoming they have a total of three
electoral votes and a population of 572,381, so they get one vote per 190,000 people.
California has fifty-five electoral votes and a population of 39.56 million so they only get
one vote per every 719,000 people. This system is unfair because it makes your vote
matter less in larger states and more in bigger states. If voters in Wyoming received
representation in the electoral college in the same proportion as those in California (1
vote per 700,000 people), then the state of Wyoming would only receive .79 votes. If
people in California had the same power as someone in Wyoming, California would
have 208 votes. The amount of people that equate to one electoral vote in California is
more than the entire population of Wyoming, which gets three. This is one of the big
reasons people disagree with the electoral college as it gives way more power to
smaller states and lessens the value of electoral votes that more populous states get.
Within the United States there has been five cases where presidents have won
the electoral college but lost the popular vote, with two of these instances happening very recently in 2000 and 2016. Such recency has gotten people talking about the
electoral college and whether it should be reformed or removed altogether. A candidate
who has lost the popular vote can still win the electoral college, making the popular vote
purely symbolic. In a system that it is possible to win an election with only 22% of the
popular vote, clearly the system must be flawed. While extremely unlikely to happen,
any system where such an event is possible there is a need for reform.
One of the most common ideas is that we should get rid of delegates all together
and just have a direct system of voting. The problems with such a system are that not
every voter is educated and people who know nothing about the government are given
significant power to elect the president. Another option would be to alter the number of
votes each state gets, so that each state would have the same amount of votes. This
too is flawed, as it would be giving people in small states more power proportionally and
taking almost all the power from bigger states.
The best option for our country is to keep our first two existing methods (Electoral
College, Popular vote) and add a chamber to those two and require a candidate to win
two out of three. A third chamber added would be a compromise for people on either
side of the argument of whether we should keep the electoral college or remove it. The
third chamber should be based on another electoral vote but instead of winner take all,
this third chamber would allott electoral votes based on the percentage of the popular
vote that candidate earned. So in this third chamber, if Iowa gets six electoral votes and
a democratic candidate gets 67% of the votes, the votes would be split so that the other
candidate who got 33% of the vote would receive two votes and the other candidate would receive four votes. This new system would solve a lot of problems. For people
who are democratic in a primarily republican state their vote will count more now that
the popular vote and the new third chamber matter in the final election. It gives the
minority party members a chance at more representation in states typically dominated
by one party.
The incentives of making three chambers that determine who becomes the
president are that it gives the people more representation and it ensures that the
majority of people actually want a certain president. People get more representation
because the popular vote is now a part of the real elections but still only counts for a
third of it. This is an improvement because while it is good to give the people what they
want, many of them are undereducated and should not have the final say in who
becomes the most powerful person in the country. This new system will also cause the
president to be more affected by who they choose to aim their campaign towards. The
president would be more likely to campaign in more states where he could potentially
pull in more voters who would then make a difference in the new third chamber of the
election, or even just the popular vote.
With this new system it makes it so there are more winners and very few losers.
Among the winners are people who once thought their voices were never heard in the
election, for the average citizens who have become less represented because of where
they live they can now count in the election more than ever. Now candidates will not just
campaign in swing states where they know they’re more likely to get more voters they’ll
now campaign for the people everywhere. Because there is now three chambers in which to be elected, the president would be more affected by what the people want. To
make it better while still also having a system in play where if the people are
uneducated there is still the electoral college there to make better political decisions.
In conclusion the broken system of our representative democracy has made it
difficult for people living in larger states to retrieve equal representation as those who
live in smaller states, as well as an unequal representation for democrats in repiblican
states and republicans in demoractic states. The solution to this problem is to have
three voting chambers. The first one using the system we have today with delegates
voting for the president in a winner take all system. The second using the popular vote
to gain a fair representation from the people. The third in a non winner take all system
where each state is given the same amount of representatives as the first chamber and
the votes are divided up based off of how the delegates vote for each candidate. This
final solution will solve the problems for people who have previously thought that they
have been misrepresented based off of where they live or what the majority of their
states party is, and also keep people who think that the electoral college should stay
happy. Work Cited
Foley, Edward B., et al. “An Idea for Electoral College Reform That Both Parties Might Actually
