To better understand why or why not the electoral college should be abolished, we first need to understand what the electoral college vote is and how it came about. The Electoral College is the name for the elected officials who nominally choose the president and vice president of the United States. Every four years in November more than 90 million Americans vote for presidential candidates they want in office, then in the middle of December, the president and vice president of the United States are elected by the votes of only 538 elected officials. The Constitution, and amendments, explicitly define how the number of Electors is to be determined. All 50 states are given a number of electors that are equivalent to the total number of their Congressional delegation (i.e., Senate representatives plus House). Essentially, the size of a state’s delegation to the Electoral College is equivalent to the number of its House Representatives plus two. For example, Delaware has two Senators and one House Representative; this entitles them to three electors. In accession to the states’ electors, the District of Columbia is granted a number of electors equivalent to that of the smallest state (Delaware) giving them a delegation of three. The end result is an Electoral College which currently totals 538 people. The decision on how to choose whom these elected officials would vote for was left up to the states. Most states ultimately decided to use the general ticket system where all of that state’s votes go to one candidate, whoever receives a majority of the votes in that state. The system for dealing with ties or failure to win the majority in the electoral college is to send the vote to the House of Representatives. There, each state is given one vote to cast for president. A vote is taken until one candidate has a majority.
Critics of the Electoral College believe it is a flawed system that should be altogether abolished and reintegrated by direct election. Many supporters of the Electoral College system make convincing arguments that it is the most practical system to decide the Presidential election in modern society as complex as the United States. Many politicians and scientist place the Electoral College voting system into a historical context by examining its growth and sustenance throughout the history of the United States. Critics of the Electoral College often make two solid arguments. The first compelling argument states that the Electoral College does not accurately represent the will of the citizens. The Electoral College’s inability to fully capture the will of the citizens derives from the winner take all system where the Presidential candidates compete to win the most popular votes, and whichever candidate wins in that state, wins all the electoral votes of that state. With this, it becomes increasingly difficult if not impossible for independent parties or third party to make an appearance in the Electoral College system. Afterward, the argument states that the Electoral College strictly supports a two-party system while discouraging independent and third party candidates, which in turn restrain the options available to the elected officials. The second argument is the probable role of the Electoral College in depressing the voter turnout state by state. “Since every State is entitled to the same number of electoral votes regardless of the voter turnout, there is no real incentive in the States to strengthen voter participation.” Since the debacle of the Presidential Election in the year 2000, millions of Americans have been calling for a complete reform of the Electoral College. A vast majority of these citizens were Al Gore supporters; disillusioned by the fact that G. Bush won the office for the President while, in fact, he lost the popular vote. In many voters minds, the American people did not elect George W. Bush; the Electoral College did.
This leads many Americans to the conclusion that this system should be put to an end. American citizens believe they are well enough informed to elect their president without the assistance of an Electoral College vote. The elected officials in the Electoral College are just representatives and do not make decisions anyway. They are just figurative for they should vote along their state’s popular vote, even though the majority are not legally bound to do so. Even though the elected official's votes reflect that of their state’s popular vote, the views of the citizens are not always represented. If one presidential candidate receives 50.1 percent of the popular vote, and the other candidate receives 49.9 percent, the candidate with only .2 percent more of the popular vote receives all of that states electoral votes.
I remember thinking the concept of the electoral college being a bad idea when it was explained to me in my junior high history class. Why should the vote of someone living in California have any more weight than, say, someone living on New York? The current argument for maintaining it—other than inertia—is the uneven population distribution. That is, without the electoral college, presidential candidates, could win by campaigning in urban, coastal areas and could ignore the vast rural, sparsely populated areas of the country. In my honest opinion, the inequities could be ironed out by rationalizing the primary process. For example, run five primaries ever two weeks for twenty-one weeks (with an extra week for Puerto Rico and D.C. and whoever else I may be overlooking) leading up to summer so conventions can be held. The primaries start with the five smallest states. The candidates have to run that gauntlet. Whoever washes out early saves everyone a lot of times and trouble.