ELECTORAL COLLEGE
Election is a power which the people hold that enables them to choose their leaders who helps them make decisions for the betterment of their nation. Election is a method that each country uses to calculate the results of the elected positions in the government. In other words, it is a system that translates votes into seats in the parliament or in other areas of the government.
There are many kinds of electoral systems used around the world but for the United States of America, one of the most important rules of the game in the elections is the Electoral College. Electoral College is the presidential electors from each States who meet after the general election to cast ballots for president and vice president.
The Electoral College was established in Article Two of the US, Constitution (1804), the issue of how to choose the nation’s chief executive was debated during the first two months of the Constitutional Convention. The President of the United States is the winner of the Electoral College – the first to earn 270 votes of the college’s rather than the winner of national popular vote (the candidate who receives the most votes from citizens at the ballot box.)
There are a couple of issues that I want to discuss – these are the operation of the Electoral College and its impact on the presidential contest; the original intentions of the framers of the Constitution in creating this strange entity and were those intentions carried out; and lastly, should the Electoral College be abolished? Why or why not?
First, let’s find out what is Electoral College and how it works. Electoral College and most elections in the United States are governed by plurality, or “winner-take-all’ rules.
The Electoral College consists of 538 electors. A majority of 270 electoral votes is required to elect the President. A state is entitled allotment of electors equals the number of members in its Congressional delegation: one for each member in the House of Representatives plus two for your Senators. Based on the article of Patrick Hummel, Presidential elections in the United States are decided by an Electoral College system in which different states are allowed to cast a fixed number of electoral votes, and the candidate that receives the majority of electoral votes is elected. In these elections, states normally allocate their electoral votes according to a winner-take-all system. Thus, a state usually casts all of its electoral votes for the candidate who receives the majority of votes in that state. While states normally use a winner-take-all system in deciding how to allocate their electoral votes, there are two states that make use of different systems; these two states are Nebraska and Maine.
Nebraska and Maine are the only allowed individual districts in their states that independently decide how to allocate one electoral vote. In result, these two states do not necessarily need to allocate all of their electoral votes to the same candidate, and may ultimately allocate their electoral votes in closer proportion to the number of votes received by the two candidates.
For instance, in the 2008 US presidential election Nebraska cast four electoral votes for the Republican candidate, John McCain and one electoral vote for the Democratic candidate, Barack Obama. This resulted in two candidates receiving electoral votes from Nebraska in closer proportion to the relative number of voters that voted for the two candidates in Nebraska.
What would be the Impact of the presidential contest? During the fewer than forty years since Baker v Carr, the Supreme Court has gone from deciding whether election law is even subject to judicial review to playing key role in the outcome of the presidential election itself. More than a month after the 2000 election, the court issued the controversial Bush v Gore opinion. In addition to ending the presidential contest for practical purposes, seven justices agreed that the Florida recount raised a valid equal protection holdings to the specific facts of the case, analysts suggest that the case may indeed open up questions about the implications of this “Newest Equal Protection” the court further hinted that “uniformity” would have prevented the equal protection problem. It concluded that the recounts did not comply with the Fourteenth Amendment because they lacked “adequate statewide standards”, “practicable procedures,” and “orderly judicial review”. Bush v Gore expands on the “one person, one vote” precedents by extending the doctrine beyond the mere structures and procedural designs of elections to include the actual management of the election itself.
The next logical question is: what exactly will now be required to ensure an equally weighted vote? Opponents of the unit rule may see some support for their cause in the equal protection reasoning of the opinion. Bush v Gore supports the notion that the constitution requires voters to be treated equally and seems hold the “one person, one vote” principle to require the vigorous scrutiny of presidential election practices at the micro-level. It certainly seems plausible to argue that given high degree of equal protection required by Bush v Gore to ensure that citizens votes are not weighted differently, and the fact that the court used that requirement to strike down a state’s election procedure in an article II presidential election, it could also be proper to enjoin a state from employing a unit voting practice for selecting electors. As far into the Article II as it may reach, any notion that the fourteenth Amendment could extend far enough to reach a state’s discretion to choose the manner of selecting its electors is not supported by Bush v Gore. The Courts take care to note that “the State Legislature‘s power to select the manner for appointing electors is plenary” and that even though the Equal Protection Clause applies when a state choose to have an election, the state still has the right to “take back the power to appoint electors” in the legislature.
In the end, it appears unlikely that a court challenge to the unit rule would be successful. However, such a possibility still exist, especially while there is still uncertainty over exactly how courts will deal with the Bush v Gore interpretations of equal protection.
History truly repeats itself. Last November 8,2016 election happened. Donald Trump was running against Hillary Clinton, seeing the polls and the popular votes, Clinton was leading with 60,467,245 popular votes to Trump’s 60,071,650 popular votes. This clearly showed that despite having people to vote freely for the leader they wanted, it does not matter since votes are collected through electoral votes per states. The real essence of democratic voting is gone because no matter how large the popular vote is for one candidate, sometimes, that candidate still doesn’t win.
Political Scientists have long devoted considerable effort to analyzing the operation of the electoral college, including its systematic biases, which work to the advantage of some states, voters, and parties and to the disadvantage of others, as well as its potential to elect minority presidents, provoke popular anger, and produce constitutional crises. But American political leaders of the nineteenth century fully knew and strategically acted upon these biases and their implications. Scholars investigating the influence of the structural features of American politics have increasingly described how the electoral framework in the third party system powerfully affected the legislative, administrative, and political decision making, ranging from narrow questions about specific administrative actions and policy developments to broader issues involving attitudes toward government activism, institutional reform, and campaign strategies.
Third, I’m going to discuss about what were the original intentions of the Framers of the constitution in creating this strange entity.
According to the article of Randy Barnett, the revival of interest in originalism that occurred in the 1980s, critics have charged that for a variety of reasons it is impractical, if not, impossible, to determine the Framer’s intentions. It is also argued that we should not be bound by the intentions of a few men who lived and died over two-hundred years ago. In sum, adherence to original intent is rejected as being impractical, unjust or both. Base on his article, the Constitution places limits on what laws a majority may impose on the people, but these limits are themselves a reflection of majority will; the Constitution reflects the will of the majority who elected representatives to state constitutional conventions, a majority of whom, in turn voted to ratify the constitution. Because the Constitution, like a statute, is viewed as a command from majority, we need to determine the intentions of those who issued the command to determine its meaning.
The United States founded this movement to point out the importance of representing the people through the government. The original intentions of the founding fathers were to establish it in the constitution to compromise between electing a president through a vote in congress and election of a president through votes of a qualified citizen.
Base in the article of Hummel, the Founding Fathers of the United States never intended the Electoral College to be a perfectly democratic system. Some expressed a fear of the tyranny of the majority, and electors were often chosen by state legislatures in early presidential elections in the United States. As the system was not intended to be completely democratic, it is not surprising that some scholars have suggested that the current system in the United States may not be optimal. Various authors have argued that proportional representation systems would do a better job or representing the interests of voters than the winner-take-all systems commonly used in the United States. For example, Amy (1993) and Barber (2000) indicate that winner-take-all systems are partly to blame for problems such as low voter turnout, underrepresentation of women and minorities, and gerrymandering. And Hill (2002) suggests that problems with pork barrel politics and political polarization can also be traced to winner-take-all systems. (Patrick Hummel)
Were those intentions carried out? The results are significant because they suggest that there are strategic reasons that a state would want to use a winner-take-all system of allocating its electoral votes. Not using a winner-take-all system could only serve to make the majority or residents in the states worse off. Similarly, the results indicate that there are predictable ways that voters in other states might be affected by a state’s decision not to use a winner-take all system of allocating its electoral votes. Voters who are relatively more likely to share political views with the states that changes from a winner-take-all system will view the change relatively less favorably. Also, typical voters in other states may be made better off as a result of this change because a state that does not use a winner-take-all system effectively dilutes its own voting power. (Patrick Hummel)
Should we abolished the Electoral College? Why or why not? It would take more than abolishing the Electoral College to correct the inequities caused by the current process of electing U. S. presidents. Any plan to abolish the Electoral College would require a constitutional amendment. This could result in a new system for selecting a president possibly through runoff election that would allow all citizens to vote regardless of residence, and require the eventual victor to gamer at least a majority of the vote. Voters would order candidates by preference. If no candidate received an overall majority of first choices, the candidates with the fewest votes would be eliminated one at a time, and ballots cast for those candidates recounted for the remaining candidates until the winner finally earned at least fifty percent of the vote. This could simultaneously resolve inequities between the states and the disenfranchisement of U. S citizens in the territories, and prevent candidates with very narrow bases from winning in a multi-party election.
Why we need to preserve the Electoral College? It allows for the continuation of “balanced federalism.” The United States takes pride in its governing institutions. Its values are seen in every aspect of the Constitution, with its system of checks and balances among the most prominent. The desire of Americans to maintain a balanced government, where no one source of power reigns above any other, calls for such systems as the bicameral legislature and the Electoral College . In other words, abolishing the Electoral College would remove one key aspect of the free and balanced nature of American government. The elimination of the Electoral College would destroy the two party system that has evolved from it. The two party system acts as a balance in the presidential election process that parallels those found within the Electoral College itself (the people and the Electoral College vote) as well as the nature of the American federal government, such as the two-house legislature.
I think that Electoral College should be abolished because Electoral College has lost its true essence of electing leaders that the nation freely chooses. The Electoral College has the representation of the state in a winner-take-all nature. This creates a great deal of inequity that betrays American values of majority rule, equality before the law, and representative government. It lets a candidate win the election despite having none of the majority of popular votes. Also, it gives unfair or unequal representation for each state.
Without the Electoral College, the United States will become a less federalist nation, the two-party system would collapse, and there would no longer be any requirement for a national president. In its Constitution, the United States embraces the concepts of freedom, liberty, and justice. The Electoral College is just one manifestation of those values, but it is crucial one that deserves our continued support.