As the 2016 presidential race commences, voters are already choosing sides. Many staunch conservatives are throwing their weight behind Donald Trump, while other younger voters choose to back candidates like Bernie Sanders. With the exciting opportunity to vote, newly registered voters are eager to make a difference and await the chance to cast their votes.
But do the votes of individuals really matter? In the United States’ system, a candidate can win without a majority of the popular vote. Most recently in the 2000 George Bush versus Al Gore election, Gore won the popular vote but lost the Electoral College when the Supreme Court halted the vote count in Florida, and gave the state to Bush. It is incredible that in a system of democracy, a leader can be chosen whom the majority of people do not wish to be their president.
The founding fathers created the Electoral College to ensure that only a qualified person could be elected president. They feared that a malevolent person intent on becoming a tyrant could too easily sway public opinion.
Moreover, the Electoral College is a mechanism for appeasing the smaller states. Each state receives a number of electoral votes equal to its number of representatives in the Senate and the House of Representatives. The selection process for each state’s electors varies, however electors are typically party selected representatives or other government officials. But are these mechanisms really necessary any longer?
The beauty of representative democracy is that it gives the populace the opportunity to elect officials that they consider to hold the same values as themselves. The Electoral College defeats the purpose of this form of government, effectively taking the power out of the hands of general voters. Although we live in a Democratic Republic, isn’t giving power to the people part of the democratic values that we as Americans hold so dear? So why put up with a system that limits that power?
The Electoral College is not a necessary institution. Measures are already in place that prevent the president from abusing power. The system of checks and balances was instituted to assure that the president would not exploit the power that’s given to them.
The Supreme Court has the power to rule any legislation that the president signs unconstitutional, and the Congress can overrule a presidential veto with a three-quarters majority vote. These measures significantly curb the power of the president insuring proper use of the presidency. The Constitution virtually guarantees that it is impossible for someone to misuse the presidency, and the use of the Electoral College to prevent a tyrant from rising to power is an unnecessary precaution.
The Electoral College forces candidates to campaign in every state, rather than simply bypassing rural areas and spending a majority of time in cities and states with the largest populations. In 1792, this notion made perfect sense. The framers lived in a world without digital technology, television or any form of mass media. In the 21st century, the need for a candidate to campaign in every state is almost non existent, when the majority of the population would rather watch a speech from their couch or read it in the paper than actually attend it. Information is readily available to anyone who cares to procure it, and it is no longer necessary for candidates to go to their audience.
Without a doubt, smaller states need to be equally represented, but should a smaller population really receive measures to increase the value of its votes? Why should the vote of any one person count for more than another? The voters in a state are its representation, and it is unnecessary to implement systems to increase the value of its voters. The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, and although it is never fun to be on the side of the few, the running of a country requires people to make compromises and sacrifices in order to be united. The Electoral College makes it possible for the needs of the few to outweigh the needs of the many.
When the needs of the few begin to be of more importance than the needs of the many, a road is paved toward tyranny and oppression. In a country that stands with freedom and democracy, this is something that should not be tolerated.
The Electoral College is a winner take all system, and regardless of whether 49 out of one hundred representatives voted for one candidate, all of the votes will be given to the candidate who wins the majority. This is exactly the flaw that makes it possible for a candidate to win without a majority of the popular vote, and though this made sense during the founding of the country as a means of equaling out the value of the large and small states, it is not necessary any longer. The Electoral College was designed and implemented for a society and an era that is long past.
Whether right or wrong, the Electoral College will most likely never be abolished due to the fact that any amendment to the United States Constitution must be ratified by three-quarters of the states. Regardless, it could be possible to implement changes so that a candidate cannot win an election without a majority of the popular vote. Rather than using a winner take all system, candidates should receive the electoral votes that they garner in a given state regardless of who takes the majority.
If a representative’s votes do not fall in line with those of the people they were chosen to represent, something is wrong. The purpose of democracy is to give power to the citizens, so that they may elect the person most aligned with their views and desires, and the Electoral College permits just the opposite. By giving power to a select few representatives it opens the opportunity to bypass the necessity for voters altogether.
-CJ Haberbush
Featured Illustration Credit: Jenny Chang/The Foothill Dragon Press
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Americans have not agreed that presidents need to be elected by a majority vote.
With the current system of electing the President, none of the states requires that a presidential candidate receive anything more than the most popular votes in order to receive all of the state’s or district’s electoral votes.
Since 1824 there have been 16 presidential elections in which a candidate was elected or reelected without gaining a majority of the popular vote.– including Lincoln (1860), Wilson (1912 and 1916), Truman (1948), Kennedy (1960), Nixon (1968), and Clinton (1992 and 1996).
Because of the state-by-state winner-take-all electoral votes laws (i.e., awarding all of a state’s electoral votes to the candidate who receives the most popular votes in each state) in 48 states, a candidate can win the Presidency without winning the most popular votes nationwide. This has occurred in 4 of the nation’s 57 (1 in 14 = 7%) presidential elections. The precariousness of the current state-by-state winner-take-all system of awarding electoral votes is highlighted by the fact that a shift of a few thousand voters in one or two states would have elected the second-place candidate in 4 of the 15 presidential elections since World War II. Near misses are now frequently common. There have been 7 consecutive non-landslide presidential elections (1988, 1992, 1996, 2000, 2004, 2008, and 2012). 537 popular votes won Florida and the White House for Bush in 2000 despite Gore’s lead of 537,179 (1,000 times more) popular votes nationwide. A shift of 60,000 voters in Ohio in 2004 would have defeated President Bush despite his nationwide lead of over 3 million votes.
After the 2012 election, Nate Silver calculated that “Mitt Romney may have had to win the national popular vote by three percentage points on Tuesday to be assured of winning the Electoral College.”
Most Americans don’t ultimately care whether their presidential candidate wins or loses in their state or district . . . they care whether he/she wins the White House. Voters want to know, that even if they were on the losing side, their vote actually was equally counted and mattered to their candidate. Most Americans think it would be wrong for the candidate with the most popular votes to lose. We don’t allow this in any other election in our representative republic.
The Electoral College does not ensure that only a qualified person could be elected president. A person with malevolent intent on becoming a tyrant could win.
The current system does not provide some kind of check on the “mobs.” There have been 22,991 electoral votes cast since presidential elections became competitive (in 1796), and only 17 have been cast for someone other than the candidate nominated by the elector’s own political party. 1796 remains the only instance when the elector might have thought, at the time he voted, that his vote might affect the national outcome.
The electors are and will be dedicated party activists of the winning party who meet briefly in mid-December to cast their totally predictable rubberstamped votes in accordance with their pre-announced pledges.
The U.S. Supreme Court has upheld state laws guaranteeing faithful voting by presidential electors (because the states have plenary power over presidential electors).
There is no reason to think that the Electoral College would prevent a demagogue from being elected President of the United States, regardless of whether presidential electors are elected on the basis of the state-by-state winner-take-all rule or the nationwide popular vote
In 2012, 24 of the nation’s 27 smallest states received no attention at all from presidential campaigns after the conventions after Mitt Romney became the presumptive Republican nominee on April 11. They were ignored despite their supposed numerical advantage in the Electoral College. In fact, the 8.6 million eligible voters in Ohio received more campaign ads and campaign visits from the major party campaigns than the 42 million eligible voters in those 27 smallest states combined.
Now with state-by-state winner-take-all laws (not mentioned in the U.S. Constitution, but later enacted by 48 states), presidential elections ignore 12 of the 13 lowest population states (3-4 electoral votes), that are non-competitive in presidential elections. 6 regularly vote Republican (AK, ID, MT, WY, ND, and SD), and 6 regularly vote Democratic (RI, DE, HI, VT, ME, and DC) in presidential elections.
Similarly, the 25 smallest states have been almost equally noncompetitive. They voted Republican or Democratic 12-13 in 2008 and 2012.
Voters in states that are reliably red or blue don’t matter. Candidates ignore those states and the issues they care about most.
None of the 10 most rural states (VT, ME, WV, MS, SD, AR, MT, ND, AL, and KY) is a battleground state.
The current state-by-state winner-take-all method of awarding electoral votes does not enhance the influence of rural states, because the most rural states are not battleground states, and they are ignored. Their states’ votes were conceded months before by the minority parties in the states, taken for granted by the dominant party in the states, and ignored by all parties in presidential campaigns. When and where voters are ignored, then so are the issues they care about most.
Support for a national popular vote in rural states
Support for a national popular vote is strong in every smallest state surveyed in recent polls among Republicans, Democrats, and Independent voters, as well as every demographic group
Among the 13 lowest population states, the National Popular Vote bill has passed in nine state legislative chambers, and been enacted by 4 jurisdictions.
California has enacted the National Popular Vote bill. It would guarantee the presidency to the candidate who receives the most popular votes in the country.
Every vote, everywhere, would be politically relevant and equal in every presidential election. No more distorting and divisive red and blue state maps of pre-determined outcomes. There would no longer be a handful of ‘battleground’ states where voters and policies are more important than those of the voters in 80%+ of the states, like California, that have just been ‘spectators’ and ignored after the conventions.
The National Popular Vote bill would not take effect in any state until enacted by states possessing a majority of the electoral votes—270 of 538.
After taking effect, all of the presidential electors from the enacting states will be supporters of the presidential candidate receiving the most popular votes in all 50 states (and DC)—thereby guaranteeing that candidate with an Electoral College majority
The bill has passed 33 state legislative chambers in 22 rural, small, medium, large, red, blue, and purple states with 250 electoral votes.
The bill has been enacted by 11 jurisdictions with 165 electoral votes – 61% of the 270 necessary to go into effect.
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