Electoral College: Electoral College and how It is beneficialJonPaul TottaLouisburg High SchoolAbstractThe electoral college is something that the government has had for sometime. The constitution has made something for this process and they also have the popular vote. The electoral college has many benefits and a lot of good things.
Another thing is the amount of electors and how many to win the electoral vote. Electoral College: What is good about it The electoral college is the best way to elect the president but doesn’t work one hundred percent of the time. The electoral college is made up of 538 electors. To win the electoral vote in the election you need 270 electoral vote or even more. The electoral college is made up of 435 representatives, 100 senators, and 3 electors from Washington D.
C. Every 4 years there is an election for president and the electoral college decides who the president is. Each state is divided up into districts and these districts are split up upon the population of the state. The amount of districts your state has tells you how many electors you have or how many electoral votes you have. The thing about the electoral college is that you don’t always have to win the popular vote. An example of not winning the presidency because you didn’t get the electoral vote but you got the popular vote would be Al Gore. Another good example of that would be the 2016 election between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton when Trump won the electoral vote but not the popular vote. The electoral college is something that matter when it comes to electing the president.
Why is it important? It is important because our constitution likes the the power separated. The electoral college give the smaller states power when it comes to voting. Another thing about the electoral college is that if you want your state to vote for Republican or Democratic or even a third party you can live in a state that will vote strictly for one of those. An example of that is if you live in Kansas you will most likely vote Republican because Kansas is a Republican state. The electoral college doesn’t always work 100 percent of the time because they need to make it harder to win the electoral vote since it is the only actual one that matter when it comes to electing the president. If you balance out the popular vote and the electoral vote the election would be really difficult to win the election and it would be more fair. The electoral college is very controversial and some people don’t think it is fair. The things that i think is not fair are only two things.
The first thing is that you could win the popular vote and still lose. If you are going to have the popular vote and the electoral vote and you win the popular vote and lose, what is the point of having a popular vote if it is useless? The only way that i think a way to fix this is what i said in the last paragraph and that is you need to balance the popular vote and the electoral vote. The electoral vote is something completely different from the popular vote. Both of these have some major differences.
The first major difference is that in the electoral college your vote is almost useless because you will vote and it goes to an elector and they decided whether or not that district will vote Republican or Democratic based upon the state and its political view. The popular vote is what everyone looks at during the elections and when you vote it just counts toward the popular vote. The electoral college to me is important because it is something that the constitution made to make the power equal and it gives the smaller states like Rhode Island, New Jersey, Vermont, etc. It gives those small states power to the election instead of being almost completely useless. If we a president can win the popular vote but not the electoral vote and lose the presidency is that really a democracy? The constitution says that we are a democracy which is a system of government by the whole population or all the eligible members of a state, typically through elected representatives.
Also a democracy is something that if you vote for something and it has the majority of the votes it will pass. But the president can have the popular vote which is everyone in the country and the president can still lose the election how is that a democracy. But, the Founding Fathers said when they made the government it is a republican form of government or a representative democracy. So the government is not a complete democracy it is rather partially republican and a democracy. A direct democracy would only work if the entire country would trust the process or at least participate in it. Since the government is not a direct democracy there has to something to equal the power or separate the power so they made the electoral college. What if you wanted to change the electoral college in some way. What would it take to change the electoral college? First you would have to make a constitutional amendment then have the get through the legislative process.
Before you make that amendment a president would have to lose the presidency due to the electoral vote but having the popular vote and lose the presidency. If that was to happen again someone could try to make the amendment become a reality. There has only been three cases when a president has lost due to the electoral vote and the popular vote. Some people might ask about if the electoral vote gets tied? What will happen? There has been only two times since the electoral college was made and they were in 1800 and 1824. The first was between Thomas Jefferson and Aaron Burr which they both tied the electoral vote.
In 1824 when Andrew Jackson and John Quincy Adams tied with two other candidates making a four way split for the electoral vote. Even though Andrew Jackson won the popular vote the House of Representatives decided to pick John Quincy Adams to be president. John Quincy adams then went on and won the 1828 and 1832 elections. Over the years of having the electoral college since the United States has been made there have been some modifications and amendments to make sure the process is correct. There has been a total of about 4 modifications to the electoral college. The first modification the electoral college has faced was the 12th amendment.
The 12th amendment was passed by congress on December 9, 1803. This amendment change a section or a portion of Article 2, section 1. Then later the 12th amendment was then amended by the 20th amendment. The second modification the electoral college has had was the Electoral Count Act of 1887. The Electoral Count Act was the selection of electors by state legislatures instead of party caucuses.
This act created a uniform of state elector certifications. The third thing that the electoral college has been modified been is the Permanent Appointment Act. The permanent Appointment Act was created in 1929 and it created the amount of electors needed for the electoral college. It locked down the number to 435. The last thing that modified the electoral college was the 23rd amendment. The 23rd amendment is a number of electors of the President and the Vice President equal to the number of Senators and Representatives in Congress. The 23rd Amendment was passed in 1961 it made the District of Columbia get three new electors. This may have created the statistical tie of 269-269.
There may have been instances where someone wins a popular vote and lose or maybe they have tied. Those are a problem but have you thought about the electoral college and the third party system doing something beneficial for the presidency? It seems almost impossible for a third party to win the election but a third party can make an entire election swing. The electoral college makes for a small third party show in a state or maybe two states make the election completely change. There are many things that make the electoral college different.
The electoral college guarantees certainty to the outcome of the election. But, the electoral college also seems to ignore the will of the people. There are about 300 million people in the United States but the Electoral College only has 538 people vote for our president. Does it seem like that the electoral college is not really following the whole democracy thing? The Electoral college is something that not a lot of people pay attention to or even know how it works.
But, the thing about the electoral college is that it helps all parts of the country included and even makes sure that the best president for the nation is elected. Most people just think about the two main parties that we have and they don’t know what the third party can do. There are many pro’s and con’s to the electoral college. The Electoral College has many more pros than cons like that every state has weight to the election, or that third parties can swing elections.
One of the only cons that the electoral college has is that you can win the popular vote and win the electoral vote and lose the presidency. Most people when that happens think it is unfair or even unconstitutional. Work CitedLongley, R. (n. d.). Learn Why the Founding Fathers Created the Electoral College. Retrieved January 30, 2018, from https://www. thoughtco. com/why-keep-the-electoral-college-3322050