Essay On Electoral College Flaws

The Flaw of The Electoral College

The benefit of a democracy is that everyone gets a say in how the government should work and how the leaders are elected. Although most democracies are fair systems where everyone can say their piece, sometimes there can be flaws in the system. In the United States all citizens are guaranteed one vote per person and everyone has an equal voice in electing the people that serve in the government as officials. Every four years at the end of the current president’s term in the month of November, the citizens of the US are given the opportunity to go out to the polls and cast their vote on who should be the next president and vice-president. But the truth is that once the votes are cast, they go to the electors

of the Electoral College and then they decide who gets elected president. So this causes turmoil among voters because many think that their votes don’t matter because after all is said and done, only a select group of people, not the American people, will decide who leads the nation. The Electoral College should be abolished because it defeats the purpose of a democracy by not directly allowing the American people to elect who leads them.
First of all, the Electoral College is the system that US has adopted to elect its president and vice-president.

The system awards a number of electoral votes to each state based on its population. Each party with a candidate selects a number of men and women to be an electorate. All of the electorates then proceed to state who they will vote for. Most states will have all of their votes go to one candidate or the other in order to strengthen the voting power of the state. A candidate must win a majority of the electoral votes in order to become President. According to the Constitution, "No Senator or Representative, or Person holding an Office of Trust or Profit under the United States, shall be appointed an

Elector".
The Electoral College originated from the constitutional convention of 1787. It was a creation of the founding fathers and served as, “a compromise between the election of a President by popular vote and by the Congress.” During the early years when the system was put into place, it was brilliant and it worked to keep the vote counts more accurate. Back in that period of time, there were no computers, electronics, planes, or cars to quickly deliver votes. The votes had to be delivered by horseback and counted by hand, not electronically. The Electoral College was then proven to be the most effective means of tallying the votes to determine the next President and vice-president. At the time, the system worked, the presidents came in and out of office fairly and there was rarely debate about how well the system worked. The Electoral College was known as a great example of how advanced the country was and how it could grow to become more developed.
Unfortunately however, the system began to grow outdated. As the years passed onward, the population continued to rise and the Electoral College was no longer viewed as the most efficient way to tally up the votes for who becomes President. The most accurate way to decide the outcome of the election is to count the votes. The ability to numerically count has been with mankind longer than written history can trace. The flaw is that man lacked being able to count in large quantities, a group of people cannot accurately count large amounts of numbers. The threat of losing count and misplacing votes always remained. The amount of counting on that large a scale would take forever and those tallying the votes were not always honest. They could lie or cheat regarding the numbers and falsely decide the next leader, giving the counters as much power as the man they elect. Human error doomed the idea of personally hand counting the votes, it would no longer work.
In today’s age of modernization, the rise of technology has placed its grasp on how votes are counted. With the utilization of electronic voting, the computerized poll booths can now count millions of votes in a matter of seconds. Now with almost all voting booths being electronically operated, one can now accurately tally the votes of every voter in a moment’s notice with no human error or cheating. All a voter has to do is press a button to vote for which presidential candidate they want and his/her vote will be counted along with millions of other votes. The day that computers allowed people to electronically vote was the day that the Electoral College’s system became obsolete.
Another flaw that is rife within the Electoral College system is that it does not fully encourage the entire population to vote.

In most situations, the votes of the majority party are always checked and counted, whereas the votes of the minority party are barely considered. The problem of this situation is that when a person who votes within the minority party, his /her vote will not be counted towards who the next president will be. The flaw within the system is that it favors the voters within the majority party and leaves the other voters in the dark. If the Electoral College were to be abolished as it should, then the new system will display equality to all voters, no matter what their voting preferences or which party they align themselves with. Within the democracy of the US, the government is designed so that majority rules but the rights of the minority are still protected. On the contrary, the rights of the minority are not protected and are often ignored in the system of the Electoral College. Every citizen has the right to vote and should have their vote counted fairly among others. This is something that the Electoral College does not achieve, but would be accomplished with the installment of a new

system.
At the end of the day one realizes that the Electoral College was not designed to properly function in the digitalized era that the United States is in today. In the early years of its existence, it served a purpose well. A change in the way the people elect their leader is nigh. One vote per person, fairness to all voter regardless of their preferences, and no favoritism among the majority. Suffrage among all citizens will only be ensured if everyone’s vote is truly counted.