Pros And Cons Of The Electoral College

The Electoral College is an outdated and unrealistic arrangement that caters to eighteenth century federalist America in a way that is detrimental to modern democracy. The electoral college gives too much power to the government, overlooks equal representation, and creates loopholes that do not serve to help America thrive.

The Electoral College, What the Heck is That? The electoral college is a group of five hundred and thirty-eight people who, every four years, decide our countries president and vice president. This number is created by taking the House of Representatives (four hundred and thirty-eight members elected per stated based upon population), The Senate (Two representatives elected per state), and three representatives from the

The government is pacifying the general public to make them feel as if they are in control. It keeps the power out of the incompetent and inferior hands of the public. A major flaw in the electoral college is the possible creation “Faithless Electors” or members of the electoral college who vote against the popular vote. Christopher M. Duncan’s The Voice Of The Faithless he states “No constitutional or legal provision requires those electors to follow the popular will, so the thinking went that if a dangerous or a radical candidate somehow managed to win a majority of the vote, his election could be thwarted (that is, checked and balanced) by the members of the Electoral College, who could vote for another candidate of their own choosing.”. (Duncan, par. 3) This would devastate democracy. It would create mayhem. Imagine going through the many long and trying months of an election, and just to have that all explode into flames by those few Faithless

This loophole can be exploited by the two presidential candidates. This happens because politicians no longer have to win people, they have to win states. In his video on the flaws in the electoral college C.G.P Gray explains how there is a possibility, that while this is an improbable circumstance, a candidate can scrape by with 22% of the popular vote. He states “Here’s the action plan: win the votes of the people who count the most and ignore the people who count the least. Start with Wyoming, the state where 0.18% of Americans live, but who get 0.56% of the electoral college votes for president. And, because it’s a winner take all system, you don’t need all of them to vote for you, just half plus one or 0.09%.” (The Trouble With The Electoral College,