Should Electoral Vote Be Abolished Dbq Essay

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Recommended: Electoral college vs national popular vote

Believe it or not, the President of the United States is not selected the day after Election Day. In fact, there are multiple steps involved after the popular vote. After the votes are counted, a winner for each state is declared (except for Nebraska and Maine, who split their votes). Then, electors (or people from the winning party selected to represent the party) meet to cast their votes. Since the electors for the winning party almost always vote for their party, all the electoral votes from a given state get counted towards the candidate. On January 6th the following year, the electoral votes are officially counted in Congress. The presidential candidate that received 270 electoral votes or more wins the election. Since the number …show more content…

In Document B, Ross Perot clearly received a large number of votes, even enough to challenge George H. W. Bush, but he didn’t get any electoral votes because he didn’t have enough widespread recognition. If Ross Perot had been affiliated with one of the two major parties, he probably would have received much more recognition and therefore had a better chance. Thanks to the Electoral college, though, candidates are forced to campaign throughout the country - even if they can win the popular vote using only a fraction of it - in order to get enough electoral votes from the less populous states. Document G shows another example of an Independent Candidate (Nader) receiving lots of votes but being shunned in the Electoral College because he didn’t win a majority in any …show more content…

could still lose in the Electoral College. Common sense shows that this practice is unfair towards the popular candidate who eventually lost the election, such as Jackson in 1824, Tilden in 1876, Cleveland in 1888, and Gore in 2000 (Document G). As mentioned above, the Electoral College does distort the weight of one vote based on state population, but for a candidate, even if they win enough large states to clinch the popular vote, their opposing candidate could take all the remaining less populous states and, thus, win the election, even though they were not as popular nationwide. Document F shows how the same thing would happen if a tie were to occur: each state would get one vote, giving the candidate with the less populous states backing him or her a huge advantage. Document A reaffirms all this, showing that with the Electoral College, states with low populations matter so much more that the larger the state, the less attention per capita it gets. This translates to campaigns in all the wrong places, trying to win over a select few who live in less populous states. If a candidate fails to win over enough less-populous states, the candidate will not succeed even if he or she would win in a simple popular vote. This is unfair to those

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