But its logic, its distortion of the democratic process and its underlying flaws will still strongly influence the conduct of the election. I would not abolish the College but would be ammenable to changing it to the same method which Congress would use if there were to be an Electoral Tie or if no candidate reaches 50.1% of the College. Editor’s Note: In 2016, we asked two professors to debate whether the Electoral College should cease to be the mechanism used for selecting the U.S. president. From now on, they should abandon a statewide popular vote for president, and instead either appoint electors directly or implement an Electoral College–type system within each state. Now is the time for sober and spirited citizens from both parties to devise a new system for 2020. Essay text: A majority winner must receive 270 votes to be elected. Why We Should Abolish the Electoral College. It is true that the Electoral College no longer serves its original purposes, and that it creates a grave risk that a candidate not favored by a majority of the people will, from time to time, be elected president. Document C: Political Scientist and a Senator 1. The last few chapters debunk popular myths about the Electoral College and show how a national popular vote might work. But reforming the Electoral College does not rank high among our national problems. They simply happen to be states that become competitive because of their demography, and which are readily identifiable as such because of the increasing sophistication of political polling. These elections provided the impetus for the only constitutional amendment to the Electoral College scheme to date: the 12th Amendment, ratified in 1804 to ensure that the president and vice president would be from the same party. By Michael W. McConnell, the Richard and Frances Mallery Professor of Law, director of the Constitutional Law Center and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. The National Archives and Records Administration (n.d.) concluded that third parties tend to have negative opinions of the Electoral College, and those opinions have affected the public 's opinion about the system as a whole. For all the times that the USA has used the Electoral College, it has been proved that this system is good enough to use. Twitter. Although the Electoral College is an archaic form of election, that does not mean that it is insufficient and should be abolished. Generally, we count on the Republican and Democratic parties to nominate not the best people, but candidates who combine a degree of popular support with the experience and temperament to govern. Second, a national popular vote would eliminate the “battleground state” phenomenon that has now become the key feature of post-convention campaigning, leaving most Americans alienated from the decisive phase of presidential elections. In the debate about whether or not we should abolish the electoral college, my concern, as well as so many others, is not on the small/big states or Democrat/Republican states, it is about what the people want. The Electoral College is an outdated system that stifles what the people truly want and doesn’t encourage a high voter turnout. The three-fifths clause became irrelevant with the end of slavery (thankfully! Come this November, many of us Americans will journey to our specified polling place to cast a vote for the next President of the United States. A Modest Proposal To Voluntarily Abolish The Word “Bubble” Feb 5, 2021, 06:55pm EST U.S. Deficit A Record $905 Billion In 2020, But, Miraculously, Trade Off Only 9% They do not matter because they have any special civic characteristics. But no one, at least in recent years, has laid out the case as comprehensively and as readably as Jesse Wegman does in “Let the People Pick the President.” Wegman, a member of the New York Times editorial board, surveys the Electoral College’s history from its drafting through the state ratification debates — and, importantly, well beyond. The Electoral College should be abolished. In this extraordinarily strange election year, debating the Electoral College might seem an odd pastime when so many other issues concern us. Our votes would count the same wherever they were cast. The electoral college was created in a time where it took months and months for votes to reach the capitol and the people could not always access information about the candidates; But now, the votes can be counted by the next day and the needed information is everywhere. Yes, we should abolish the Electoral College. Here are the yea and the nay. It seems to me that the original system may have been superior to what we now have. States worth 196 electoral votes have already signed on; another 74 electoral votes are required before it can go into effect. In this election, Donald Trump managed to win against Hillary Clinton with 302 electoral votes even though he lost the popular vote by 2.7 million votes. The Electoral College is a … This year is the poster child for the need for reform. The Electoral College is not going to be changed, and there are far more urgent and promising topics for reform of our presidential selection system. The two-party system solves the fractured vote problem more effectively than the Electoral College ever did, and the electors never exercised genuine independence. Opens in new window. The great problems with our presidential selection system today stem from the haphazard way we choose the two major party presidential candidates. The current system is weighted too heavily in favor of celebrity appeal, demagogic displays and appeals to narrow special interests. Presidential electors are not more qualified than other citizens to determine who should head the government. “Swing” or “battleground” states are mere accidents of geography. Having a state-based system for electing both houses of Congress should be adequate to that task. Today, many people believe the Electoral College should be abolished and replaced with a national popular vote. They also outline Wegman’s preferred alternative: the National Popular Vote Compact. That probably promotes a more national and less regional vision. One thing is clear, though: The Electoral College as we have it now should go. Moreover, the electoral college method preserved the two compromises over representation—the three-fifths clause and the big state-small state compromise—and guarded against a fracturing of votes for many candidates, which they thought might occur once George Washington was no longer available as a nationally respected consensus candidate. No other mode of presidential elections would be fully consistent with our underlying commitment to the equality of all citizens. It arose from a convoluted compromise hammered out late in the Constitutional Convention, and the rise of political parties in the late 18th century and the spread of democratic ideals in the early 19th quickly undermined its rationales. ), and the big state-small state divide no longer animates our politics, if it ever did. Abolish the electoral College. But reforming the Electoral College does not rank high among our national problems. @2021 Stanford University Whether we should or should not abolish the electoral college has been on the minds of many people, especially since the election for the presidency in 2016. This is where the rubber hits the road, and it’s also the only portion of Wegman’s book that’s not fully convincing. A second argument holds less populous states deserve the further electoral weight they gain through the “senatorial bump” giving each state two electors, because their minority status entitles them to additional political protection. The two parties have chosen the same year in which to nominate a person whom large numbers of Americans, probably a majority, regard as unfit (though not for the same reason). Pinterest. The Electoral College should not be abolished because of the way it keeps the government and elections organized. It gives a slight edge to candidates with broad-based support in many states over those who rack up huge majorities in just a few large states. If, say, environmental sustainability or abortion or the Second Amendment is your dominant concern, it does not matter whether you live in Wyoming or California, Pennsylvania or Delaware. What are the positive arguments in favor of replacing the existing electoral system with a national popular vote? It is unlikely that the Electoral College will ever be abolished because the smaller states (which are many in number) would vote against its abolition. Why We Should Abolish the Electoral College. It probably reduces the cost of presidential campaigns by confining television advertising to the battleground states (and spares the rest of us the tedium of endless repetitive ads). In recent year… It should also be abolished because of the fact how in most of the elections, the Presidents are most and only elected because of the electoral college and our own vote, the vote that we had taken our own time to choose our future leader that will guide the country in the right path. But explaining exactly how it does this remains a mystery. Because a state’s number of electors is based on total population, not actual voters, it gives the states no incentive to enfranchise new groups of people, or to make voting easier for those eligible. All of these treatments are detailed, but eminently readable. Given that a change would require a two-thirds vote of both houses of Congress and three-quarters of the state legislatures, it is not going to happen. What would happen if one state lowered the voting age to 16? If it didn’t exist, no one today would consider creating it. The first is easily dismissed. Match Direct Elections at Local and State Level. I said the founders created the institution to make sure that large states did not dominate small ones in presidential elections, that power between Congress and state legislatures was balanced, and that there would be checks and balances in the constitutional system. A New Mexico doctor describes the pain and horror of caring for COVID-19 patients. He discusses the crucial elections of 1796 and 1800, which made pellucid that political parties were here to stay and that their interaction with the Electoral College could produce some problematic results (like President John Adams teamed with Vice President Thomas Jefferson, his bitter rival). Social change can seem sudden, as if millions awoke one day to the same realization. Imagine a Florida-style recount in every precinct in America. The following five reasons to abolish the Electoral College are offered by supporters of using a different approach to presidential elections. Presidential elections have little if anything to do with the subject, even when some candidates claim to be “running against Washington.”. WhatsApp. Also this should not depend on the government, for the president is serving us, not the government. This is not a new claim: People have been arguing against the Electoral College from the beginning. The Electoral College should be abolished to become an equal election. In a liberal democracy, not everything need be decided by majority vote. Should the Electoral College Be Abolished? It is no secret that the administrations of Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama all suffered, from the outset, from efforts to imply that there was something improper and unworthy or even suspicious in their elections. It also had wide support in Congress. 1. For years when I taught campaigns and elections at Brown University, I defended the Electoral College as an important part of American democracy. One state, one vote. It’s an elegant way of awarding the presidency to the popular vote winner without a constitutional amendment. It is long past time to get rid of the Electoral College. When you purchase an independently reviewed book through our site, we earn an affiliate commission. 2. If the Electoral College is abolished, all voters will be equally important, as they should be. They are simply party loyalists who do not deliberate about anything more than where to eat lunch. A state is entitled to a number of electors equal to its number of senators and representatives. |. Does John Samples believe that government power should be increased or limited? Its primary function is to malapportion political power, and it does so — indeed, has always done so — with strikingly awful consequences. Electoral College Should Be Abolished 1129 Words | 5 Pages. Facebook. Emily Cousins - September 29, 2020. There are three basic arguments in favor of the system the framers of the Constitution gave us, with little sense of how it would actually work. But the Electoral College is worse than merely useless. Having the states play an autonomous role in presidential elections, it is said, reinforces the division of governing authority between the nation and the states. But Wegman leaves largely unaddressed how the compact interacts with the patchwork of state laws governing elections. We should be talking about other things. The Electoral College is racist. The Electoral College is not going to be changed, and there are far more urgent and promising topics for reform of our presidential selection system. This perception is reinforced by the red- and blue-state imagery that controls our view of the electoral process. Third, defenders of the Electoral College also claim that it supports the underlying value of federalism. It is true that the Electoral College no longer serves its original purposes, and that it creates a grave risk that a candidate not favored by a majority of the people will, from time to time, be elected president. The party structures—which, for all their faults, have a vested interest in candidates from the moderate middle who are able to work with Congress and other officials to govern—have been sidelined. The elected officials of both parties have incentives to choose candidates with an eye toward popular electability and governing skill. The electoral college should be abolished. It is impossible for a politician to gain the 270 votes needed to win the election by just concentrating on the states with the largest population or just one region. Senator Barbara Boxer has proposed an amendment to abolish the Electoral College. That same view will doubtless color the 2016 election as well. But really, scholars say, consensus is constructed through thousands of small acts over generations. Having an election in which victory went to a candidate carrying a single national constituency might not wholly cure this problem, but it might well work to mitigate it. It was replaced by party conventions, which eventually were replaced (almost) with strings of single or multiple state primaries and caucuses. After the war, every person counted as a full person for apportionment purposes — but with the collapse of Reconstruction and the violent disfranchisement of African-Americans throughout the South, that increase in representation once again redounded only to the benefit of white male power-holders, a situation that was not largely rectified until the Voting Rights Act of 1965. It channels presidential politics into a two-party system, which is superior to multiparty systems where fringe factions can exercise too much leverage. The Electoral College is no longer fit for purpose and does not produce an accurate picture of the American people. Instead of the United States abandoning the Electoral College, state legislatures should take us in exactly the opposite direction. I suggest having an alternate plan is a wise move. Most Americans would breathe a sigh of relief, I believe, if we had a system capable of choosing the U.S. equivalent of Theresa May instead of Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton. There have been three: John Quincy Adams, Benjamin Harrison and George W. Bush. Before the Civil War, the combination of the Electoral College and the Three-Fifths Clause, counting a slave as three-fifths of a person, gave the Slave Power outsize control in electing the president, with the consequence that antebellum presidents were almost always either slaveholders or at least friendly to their interests (the major exceptions were both named Adams). Opens in new window. The fact that it no longer serves this purpose suggests that it is no longer necessary. And it confines vote-counting disputes to just one, or maybe a few, states. 2305 27 November 2017 Should we abolish the electoral college? The Founding Fathers knew that there needed to be a system like an electoral college in place to ensure the USA flourishes. That is why it was written in the Constitution. Even so, discussions about how our country should be ran is a blessing; in many countries, questioning the way the governments' work could get you into a lot of trouble and could even result in death. Having the states play an autonomous role in presidential elections, it is said, reinforces the division of governing authority between the nation and the states. It must be abolished,” Robert Reich, the Former United States Secretary of Labor, said in a tweet. Not this year. Voters in all 50 states cast ballots for local, state, and congressional offices that directly influence election outcomes. Interestingly, the congressional caucus system is very close to the system the British used to replace Prime Minister David Cameron. The size of a state does not affect our real political preferences, even though the Electoral College system imagines that it does. The Electoral College Should Be Abolished Some of the largest opposing groups of the Electoral College are the third parties. [ 25] On Monday Dec. 19, 2016, the electors in each state met to vote for President and Vice President of the United States. And Americans have long understood themselves to be voting for their president, not for presidential electors. The result — as we’ve now seen twice in the last two decades — is that a popular vote loser can be an Electoral College winner. By Jack Rakove, the William Robertson Coe Professor of History and American Studies and a professor of political science. This is not a new claim: People have been arguing against the Electoral College from the beginning. First, and most obviously, such a system would conform to the dominant democratic value that has prevailed in American politics ever since the one-person, one-vote reapportionment rulings of the early 1960s. Still, the advantages are uncertain and relatively minor. Yes, because this country is a democracy and the popular vote should count not the electoral votes. The Electoral College ensures that all the states have a voice in the national election. The Electoral College may have made sense in 1789 when it was created as part of the U.S. Constitution, but it makes almost no sense today. The electoral college should be abolished. Wegman also covers Reconstruction and its collapse; the one-person-one-vote revolution of the 1960s; and the drive for a constitutional amendment providing for a national popular vote for the presidency in 1969 and 1970. The compact, in brief, provides that the states that join it will award all their electoral votes to the national popular vote winner. Here, again, there are three main points to make. These problems might well be solvable within the compact framework — but they require more thinking through now, before a presidential election turns on them. Facebook - share an article. Almost no one would adopt an Electoral College today if we were starting from scratch. Samples says that he Electoral College helps preserve the federalist structure of our government. By. As American leadership falters, scholars say, autocrats are on the rise. America is a democracy. But explaining exactly how it does this remains a mystery. In 1970, there was nationwide support for a Constitutional amendment to end the Electoral College. That is not to say the Electoral College is without its advantages. In conclusion the Electoral College discriminates, violates democratic principles, and is ultimately unfair. How do we count the popular votes in Maine, given that state’s adoption of ranked choice voting? We need to think hard, and quickly, about how to reform three aspects of the presidential nomination process: the debates, the primary elections and the conventions. Third, a national election might provide a cure for the delegitimation of presidential authority that has afflicted the last three presidencies. The Electoral College can and should be abolished by a Constitutional Amendment. That system worked well until the two-party system briefly died with the Federalist Party. At least 700 amendments have been proposed to modify or abolish the Electoral College. Until the Electoral College is eliminated, our current two-party duopoly is unlikely to get the effective competition it needs so badly at the Presidential level. But the real interests of small-state voters are never determined by the relative size of the population of their states. 01/12/2016 04:38 pm ET Updated Jan 12, 2017 Voting for President of the United States. With a few minor exceptions, the Electoral College gives all of the electoral votes for each state to the plurality winner in that state, regardless of the margin of victory. What is the federalist structure? Opponents of the system argue that the Electoral College is outdated and causes candidates to ignore voters from the vast majority of states. And because states want to maximize their influence in selecting the president, they also have a strong incentive to use a winner-take-all approach to awarding electors, which all but two states currently do. For almost the first half century of the republic, presidential candidates were chosen by the caucuses of the two parties in the House and the Senate. So, let me make the case for its abolition and its replacement by a simple national popular vote, to be held in an entity we will call (what the heck) the United States of America. It’s hard to imagine a political institution less suited to a 21st-century liberal democracy than the Electoral College. In 2019, Senate Democrats introduced a Constitutional amendment to abolish the Electoral College “in order ensure that every person’s vote is valued equally, something that’s not entirely guaranteed with the Electoral College system, under which votes in certain swing states can play a larger role in deciding the outcome than others,” reported Vox. Twitter - share an article. The Electoral College gives a minority disproportionate influence. The interstate compact doesn’t amend or abolish the electoral college, and so if it were adopted, it means the old state-by-state, winner-take-all system could eventually return. They're going to try to abolish it. The Electoral College guarantees that a President of the United States has support of a broad coalition of states. The Electoral College thus presents democratic risks without serving any of its original purposes. Almost no one would adopt an Electoral College today if we were starting from scratch. LET THE PEOPLE PICK THE PRESIDENTThe Case for Abolishing the Electoral CollegeBy Jesse Wegman. We survived. Pros Cons The electoral college no longer works as it was intended by the founding fathers. The founders opted for the Electoral College because the two leading alternatives, election by Congress and by popular vote, were thought to have serious defects. It also ensures that a candidate runs a national, rather than a regional, campaign. In a truly national election, parties and candidates would have the incentive to turn out their votes wherever they were, fostering a deeper sense of engagement across the whole population. From my point of view, the Electoral College should be abolished and the result form the citizens popular vote should be used to elect a president and a vice president of the people. Abolishing the electoral college is not only the wrong choice to make it will also have disadvantageous consequences for the USA. But once something is put to a vote, it is hard to understand why the side getting fewer votes should win. Not one was a first-rank president, but their selection did not seriously injure the democratic character of our system. By Emily Cousins | Staff Writer. Limited. Crucially, it does not go into effect until enough states have joined to constitute an Electoral College majority. In the sense that the Electoral College didn't stop the steeel, then maybe it's broken. It is long past time to get rid of the Electoral College. What if there is a dispute as to who actually won the nationwide popular vote? Yes.
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