Electoral Reform Essay, Research Paper

Last year s election involving Bush and Gore heated up a fifty year old debate: whether the Electoral College is still an effective system considering the circumstances the United States now faces compared to when it was created by the founding fathers. The Electoral College is drafted into the constitution and has been used to elect the President of the United States since the beginning of our independence. In the two hundred some odd years of its history, there have been instances when the college did not work and has stirred up a considerable amount of debate.

When our founding fathers created this system of election, they accounted for the many problems faced by a new nation with new citizens. Because of the pristine age of the country, the founders knew they faced different problems of creating a system compared to the older powers of the world. The influence from other world powers was a foreseeable problem, so the founders had to limit the public vote in order to protect the new nation.

Two of the main problems faced by the founders were the difficulty of travel and the absence of political parties during the 18th century. In 1776 the United States contained only four million people spread up and down a thousand miles of Atlantic seaboard barely connected by transportation or communication. Because traveling and communication from one state to another took days and sometimes months, it was almost impossible for any normal farmer or shop owner to make an educated guess with lack of up to date information. Also, considering there were no political parties at the time, no person could chose a candidate with common beliefs of their own unless they had some form of information that would be distributed to every citizen. Additionally, the founders also had to deal with the country s fear of an oppressive ruler as a result of the tyranny imposed upon the colonies by British rule.

The founders agreed that the best way to select a president would be to elect responsible trusted people of the government to become apart of the Electoral College. In effect, the President would not be elected by popular vote, but by the votes of the electorates. The electorates are representative of each state. There are a number of electorates per state equal to the amount of persons in both the House of Representatives, and the Senate. The District of Columbia although not a state, also has three votes to cast. The Electoral College was a brilliant 18th century device to solve the problem of electing a president with states ranging in size.

Although brilliant in the 18th century, is the Electoral College still efficient in today s political society? One of the major drawbacks to the Electoral College is the fact that it can at times be very undemocratic. If a candidate wins the votes in certain states, and gets all their electoral votes, it is possible to win the Presidency, without getting the most popular vote. An example would be found in the Benjamin Harrison and Grover Cleveland race for the presidency in 1888. The defeated candidate (Grover Cleveland) polled 5,444,337 popular votes to 5,540,050 for Benjamin Harrison; however, Cleveland received only one hundred and sixty eight electoral votes to Harrison s two hundred and thirty three. One reason given for this upset is that Democrat Grover Cleveland, ran up huge popular majorities in several of the eighteen States which supported him while the Republican challenger, Benjamin Harrison, won only slender majorities in some of the larger of the twenty States which supported him. Cleveland s majority of the popular vote throughout the population of the nation did not matter to four hundred and one electors who decided that Harrison should win. On the same note, in 1976, the electoral vote gave Gerald Ford the victory even though Jimmy Carter won the most popular support. Because of cases such as these, there are many theories circulating to fix the college or just completely abolish it.

One idea to abolish the Electoral system came from Steven Hill, a writer from the Christian Science Monitor. He believes that the U.S. should incorporate the use of an instant runoff system. This system is used in the United Kingdom, Australia, and Ireland. An instant runoff allows voters to rank their first, second, and third choices on the same ballot. By doing this, a voter has allowed the government to use their second and third choices as votes if the party candidates do not meet a required majority for presidency.

Another way to solve the problem with the Electoral College is to send percentages of electoral votes, or ignore the winner-take all system. For instance, say that in Florida, who has twenty-five votes, eighty percent of the popular vote supports the democratic nomination, whereas the other twenty percent went for the republican nomination. Then twenty electoral votes would go to the democrat, and five would go to the republican.

Another way to solve this problem would be to base electoral votes solely on the population. This could be accomplished in two different ways. The first would be to separate the nation into regions with approximately the same population, and give them each votes. In this, there would be no actual state borders, just a set number of voting regions. The second way to base the election on the popular vote would be to do away with the system entirely, and let the popular vote be the sole decision making factor. This would be the easiest and quickest way to solve the Electoral College problem.

The electoral system is not completely bad. There are several pluses to its use. One of those pluses is the declaration of a clear winner. Whichever candidate wins the most votes, or the first to get 270 votes, wins. Also with the current winner-take all policy, it makes the smaller states votes more important and more significant to the candidates. There is also the ability to tell that a clear winner may or may not have a mandate. A mandate states that the public endorses a candidate s programs and that the candidate should put them into affect when he finally reaches office.

After considering all of the pros and cons, I believe that the Electoral College is an outdated system. All of the backers of the system are still paranoid of presidential take over from extreme parties because they believe the public is not educated enough to make the proper choice. Maybe it is true; many people do not know the first thing about politics. Personally, I believe I am too inexperienced in the field of politics to be voting for candidates that would put them in the most powerful seat in the world, but whether I am experienced or not, I believe the selected few should not decide the future of the whole. Because many people like myself are inexperienced, does not mean the entire United States is inexperienced. There are many politically inspired and educated people besides the elected five hundred and thirty eight that should help decide the future of this nation. The future should be left to the open mind of the entire population, and not to the limited mind of the few.