Electoral College

A detailed Summary of Electoral College

The Electoral College is one of the vital checks and balances created by the Founding Fathers in the Constitution to ensure the preservation of liberty. Why do we not elect the President by popular vote? All other elections are based on popular vote, why not the election of President? It is generally said that the Electoral System was put in place for two main reasons: to give more weight to the smaller states so their concerns wouldn't be ignored in national elections, and to ensure that any successful candidate has wide national appeal, rather than having huge popular appeal in a few very populous areas and no appeal anywhere else.

When the Founders of our Constitution settled on the Electoral College as the means of selecting a president, one of their primary concerns was to protect the interests of smaller states against potential domination by larger, more densely-populated states. The results of the 2000 race illustrate how easily such domination could be brought about through direct popular election of the president. President Bush won practically the entire rural area of the United States whereas Al Gore won the densely-populated states in the popular election. If the Electoral College was

Our system of government is not a true Democracy, but rather a Representative Democracy or a Republic form of government. It is not direct rule by the people. There must be some protection to the minorities and a check or limit to the authority and power of a majority or plurality. Democracy is not always fair and incorruptible. To quote Ben Franklin, "A Democracy is two wolves and a lamb deciding on what to eat." Guess who is going to win? Is that the fairest political system? The E.C. helps keep people unified, by forcing candidates to present an election platform that appeals to a broader group of people. Otherwise, the country might split into many factions of different viewpoints. The 2000 election, for example, and the partisanship that is now appearing, as a result of the closeness of the election, is clear evidence of how divided and partisan people can be.

If you increase the size of the electorate, everybody's vote becomes less and less influential. An individual is then just one of the millions, a small phish in a large ocean. When the Presidential election is broken into the 50 smaller state elections, everyone's vote means more. Everybody has more say. The chance that one vote can determine the election is greater than if we had just one election for everybody. The Electoral system breaks the large national vote in smaller multiple elections. The idea is to win the most elections where people have different needs and ideological beliefs, not just get more votes where there are more people of similar interests.

Every other popular election is based on a region of no larger than one state. The people who live in Idaho or Ohio do not vote for a Senator or Governor of New York. An

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Approximate Word count = 1165
Approximate Pages = 5 (250 words per page double spaced)

Category: Politics