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Reasons We Should Get Rid Of the Electoral College.
The divided outcomes of the 2000 and 2016 U.S. presidential polls, where the winner of the popular vote lost the electoral votes, raised several questions about how Americans elect their chief executive. The Electoral College has been put under fire to fail to have fairness and ignore the voters’ will across the state. Supporters of the popular vote believe that the current system does not create a clear mandate and prevents national unity. Therefore, we will explain why the Electoral College is no longer a constructive force in American politics and why we should move to the direct popular way of electing presidents.
The Electoral College creates several problems, which is why it should be scrapped off. First, it creates room for the loser of the popular vote to lose an election, which is more than a theoretical possibility. On several occasions, the scenario has happened approximately four times, with the most recent one being in 2000. The scenario has created quite a hideous mess of time, considering that this is not a small percentage. Come to think of it, a presidential candidate who is not the people’s choice becomes a president. The fact of citizens not being on good terms with the candidate could be attributed to the fact that they probably do not like their leadership style; for example, he uses a dictatorship type of ruling. What would be later seen is violence against this president, thereby disrupting the peace of the state.
Besides, the Electoral College distorts the one-person, one-vote democratic principle since the electoral votes are not distributed according to the population. Each state gets one electoral vote for every member of its assignment to the House of Representatives. Every state acquires two bonus electors that represent each of its two senators. As a result, there is an overrepresentation of small states in the “College.” In a recent case using the 2010 census and the new way of distributing House seats, a citizen in Wyoming portrayed more than triple the weight as one in California. Is this a good thing? If there is nothing we can do other than allocate electoral votes based on a population basis, we would be making the system more democratic. But in the real sense, we cannot do that without amending the Constitution since the apportionment formula is rooted in the Constitution because more incentives that the farmers felt were essential to attract the backing of small states for ratification.
Further, although the United States evolved, it is still challenging for third parties to emerge as presidential winners; the Electoral College makes it possible for a small third-party that shows in a sole or two states to alter the whole nation’s results election. Ralph Nader, for example, in 2000 completed as the third person in the popular vote, but there is a likelihood that those votes shifted from Al Gore, a nominee, to George Bush, who was a republican. And because of winner-take-all, that single state slanted the results of the national election. Even in a popular vote system, minority parties can change the results. When Electoral College is paired with the winner-take-all aspect, the leverage dramatically increases. The fact that the Electoral College makes such shenanigans possible gives a more reason for it to be scrapped.