ELECTORAL COLLEGE

Electoral College

Electoral College

Introduction

In order to get the president elected in a fair way, first our founding fathers thought of a method in which Congress and Senate would have the right to choose the president. Then, they thought that this method would disturb the balance of government' power. To ensure that a selected president with wide geographic mandate they devised the method of Electoral College. This paper talks about this system of the Electoral College.

Position on the Topic

The system of the Electoral College should be abolished. There are various flaws attached to this system so on the basis of which it can be said that this system should be abolished. These flaws are discussed in the following part of the paper.

Discussion to Support the Position

This part of the paper discusses what are the different grounds on the basis of which this system should be abolished? These grounds are discussed below.

Over Representation of the Rural States

The first and foremost reason to oppose this system is that it over represents the rural state. This system does not have the ability to show the popular will in an appropriate way (Martha, 2002). The electors of a state are based on the representatives that are determined by the population in House also representatives in the Senate (two in particular, without considering the population of the state). This gives more weight to small state and over represents rural states (Martha, 2002). It is possible that a candidate can be elected president of the country even without getting a single vote in 39 states or The District of Columbia. This means that a candidate can be president if he gets the vote in 11 out of these 12 states that are mentioned below (Field, 2002):

Virginia

California

Georgia

New York

North Carolina

Texas

New Jersey

Florida

Michigan

Pennsylvania

Ohio

Illinois

Risk of Faithless Electors

A faithless elector is an elected member who promises to vote for the candidate of his party but ends up voting candidate of another party (Field, 2002). If we look at the statistics, it would be revealed to us that there have been seven such cases in which an elector has casted the vote for another candidate (George, 2005). For instance, in 1988, a Democratic Elector was supposed to cast his vote for Lloyd Bensen for Vice President and Michael Dukakis for President in the state of West Virginia. However, he named Lloyd Bensen for President and Michael Dukakis for Vice President (George, 2005). By ...