This post is a mix of my 2008 Wyoming Seminary Oratorical Contest-winning speech, a previous essay of mine on the issue, and a bit of fresh thoughts on the matter.
You might be under the impression that you can now one day vote for the next President and Vice President of the United States. However, the truth is that you will not be and never will be voting for these offices in your lifetime. This is despite the fact that the United States is often regarded as a leader in democratic values and a nation that strongly underscores the criticality of majority rule and the power of the people. However, ironically enough, the election of the President and Vice President of our nation is not by direct public vote. Rather, it is done through a system deemed the “Electoral College.” It has served as our means of electing the president and vice president of the United States for over two centuries and has emerged as the subject of considerable controversy. In a presidential election, American voters pull the trigger for electors rather than actual presidential or vice presidential candidates. It is such that in the final tally what is significant is not the total number of votes a candidate received nationwide yet how many electors he or she won. Although this system has served as a major element in our democracy, it is nonetheless very undemocratic. For that, the American Electoral College system must be rescinded in favor of a national popular vote election system.
It is critical to take into account the history and methodology of the Electoral College system. It was established by the U.S. Constitution in Article II, Section I as a system in which “each state shall appoint a number of electors equal to the whole number of Senators and Representatives to which the State may be entitled in the Congress.” Typically, according to the National Archives and Records Administration, the state parties are the entities that select such electors, being chosen to account for the state’s total number of electoral votes. Given the total of 100 members of the U.S. Senate combined with 535 members of the U.S. House of Representatives and in addition to three electoral votes granted to the District of Columbia, there are a total of 538 electors or electoral votes nationwide.
On the day of a presidential election, voters in regions throughout the nation cast their ballots for electors for their choice for president and vice president. Whichever ticket wins at least a plurality of the votes in a state, that ticket receives all the electoral votes of the state. The only existing exceptions to this winner-take-all system are Maine and Nebraska, which award their electoral votes based on results in congressional districts. Whichever ticket receives at least a 270-vote majority in the electoral count is elected President and Vice President of the United States, regardless of who won more votes nationwide. In turn, the electors representing these electoral votes of each state proceed to vote, usually in state capitals according to MSN.com, for the ticket that won the most votes in that state. However, such a procedure is of no significant value and only serves to simply validate the results of the electoral vote. While there are a sizable number of states that legally mandate electors to vote for the state’s popular vote winner, it could occur that electors in states with no such laws could potentially vote for whomever they want regardless of who won that state. In the most recent presidential election, a Democratic elector in Minnesota, a state carried by John Kerry, voted for Mr. Kerry’s vice-presidential nominee, John Edwards, for the presidency, thus decreasing Kerry’s electoral vote total from 252 to 251. Although these appropriately dubbed “faithless electors” have yet to have any substantial influence on the result of a presidential election, the possibility that they may in the near future is not entirely improbable. Another potentiality is the possibility that no candidate receives a majority of electoral votes if there are more than two competitive nominees, as occurred in 1824. All of these and other components of one of the most long-lasting establishments of our democracy reveal a rather undemocratic and frankly disingenuous manner in which we elect the leaders of our society.
Most alarming regarding the Electoral College system is that it makes it possible that an individual could win the presidency without actually receiving more votes than the opposing candidates. Thus far, this has occurred four times in all of American history – 1824, 1876, 1888, and 2000. In the latter three of these instances, the winning candidate received a majority of electoral votes and lost the national popular vote. Most recently, in 2000, then-Democratic Vice President Al Gore received 540,000 more votes nationally than Republican Governor George W. Bush. Nevertheless, Bush’s narrow 271-266 advantage in the electoral vote guaranteed his election to the presidency. The fact that such a direct abdication of the very ideals that have defined what a democracy is for ages could take place on the soil of our nation is appalling. If we are to be that country where “it is the right of the people to abolish” a government not of our liking and if we are to be a country that fought against tyranny because of a lack of representation of the people, it is essential to get rid of the Electoral College. Our nation is very often described as a democracy. Democracy is defined by the Meriamm-Webster Dictionary as rule by the people. In addition, the Declaration of Independence clearly sets forth a truly magnificent idea that “governments are instituted among men.” If we are in fact a democracy in which governments are instituted among men, then we cannot allow the decision made by the people to be completely brushed aside in favor of a system that even founding father Thomas Jefferson grew skeptical of at one point.
According to Newsweek magazine, Jefferson himself is quoted as saying that the Electoral College is a “blot” on our Constitution. Congressman Gene Green of Texas clarifies that The Electoral College was “necessary when communications were poor, literacy was low and voters lacked information about out-of-state figures, which is clearly no longer the case.” Mr. Green’s brilliant assessment demonstrates that the Electoral College was intended for an era in which America and its population were radically different than they are today by any measure. It was perceived by many of our founding fathers that the populace was not well informed enough to have the upper hand in a presidential election. However, in the past two centuries, there has been such an incredibly sufficient surge of invaluable education, technology, and media that voters are more than capable of reaching a reasonable decision based on solid facts and assessments. The Electoral College is a system meant for the past and it entirely refutes the foundations of democracy highlighted by the Declaration of Independence that our nation always yearns to follow.
Furthermore, the “winner-take-all” system that 48 of the 50 U.S. states use in the Electoral College should be most definitely reexamined. Firstly, many argue that it obstructs the competitiveness of third party candidates. It does such by effectively obscuring them from having any truly real effect by ensuring that all the electoral votes of that state are appropriated to the winner of the state’s popular votes. For instance, in 1992, highly popular third-party candidate Ross Perot scored 19 percent of the nationwide vote and yet that historically large total is often overshadowed by his failure to win a single electoral vote, despite finishing ahead of one of the two major party candidates in a handful of states. Some point out that this in turn works to reduce voter turnout, never a positive sign for any democracy, among voters who are in strong opposition to the major party candidates and see it as pointless to vote for a third party. In fact, according to president-elect.org, since 1992, the most popular third-party candidate’s total in the popular vote has decreased in each election, indicating less and less voter support as it became clearer that the winner-take-all system was a deterrent to independent parties’ success. MSN.com points out it serves to force many of those who would vote and would otherwise support independent candidates to vote for the candidate many so aptly dub “the lesser of two evils.”
In addition to this, there are additional significant negative aspects of the ‘winner-take-all’ concept. The most glaring of these, as many Electoral College critics point out, is that it allows for rather large sections of the United States to be largely disregarded in the general election. NationalPopularVote.com asserts candidates will probably never darken the streets of states in which they have a clear advantage or disadvantage considering that there is no gain. Thus, candidates invest in states where the outcome is rather unpredictable, meaning that the criticality of votes cast in a less politically reliable state such as Ohio and Florida are far more sought after and outwardly important than the votes cast in the heavily Democratic Massachusetts or the heavily Republican Utah. In the past three decades, the 1984, 1988, and 1996 presidential elections, highlighted by predictably huge electoral landslides and a lower number of contested states, saw an average voter turnout of roughly 50.7 percent of the voting-age population. By comparison, years in which a higher number of states were contested and the electoral map was less titled, 1976, 2000, and 2004, saw a 53.4 percent average turnout. This clearly indicates reductions in voter turnout that have been caused by the undemocratic nature of the winner take all system. NationalPopularVote.com cites that in every presidential election since 1988, roughly two thirds of the states have been highly uncontested. On the other hand, if we had a national popular vote system, critics of this method claim candidates would run to heavily populated areas like New York City and Los Angeles and shun smaller states that currently get attention. In the end though, the residents of large cities are just as much American as everyone else; we are all Americans and so our votes would all count equally in a national popular vote system with no care for swing states having more sway than others. People all across the country would feel like their vote is very valuable, much more so than now, because, as it is now, a voter in Ohio arguably has more sway in the election than a voter in reliably Democratic Vermont. In a national popular vote system though, the presidential election could literally come down to a single voteanywhere in the U.S. so all Americans’ votes would be equally important.
Finally, during the 2004 presidential campaign cycle, Michael Mugner, chairman of the political science department at Duke University, referenced that “too much rides on too few votes.” For instance, 1976, a swing of over just 5,500 votes in Ohio and just 3,687 votes in Hawaii would have propelled President Gerald Ford to victory over Jimmy Carter in the Electoral College and yet Carter would still hold a roughly 1 million-vote lead in the national popular vote. This illustrates that an alteration of a very small number of votes in an electoral prize state could determine the presidency without any significance to the vote of the general people of our land across the country. All of these signs are that the Electoral College must be rescinded.
Ultimately, a national popular vote system would be preferable because it effectively validates the important American ideal of rule by the people, facilitates a truly nationwide campaign, and puts third parties in play. Should we not follow the will of the people in a democratic society like ours? That idea is at the heart of our democracy. As one of our own founding fathers, Thomas Jefferson beautifully said, “we cannot defend freedom abroad by deserting it at home.”
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