The District of Columbia would also somehow have three electors, bringing the total to electoral votes. These electors would then gather in Washington one month before inauguration day to vote for the president and vice president. Whoever receives a simple majority of votes would win. Similar mechanisms exist in other thriving democracies, like the Vatican and the Holy Roman Empire. Who would choose these electors? State legislatures could decide whether to let the people elect the electors, thereby preserving an element of the old popular-vote system.
Or they could save their citizens the time and money of holding a presidential election and simply choose the electors themselves. Leaving both options on the table seems like a good idea. If no candidate receives votes, either because of a tie or because the electoral vote fractured across three or more candidates, the House of Representatives will elect the president and the Senate will elect the vice president.
This creates the possibility that the elected president and vice president could be political foes, which would be productive. Such a system would have multiple benefits for our political system. First, it would treat Americans differently according to where they live. The popular vote currently gives every citizen—Californians and Texans, Hawaiians and Mainers, Alabamans and Oregonians—an equal say in choosing the president. An electoral college would solve this problem by giving Americans in some states more influence than Americans in other states.
The biggest problem with the Electoral College is that it encourages vote suppression, says DeRosa. Southern states always had an advantage in the population count, because they got electoral votes appointed on the basis of their slave populations and their white populations. But Black voter suppression still took place through Jim Crow laws. As of the election, since the founding of the Electoral College, electors have not cast their votes for the candidates who they were designated to represent.
If no candidate receives a majority of the electoral votes, the presidential vote is deferred to the House of Representatives and the vice presidential vote is deferred to the Senate. This could easily lead to a purely partisan battle, instead of an attempt to discover which candidate the citizens really prefer. If the Senate and the House of Representatives reflect different majorities, meaning that they select members of opposing parties, the offices of president and vice president could be greatly damaged.
This potential opposition in the presidential office would not be good for the stability of the country or the government. Because of our two-party system, voters often find themselves voting for the "lesser of two evils," rather than a candidate they really feel would do the best job. The Electoral College inadvertently reinforces this two party system, where third parties cannot enter the race without being tagged as "spoilers.
Since most states distribute their electoral votes on a winner-take-all basis, the smaller party has no chance to gain support without seeming to take this support from one of the major parties. As the election demonstrated, it is possible for a president to be elected without winning the popular vote.
Andrew Jackson and Samuel Tilden won the popular vote in and respectively, only to see someone else walk into the White House.
As an even more common occurrence is for a presidential candidate to win both the presidency and the popular vote without actually winning a majority of all ballots cast. This has happened 16 times since the founding of the Electoral College, most recently in In every one of the elections, more than half of the voters voted against the candidate who was elected. With such a winner-take-all system, it is impossible to tell which candidate the people really prefer, especially in a close race. Problems with the Electoral College Many observers believe the Electoral College introduces complications and potential problems into our political system.
An outright majority of votes could be gotten simply with populist appeals to a handful of large, highly urbanized states. But how would it lessen polarization? But once Trump crashed through the wall, many of the same people suddenly declared the Electoral College to be a white supremacist vestige of slavery.
For complicated reasons all fueled by polarization, voters, parties and politicians increasingly act as if we live in a parliamentary democracy, casting ballots for a party more than a candidate. The federal system of checks and balances was intended to foster stability and compromise while protecting the rights of political minorities and, crucially, individual liberty. Such considerations are swept away when voters, parties and political institutions have neither the interest nor the capacity to honor them.
The growing anger at the Electoral College comes from the desire — and expectation — that all your political desires should be fulfilled without constraints simply by voting.
Despite all the rhetoric about the Electoral College being anachronistic, very few advanced democracies — and none in Western Europe — elect national leaders without some mediating process designed to filter out demagogues or the unfit.
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