Tuesday, July 18, 2017
Blog Stage 5: The Electoral College
During the elections, many United States citizens register to vote for our next leader. However, do the popular votes even matter? Do they make a difference? Does the popular vote decide on who will become the next President? I believe the answer is unclear. The Electoral College is the group that ultimately decides on who will become the next President of the United States of America. Even though each state has a certain number of Electoral votes and the popular votes of the states have a large impact on the Electoral votes, the Electoral College has the last call. The Electoral College is made up of representatives from the states. These people ultimately hold the power to choose the next leader. The Electoral College was created because our founding fathers thought the citizens did not have enough knowledge about politics in order to be able to choose our leaders. Though this may be true for a lot of American citizens, this is not fair for those citizens who indeed are aware of what is going on in the United States government. In 2000, George W. Bush lost the popular vote to Al Gore; however, George W. Bush won the majority Electoral College votes. Therefore, George W. Bush became our 43rd President. This is an example of how the Electoral College has the upper hand over the citizens. Do we need the Electoral College to decide for us, or will we as the citizens of the Unites States try and expand our knowledge on politics and decide for ourselves who will govern us?
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
For blog stage 5, Alia wrote an article on her blog about the Electoral College. She considers the possibility that the popular vote does not aid in determining the President of the United State, and that the Electoral College is solely responsible for that determination. She states her answer of the popular vote vs Electoral College debate is unclear; however, she points out an example of how the Electoral College has an upper hand on citizens through an example of the 2000 presidential campaign thus shifting her stance more towards the side favoring popular votes.
ReplyDeletePersonally, I believe that America should move towards a more popular vote dominated system in order to protect the sovereignty of the people. The Electoral College has a number of issues including the unequal dispersion of votes, the significance of said votes depending on if the state is classified as swing or safe, and the dilution of the peoples’ voices considering electors vote ultimately for who they want. Using a national popular vote to select the President would give each individual equal weight and significance towards the election, and would generally increase voter participation.
I do agree with Alia in that the Electoral College was created in attempt to compensate for the lack of knowledge citizens have towards politics. Hopefully, with expanding media outlets, and putting out more unbiased information in the duration of each election the public can gain the knowledge needed for an informed election. This increase in public knowledge would need to happen before a national popular vote system can be used to pick the President; however, should this happen, a national popular vote would be the ideal way to not diminish the power of the people, and to have the fairest elections possible. As of now with the Electoral College, popular votes don’t seem to matter nearly at all, but with the termination of this system, the popular votes would hold all the power.
On July 18th, 2017, my classmate Alia published a blog about the Electoral College. I agree with Alia that we should eliminate the Electoral College. The Electoral college was initially formed to prevent uneducated people from having a significant amount of influence in elections. Its actual impact has been disenfranchising large numbers of voters and creating election outcomes where the popular vote did not match the Electoral College vote, as in the 2000 and 2016 Presidential elections. Now that we have modern technology and a reliable way of tracking the popular vote, we should be able to come up with a better solution.
ReplyDeleteIf we were to replace the Electoral College, a system more closely aligned with a simple popular vote would be the most logical option. Getting rid of the Electoral College requires a Constitutional amendment, but there are options that achieve the same goal without repeal. For example, in two states, rather than giving all of their electoral votes to one candidate, they divide the votes based on the popular vote in the state—for example, if the state has 10 votes and 60% of the population votes for Candidate A, Candidate A gets 6 votes and Candidate B gets 4 votes. Another option is the proposal already adopted in some states that says all of the electoral votes in a state will go to the winner of the national popular vote. This proposal will not go into effect until 270 electoral votes have been committed to the plan.
I agree with Alia that we need to empower voters and help them have a direct say in national elections. I think this would also lead to greater participation in the political process.