Introduction
The USA Electoral College elects the president and vice-president, who are the only two elected persons in America elected in federal elections. According to government regulations, the number of electors depends on the number of people living in a particular state that generally is up to 538. The existence of the electoral college provokes several disputes among both local American parties and foreign ones. The states’ independence is crucially essential to the small states due to their fear of being undervalued in front of the larger ones.
Main Body
The votes are distributed differently according to the individual preferences of each state. In most states, all electoral votes are automatically awarded to the candidate with a simple majority of the state’s electorate. The population in America repeatedly discusses the electoral college system and whether it is fairly reliable or not. Therefore, the debates regarding reform or abolition are argued periodically in the American community. People identify arguments for and against this system by trying to achieve the best decision for this political issue that is doubted every time from one election to another.
The main statement that is put forward is based on the possibility when the results of the college’s elections and general ones do not match each other. In other words, the opinion of people in the state confronts the view of their elector (West, 2). After these mismatches, critics of the system state that the main disadvantage here is that the opinion of the main part of the population is counted unfairly.
It is enough to receive the main part of the votes, but not an absolute number to be considered as a winner in a specific state. This fact supports the opinion that the candidates who won in terms of the number of votes but lost the elections are treated as they won the popular vote. However, generally, it simply has not achieved a significant part of votes. Despite this fact, the results cannot be predicted in the case of direct voting in two rounds. This happens due to the plurality system, which makes voters vote for candidates from the two main parties since the vote might not be taken into account if they vote for candidates from others parties.
Besides, states that do not have a stable dominance of a Republican or Democratic electorate play a unique role in election results. To sum up, a crucial part of voters in America think that they are losing position in front of the stable majority (West, 4). Each elector individually selects the name of the person, which is chosen as a necessary one. In practice, the elector can change his mind and select another name that mismatches his promise or reject to participate in voting. Such electors are known in the USA as unscrupulous electors.
Conclusion
All the reasons listed above identify the disadvantages of the electoral college in the USA. The number of electors is the same as the number of people in Congress. On the one hand, Congress is a legislature driven by human beings, which could not operate differently. On the other hand, the electoral college is considered as a formal institution that may harm the presidential elections by creating a barrier towards the accurate counting of votes by the absolute number of citizens without a necessity to recount the electorate. The lack of fairness, responsibility, and trust among the local public in the USA causes doubts about the efficiency and necessity of the electoral college.
Work Cited
West, Darrell. “It’s time to abolish the Electoral College.” Brookings, 2019, pp. 1-5. Web.