The Electoral College is the system used in US elections. In the system, each state gets a certain number of electors depending on its representation in Congress. The state with a higher number of representatives in Congress will have more electors in the Electoral College as compared to a state with a few representatives (West, 2020). There are538 electoral votes and the candidate that gathers 270 or more of the electoral votes is the winner in a presidential election.
The Electoral College system is a biased system that should be abolished, as it does not directly represent the will of the people; this is because a candidate may lose popular votes but end up winning the presidential elections.
Although the Electoral College has many disadvantages, it also serves its purpose and has several advantages. It encourages national campaigns. Through this system, a presidential candidate can’t win elections by winning states in just one region. It thus forces candidates to crisscross the country campaigning to win the elections (Longley, 2020). In this manner, it promotes nationalism, which is important as it promotes unity, peace, and harmony in the country.
The Electoral College leads to slow but stable institutions. The Electoral College has survived major political attacks. It protects the interests of the state. State are diffusers in national politics. The system does not change every election year but rather it is stable and only changes depending on party stances and regional changes. It protects the state against iconoclast movements that would a chaotic election environment.
The Electoral College helps maintain American federalism. This involves the decentralization of power to local governments and states rather than having only one central power (Funakoshi, 2020). It also protects the US government from disastrous parliamentary elections that would be observed if the Electoral College system was abandoned. It also solidifies the purpose of the senate since senators represent an entire state but not individual votes, thus they become more meaningful.
The advantages of the Electoral College do not outweigh its disadvantages thus the system should be abolished. First, the Electoral College system does not represent the true will of the people. In 2016, Donald Trump won the presidential election yet he lost the popular votes. This does is not acceptable in a democratic country (Longley, 2020). Hillary Clinton was the choice for the majority of voters yet she lost. As a result, it makes the voters seem as if they do not count and that their votes are worthless. It is only fair for the people to have a direct say on who becomes president.
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Second, the Electoral College causes a disparity in voters’ importance based on their geographical position. According to the system, the candidate who wins in a particular state takes all the votes in that state, this makes presidential candidates do everything possible to win states with the highest representation in the Electoral College. Such a system is very unfair especially in a case where two candidates split the votes from 49 percent to 51 percent (West, 2020). Giving the candidate all Electoral College votes of that particular state is unfair to the voters who voted in the candidate with 49 percent of the votes. In this manner policy of presidential candidates end up choreographed to favor the swing states at the expense of other Americans.
Third, the Electoral College is a very undemocratic system. Established by white supremacists who feared losing dominance because they were the minority, it always swings election results in a way that the winner in many cases a choice of the supremacists (Funakoshi, 2020). Without this system, some states like Vermont might never see a presidential candidate. A good system is one that each vote counts equally regardless of the state of voters.
In conclusion, the Electoral College established in 1804, serves its purpose of ensuring a peaceful transition. However, it has many flaws and it is also outdated. Its time has passed and it is time that the US president is elected directly by the citizens. Democracy involves true representation of the people’s will and ensuring that only all leaders have popular support. Abolishing the Electoral College will also strengthen nationalism.
References
Funakoshi, M. (2020). How the Electoral College works. Reuters. Web.
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Longley, R. (2020). Learn why the founding fathers created the Electoral College. ThoughtCo. Web.
West, D. M. (2020). It’s time to abolish the Electoral College. Brookings. Web.