Electoral College Be Abolished Dbq

Imagine a world in which citizens were able to directly vote for the President of the United States of America. That’s right, currently, voters do not directly vote for the President. Instead, voters vote for a slate of electors, people elected by political parties to vote for the president directly. These electors then cast their vote based on who the most wanted candidate by the general population of their state is. Depending on who the majority of electors voted for, the candidate will receive the electoral votes the state has. The number of electoral votes a state has is based off the population of the state. This whole system of electing a new president is called the Electoral College. Now think about this, does this process properly represent …show more content…
population. As shown in Document F, if there is no majority in the outcome of the electoral vote, the final decision of who will become president is left to the HOR. When this occurs, each state, no matter the population, will get one vote. This does not represent the ideas of the United States because the votes of many people will not be represented. As shown in Document F, “the single representative from Wyoming, representing 500,000 voters, would have as much say as the 55 representatives from California, who represent 35 million voters.” The proportion between 1 to 500,000 and 1 to 35,000,000 is about seventy. That is saying that every person in Wyoming is worth 70 people in California. Due to this, each vote is not proportionate to the population, so the true vote is not expressed. Not only that, several times the winner of the popular vote did not win the overall election. This shows that the idea of the people, popular vote, was not fulfilled in both the electoral vote and the when put to the HOR [Document G]. In fact, in the election of 1824, Jackson won both the popular and electoral vote, not by majority though, but lost the overall election to Adams when it was put to the House of Representatives. This goes to show that the Electoral College is not the best way to elect a president because the wants and needs of the people are not always …show more content…
According to the statistics of Document B, in no election has a third party won. This goes to show that third parties, a very important part of elections because they introduce new ideas in politics, are not given a chance to succeed. According to the second box of Document B, Ross Perot, who ran as a third party, actually did quite well in the popular vote. On the other hand, both he and John B. Anderson failed in the electoral vote. The main reason this happens is because a state, with the exceptions of Maine and Nebraska, cannot have a split vote. A split vote is when electors vote for different candidates and the vote is not unanimous (when everyone votes for the same person). Third parties usually win over only an elector or two, if at all, and due to the lack of a split vote, the state’s electoral votes go to one of the two major parties. For instance, if a state has eight electoral votes, and the third party only wins one, the majority will not go to them. As quoted from Document E, “Even when the popular vote margin is wafer-thin, the winner-take-all electoral vote allocation (distribution) tends to produce a winning margin that looks like national decisiveness…” This just goes to show that even if the popular vote gives a third-party the chance to win, the electoral vote majority always goes to one of the two major

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