Electoral College Is Bad For America Essay

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The Electoral College is a process, not a place, as some may think. The founding fathers established the Electoral College in the Constitution as a compromise between the election of the President by a vote by Congress and the election of the President by citizen’s popular vote. The Electoral College process consists of the selection of 538 electors that vote for the president. A state’s electoral votes are equal to the number of Senators and Representatives. For a candidate to win, they must receive the majority of the electoral votes, which is currently 270. There are many things wrong with the Electoral College process that the American government needs to be cognizant of. A few of these reasons include that the distribution of Electoral …show more content…
George Edwards explains in his book, Why the Electoral College is Bad for America, that this happened in 2000. It states, “...when Ralph Nader, running as the Green Party nominee, finished third in the popular vote with just 2.74 percent, and received just 1.6 percent in Florida, but those votes probably shifted the state from Democratic nominee Al Gore to Republican nominee George W. Bush.” Also, because of the winner-take-all system, that one state also changed the outcome of the entire national election. In latest cycles, there has been at least one scenario under which a small third party can tip a key state and possibly the whole election. One situation is stated in the article, "Should the Electoral College Be Abolished?” on Scholastic.com. It stated, “...former Congressman Virgil Goode, the nominee of the tiny, right-wing Constitution Party, costed Mitt Romney the presidency by drawing votes in Virginia in 2012.” Although the Constitution Party doesn’t show up in national polls, when Goode’s name was included in Virginia polls in 2012, he scored as much as 9 percent. Virginia is considered very close and has been designated a key swing state worth 13 electoral
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