", Why The Electoral College Is Still Good For The United States. The Electoral College protects that diversity and ensures that all voters matter, not just those who reside in urban areas or states. This has already happened exactly four times in the nation's history: It is sometimes reported that Richard M. Nixon received more popular votes in the 1960 election than winner John F. Kennedy, but official results showed Kennedy with 34,227,096 popular votes to Nixon's 34,107,646. The Electoral College helps give rural states with lower populations an equal voice. Fortunately, the potential litigation is only concentrated in a few states and big cities with possible voting irregularities. Finally, the constitutional amendment must get a two-thirds vote from both houses of Congress and be ratified by three-fourths of the states. The Electoral College is a process, not a place. The most important is … Accordingly, they feared that placing the unlimited power to elect the president into the politically naive hands of the people could lead to a "tyranny of the majority.". In 2016, the Electoral College allowed Trump to win the presidency in spite of losing the popular vote by nearly 3 million votes. The Electoral College makes it harder for a candidate to steal an election. By design, the Electoral College system grants the states the power to elect the president of the United States. Likewise, states pioneered reforms and strengthened rights in a multitude of areas including civil liberties, voting, religious freedom, property rights, equality of opportunity, and many others. If the popular vote alone decided elections, the presidential candidates would rarely visit those states or consider the needs of rural residents in their policy platforms. I believe in that objective. We’d all like clean, quick, and decisive election results. The states form the lifeblood of freedom and democracy. That means the candidate with the most total votes may not win the election. Here are some of their telling statements from the Constitutional Convention of 1787. Abolishing the Electoral College would be a disaster for freedom and the constitutional imperative to prevent the concentration and abuse of power. The Founding Fathers knew that as the nation grew and the time required for debating and voting on every issue increased, the public’s desire to take part in the process would quickly decrease. They can’t just win a majority of individual votes; they have to win a majority of votes in a majority of states (or, at least, a majority of large states). The Electoral College requires a presidential candidate to have transregional … The Founding Fathers also felt the Electoral College system would enforce the concept of federalism—the division and sharing of powers between the state and national governments. In most cases, the Electoral College forces candidates to win not just a majority, but a super-majority. If former Vice President Joe Biden prevails in the 2020 election by scoring a victory in both the electoral and popular vote tallies, it will not curtail the clamoring nor the movement to send the Electoral College to a crematorium. Seats in the House are allocated through a formula called the “method of equal proportions.” (If you are a math nerd, you will love this formula.) National Archives. Washington DC: Office of the Federal Register, 2020. Here's why (and how) Opinion: The Electoral College was created to count slaves as three-fifths human. Article II of the U.S. Constitution grants the power to elect the president and vice president to the states through the Electoral College system. In the presidential elections in 1876, 1888, and 2000, the Electoral College elected the person that did not receive the popular vote. If the popular vote alone decided elections, the presidential candidates would rarely visit those states or consider the needs of rural residents in their policy platforms. The short-sighted ignorance represented by the movement to abolish or circumvent the Electoral College and constitutional limits will not enhance voter rights, but it will open the door to greater abuse, fraud, and tyranny of the majority. For this to come about: First, a presidential candidate must lose the nationwide popular vote, but be elected through the Electoral College vote. He is a former Western Civilization Instructor in the UConn Early College Experience program and for many years taught AP courses in U.S. History, European History, and Comparative Government and Politics. This happens because majority of the states have a “winner-takes-all” approach to electoral voting. Leaving aside the fact that a deal is a deal, there are very practical reasons why we will always need the Electoral College under our current constitutional system. Democrats, who keep losing elections where they get more votes, want to get rid of the Electoral College and Republicans, who keep … Small-state electoral votes have often affected the national outcome. Ending slavery, impossible at the founding on a national basis, began as a state movement. Even the harshest critics would have trouble proving that in more than 200 years of operation, the Electoral College system has produced bad results. The perversity of the design of the Electoral College is that a state gets the same number of electoral votes regardless of turnout in elections and regardless of how … Republic vs. Democracy: What Is the Difference? Why Puerto Rico Matters in the US Presidential Election, Landslide Victory: Definition in Elections, 12th Amendment: Fixing the Electoral College. As a result, the decisions and actions taken would not truly reflect the will of the majority, but small groups of people representing their own interests. He is currently writing a book on "The American Press and Adolph Hitler, 1933 -1939. The electoral college gives small states more weight in the political process than their population would otherwise confer. That’s because all states, regardless of their populations, are guaranteed equal representation in the Senate with two seats each, as well as at least one seat in the House of Representatives. The Founding Fathers established it in the Constitution, in part, as a compromise between the election of the President by a vote in Congress and election of the President by a popular vote of qualified citizens. A state’s Electoral College votesare the sum total of its seats in the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives. Pro #2: It provides a clean, widely accepted ending to the election (most of the time). They make up new … The dispersion of power between the states, especially in relation to the federal government, is among the greatest protections against a concentrated national tyranny. "Electoral College Results." To be ratified and become effective, a constitutional amendment must also be approved by the legislatures of 39 out of the 50 states. The party in power typically benefits from the existence of the Electoral College, says Edwards, and the minority party has little chance of changing the system because a … They often say that the Electoral College is key to federalist philosophy -- which divides power between the federal and state governments and helps avoid an overly strong central government. Rhode Island, for example, with three electoral votes would hardly matter if the presidency were decided strictly by a national popular vote. Achieving a "separation of powers" ultimately became their highest priority. Thomas Jefferson and John Quincy Adams. In the U.S. democracy, the Electoral College chooses the president. Under the Constitution, the highest-ranking U.S. officials elected by the direct popular vote of the people are the governors of the states. The Electoral College (Why We Use It and Why It Matters) On Election Day, Americans should appreciate the great and long-lasting constitutional tradition bequeathed to … It Distorts Regular Governance. The Electoral College is widely regarded as an anachronism, a nondemocratic method of selecting a president that ought to be superseded by declaring … Witness where potential voter fraud has emerged in the current election. How likely is it that 39 states are going to vote to give up that power? This leads some to say the Electoral College … The Electoral College also stands against the concentration of power and the potential for voter abuse. America is, after all, a democracy, is it not? Imagine a hurricane hitting the southeast just before the election, … It would also likely open the door to greater election-result paralysis, as well as more voter fraud by big state and city machine politics. He served as a USAR Captain, Military Intelligence. Under the Electoral College system, it is possible for a presidential candidate to lose the nationwide popular vote, yet be elected president of the United States by winning in only a handful of key states. All Americans benefit from a greater diversity of thought, action, and opportunities. The electoral college, proponents say, makes U.S. presidential elections less contentious by providing a clear ending. Under the Constitution, the people are empowered to choose, through a direct popular election, the men and women who represent them in their state legislatures and in the United States Congress. The National Archives says the Electoral College was a compromise between founders who wanted Congress to choose the president and those who wished for the people to do it. The Electoral College website now has an easy-to-remember address. In 1787, the Founding Fathers, based on their direct knowledge of history showing that unlimited power tends to become a tyrannical power, created the United States as a republic—not a pure democracy. Funny thing. With so many swing states, this is hard to predict and hard to do. The Electoral … Presidential candidates could and would ignore states like Rhode Island and focus on states and districts with large population centers, offering more bang for effort and dollars. Much of this rich checkerboard of American politics would be lost in presidential elections based purely on a popular vote. In response, they created the Electoral College system as a process to insulate the selection of the president from the whims of the public. ThoughtCo uses cookies to provide you with a great user experience. Copyright © 2020 The Federalist, a wholly independent division of FDRLST Media, All Rights Reserved. Did the Founding Fathers—the framers of the Constitution—not realize that the Electoral College system effectively took the power to select the American president out of the hands of the American people? The founders designed the Electoral College to moderate the influence of large states and big cities over small states and rural districts. In fact, the Founders always intended that the states—not the people—select the president. Now Trump is attempting to use the system for a scheme to overturn his loss in the electoral vote and attack the bedrock of American democracy, the peaceful transfer of power. If you don’t like the politics, economics, and cultural atmosphere of one state, you can move to another. The Electoral College makes it harder to steal elections because votes must be stolen in the right state in order to change the outcome of the Electoral College. The Electoral College protects that diversity and ensures that all voters matter, not just those who reside in urban areas or states. The purpose of the Electoral College is to ensure that each state gets a proportional say in who is going to be the president of all 50 states. America can currently tolerate a socialism-friendly Vermont right alongside a no-income-tax polity such as New Hampshire because the U.S. system does not promote nor demand cookie-cutter states. However, the term “electoral college” does not appear in the Constitution. Whatever the outcome of the 2020 presidential election or future contests, the Electoral College provides a potential challenge to either party claiming a clear mandate by a myopic focus on the national popular vote. The states, through the Electoral College, are empowered to choose the president and vice president. Due to the Electoral College process, candidates must get votes from multiple states—large and small—thus helping to ensure that the president will address the needs of the entire country. Vice President of the United States: Duties and Details. How Many Electoral Votes Does a Candidate Need to Win? Under the above circumstances, it is probable that neither the Republicans nor the Democrats would hold a strong majority of seats in Congress. Getting elections as close to correct as possible is essential to democracy. As a part of their plan to separate powers and authority, the Founders created the Electoral College as the method by which the people could choose their highest government leader—the president—while avoiding at least some of the dangers of a direct election. But because the Electoral College has worked just as the Founding Fathers intended for over 200 years does not mean that it should never be modified or even abandoned completely. Equally important, a direct popular vote would further erode the power of the states in maintaining the intended constitutional balance between the national and state governments. With just over 50 percent of the popular votes in each state needed to win the entire state in the Electoral College, these four states have a lot of say in deciding who becomes president.