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Nicole Claire Carson

Mr. Hawkins
American Government P
Due: 10/22/14
Should the Electoral College be abolished?
The Electoral College in the US is a body of people representing the states of
the US, who formally cast votes for the election of the president and the vice president.
The Electoral College has been the system of voting in the US since 1787, but with the
growing and changing of our country, it has been a very controversial topic whether or
not to keep the system in place. On five separate occasions in the history of our country,
the Electoral College has voted against majority rules for the nations president. Many
may say that this is an infringement on the rights of the people themselves to vote for
their own president, because in these five instances, it truly was left to a small group of
people to decide what would be best for the United States as a country, without taking
the peoples votes under consideration. The Electoral College is unfair and should
be abolished because small states are overrepresented, third party candidates
are completely eliminated, and the system itself is undemocratic and flawed.
First, lets refer back to the DBQ packet, document D, the chart shows that
twelve of the smaller states plus the District of Columbia has a smaller population
(12,500,722 people) than the state of Illinois alone (12,830,632), but the smaller
states added up have more electoral votes, 40, than Illinois 22 votes. This alone

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shows that one persons electoral vote from any one of the smaller states, has more
weight than a single persons vote from say Texas. The Electoral College violates
political equality. It is not a neutral counting device It favors some citizens over
others, depending solely upon the state in which voters cast their vote for
president This quote by George C. Edwards gets the point across very clearly; the
votes arent spread based on population, making them unfairly distributed. This gives
the smaller states more of a say, and a president could easily win majority rules in the
electoral votes, without even touching over half of the states. In the document
analysis on document A of the DBQ packet asks What is the smallest number of
states a candidate could win and win the Electoral College? After doing the math, I
found that the president could win the Electoral College votes in merely thirteen states,
and still win by majority rules. This leaves thirty-seven states, more than a third of the
states in the country, without a proper say as to who the president will be.
Another problem with the Electoral College is that it completely eliminates the
third-party candidate. On document B of the DBQ packet both charts show very
clearly, that regardless of the amount of the people that vote for the third party
candidate, the Electoral College gives them no votes in order to ensure the
majority rules policy (over 50% of electoral votes wins). In 1922 the candidates
were Clinton, Bush, and Perot, and according to Document B of the DBQ packet
Clinton had 43% of the popular vote, Bush had 37.5%, and Perot had 18.9%. With
this information, it is pretty obvious, that although he was not the main contender, Perot
definitely was still in the running, and not wasnt even very far behind Bush.
Subsequently, with the way that the electoral college works, the vote was obviously

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more in one persons favor, giving 69 electoral votes to Clinton, 31 to Bush, and
completely eliminating Perot from the race. Yes, the popular vote still won, but
because of the electoral vote, he won by a landslide. If the electoral votes are going to
continue to be weighted so heavily, than it is very apparent that there will never be a
chance for any third party contenders; this hardly seems democratic.
As previously stated, the Electoral College system does have a problem
upholding the democratic values of the United States. George Will said The winner
take all electoral vote allocation tends to produce a winning margin that looks like
national decisiveness. Basically, hes saying that regardless of the peoples popular
vote, because of how heavily weighted the electoral votes, the electoral college gets to
choose the president they want, and because of majority rules, there is often a huge
gap between the winner and the runner up. With this process, it looks as if the nation is
almost unanimously in agreeance that this president is the one that should be leading
the country, when in reality, the president could very well not even be the one that the
people voted for. As well as infringing on the right of US citizens to choose their own
president, the system itself is also flawed. Perhaps the most worrying is the
prospect of a tie in the electoral vote. In that case, the election would be thrown
to the House of Representatives, where state delegations would vote on the
president. Because each state casts only one vote, 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. This quote from
Bradford Plumer gets the point across in an extremely direct manner. If the electoral
votes are tied, then the voting becomes even more unfair because of the

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misrepresentation of state population in the House of Representatives. Letting one

Wyoming vote have just as much weight as fifty-five of Californias votes seems
very blatantly illogical and unfair, but with the system the US is following right now, it
poses a real threat of happening.
As has been noted, the Electoral College, although once a great political tool and
advancement for our country, is now outdated and unfair. It is flawed and should be
abolished for a number of reasons. These reasons being: the small states are
overrepresented, the third party candidates are being given no chances, and the system
is undemocratic. For these reasons, the constitution should be changed, and the
Electoral College should be abolished.