The Electoral College is a system that has complete power to decide who will be the next president of the United States of America. It is actually the worst way to decide who will become president because it gives no power to the people to make the decision. It was created in 1803 by our founding fathers to help elect the president. There are a variety of reasons why people believe the founding fathers thought it was a good idea to create it.
The college is a process where a group of 538 electors come together in December of the election year and vote for president. The number of electors each state has varies depending on how many congressmen they have in their state. Electors are mostly chosen by the political parties within each state, although this process may vary depending on each state.
After the state receives which political party won the popular vote in their state they will then send the winner's party's batch of electors to vote for the US President. Twenty-nine states out of fifty have laws stating that the electors must vote based on what the popular vote, while the other twenty-one states allow them to vote however they choose to do so. This has caused a stir within the United States due to past elections and the president the Electoral College elected.
There has been a total of five different elections in the past where the candidate who won the Electoral College vote, lost the popular vote. The first time this affected the United States was during the sixth US election in the year 1825, and the last time it happened was the last election in the year 2016.
John Quincy Adams was the first president who did not get the popular vote but received the honor of becoming president. Andrew Jackson received 152,901 popular votes to John Quincy Adam's 114,023. None of the candidates received the total number of required Electoral College votes to be elected president. Therefore, the choice was left up to Congress. Congress then revealed that they chose John Quincy Adams to be the 6th president of the United States of America.
The next time it happened was fifty-two years later when president Rutherford B. Hayes won with 4,034,311 votes against Samuel J. Tilden with 4,288,566 votes. After president Hayes, Benjamin Harrison beat Grover Cleveland and secured the presidency even with Cleveland receiving 90,596 more votes than Harrison.
In 2000 George W. Bush Jr. won the presidency against Al Gore who secured 543,895 more votes than Bush. Finally, and most recently Donald J Trump was named president after receiving 2,868,686 fewer votes than Hilary Clinton.
There have been six occasions where the people's vote did not matter, and because of this many people are questioning the policy and how the US could change it to better suit how voting results turn out, some are even trying to abolish the Electoral College altogether. Many states have laws stating that the Electors must vote according to the popular vote, if this is implemented throughout all fifty states then why have the Electoral College at all? Why not just use the popular vote alone?
When addressing the question whether we should abolish the Electoral College many people ask why it was created. There are two major theories as to why the founding fathers created such a law.
The second theory was that the Electoral College was created in order to balance the interests of high-population and low-population states. Although the Electoral College does help less populated states, it hurts the more populated states. Those of smaller and less populated states' votes matter more than those of more populated states; which is not a good reason to keep the Electoral College.
As a result of the Electoral College voter turnout is declining in safe states, and not enough people are voting because they believe their vote no longer matters. If we continue to keep the Electoral College, fewer and fewer voters will be coming out to vote in safe states, and most likely in all states. We must make a change to the Electoral College, or else the future result may be dire.
