Voting in America: A Broken System or A Broken Will?
Lawns, car bumpers, and t-shirts all have one thing in common over the coming months: they are plastered with messages to vote. Vote Hillary, Vote Trump, Vote Johnson, and even a few holdouts grasping at fading hopes of a Sanders or Kasich presidency. However these people looking to promote their candidate are among a small number of Americans who vote. According to PewResearch.org the number of registered voters in the United States is almost two hundred and sixteen million citizens. During state primaries over the past year voter turn out was only thirty percent of all registered voters. Meaning that both candidates were chosen by less then sixty four million Americans. In an election cycle that has been on of the most contested in recent decades it is strange to see such low voter turn out. It begs a question is the US voting system making it deliberately harder for citizens to vote or are Americans faith in the voting system eroding?
Voting is one of the most basic of civic duties that allow citizens to participate in our democracy and have their voice heard. Since we are looking at the presidential election it is a fair starting point to look at how a president is elected and what Americans think of the process. Once candidates are chosen via the primary system and their parties leadership Americans can cast a vote. However they are not voting for a candidate directly, instead they casting a vote for the Electoral College. This institution is the subject of much debate in our country. The Electoral College is a group of Electors which represent the people in a particular state. When you vote in the general election your vote is counted by the electors in your state, the number of which is the total number of members of Congress that state has. Electors in that state then cast their vote for president. In the general election there are a total number of electoral votes of five hundred and thirty eight. When a candidate reaches and absolute majority of two hundred and seventy votes they have won the election. As a system it has worked for over two centuries but overall Americans are in favor of the college.
Gallup Polls asked voting age adults in 2013 if they would vote for doing away with the Electoral College with a resounding majority of sixty three percent want to the system gone. Recently it can be seen why so many people would see the system as unnecessary or overly complicated. We live in an age when Americans have a large amount of agency in their everyday lives to make their voices heard on social media platforms and video sharing sites. When you have the ability to express your opinion to millions of people at once it makes an indirect election seems unfair. Can your vote really mean that much if an elector can take millions of votes and just against them? Americans are starting to see that maybe their vote is not worth as much as it seems. In my opinion the Electoral College is a system that was designed at a time when many Americans had little to no education, so having a system that would allow for individuals with more knowledge to make presidential decisions seems to make sense. 2016 is a time when education is a fundamental right and secondary education is at its highest levels. So the question remains do the voting systems in the United States actually work or are Americans feeling distrust and disenfranchisement in the system?
