The Electoral College: Pros and Cons

Essay by tjuskyHigh School, 11th gradeA+, June 2004

download word file, 5 pages 4.4 1 reviews

The year is 1986, in the Texan resort town of Lajitas, a municipality with a population of approximately 10,000; there is a heated election for mayor. The candidates are Tommy Steele, the incumbent, and Clay Henry III, a newcomer to politics. The election committee tallied the votes and it decided that Clay Henry has won the vote. Does Henry give an acceptance speech or give an oath to help the city? Neither. The problem is that Clay Henry III is a mountain goat; his owner put him on the ballot because he did not like Tommy Steele, the current mayor. Though this happened in a relatively small town in Texas, it happened because people do not care about their welfare. They just wanted to have some fun. Could you imagine electing a goat as President of the United States of America, the most powerful position on earth! Maybe there is a way to stop such foolishness.

Possibly, by proposing to establish a sort of restraint on the people who do not care about the elections. Let alone with the 1 in 30 illiterate citizens, moreover, with the much lower literacy rates in our country 228 years ago as well as many other factors which I will write about later, the framers of the constitution deemed it necessary to create the Electoral College.

If you run a Google search on the term "Against the Electoral College," you will turn up about 277,000 different websites, some, if not most of them dedicated to removing the limits on free elections imposed by the Electoral College. I will now give a list of both problems and advantages of the Electoral College.

In order to discuss why there should or should not be an Electoral College, you should know how the process works:

The idea...