Trent Harris Government Period 5 � PAGE �1�
Problems with the Electoral College
Trent Harris
Teacher: Ms. Scott
Period 5
Government
Who is really voting for our presidency, the people or the elected few? The most recent election involving Bush and Gore has impassioned a fifty-year old debate. The dispute is about whether the Electoral College is still a valuable system considering the situations the United States now faces compared to when it was created by our founding fathers. The Electoral College gives disproportionate voting power to the states, favoring the smaller states with more Electoral votes per person. The Electoral College is an obsolete system of election that misrepresents the people of the United States today.
For instance, each single vote in Wyoming counts nearly four times as much in the Electoral College as each single vote in Texas. This is because Wyoming has three Electoral votes for an approximate population of 500,000 and Texas has thirty-two Electoral votes for a population of over 20 million people (The Center for Voting and Democracy, 2002).
Votes in the Electoral College, 1824.
ElectoralCollege2000-Large-BushRed-GoreBlue
Graphic showing how the popular vote winner can lo...The presidential election representing George W. Bush and Al Gore, has again raised the question of Electoral College reform, since the winner of the Electoral College obviously lost the popular vote, like Benjamin Harrison did in 1888. Many are saying that if the loser of the popular vote serves as president, he will (like Harrison) be very weakened by a lack of approval. Therefore quite a few people, including Senator Hillary Clinton, are calling for a constitutional amendment that would elect the president by a pure popular vote.
George Edwards, author of Why the Electoral College is Bad for America, doubts the electoral system. Edwards, a political science professor at Texas A&M University, contends that it misrepresents an election by dividing up the vote, state...