Electoral College Reform - Research Paper Example

There are other viewpoints as well but this discussion is going to focus on these topics. In the opinion of this author, Electoral College, even if it has certain flaws, provides the best compromise to ensure a federalist, all inclusive, judicious method to elect the American leadership. It is also proposed that instead of breaking down the system altogether, the flaws are addressed through other means. Context To set the stage for describing and placing arguments related to opinions on Electoral College Reform, it is essential to briefly describe the process.

Electoral College is used to elect the President and Vice President of the United States. It is a form of indirect election in which the public casts their vote to elect “Electors” in their respective states. These Electors are authorized to eventually vote on their behalf to choose the President. The nationwide group of electors and the process through which this two tier voting takes place is called the Electoral College. Each state is allocated a number of electors equal to the state’s representation in the House of Representatives plus the Senate.

This allocation is based on the census and this means that more populous states have more electors than the less populous ones. However, as a minimum, each state has three to four electors. Since it is binding on each elector to vote for their party’s candidate, the result for Presidential election becomes clear after the first tier of voting. The total electors at this time being 538, whoever gets past 270 electors, wins the election. In the first tier of direct voting, a winner-takes-all system is followed.

This means that whichever party’s electors get more than 50% of votes cast in a particular state, all electors for that party go to the Electoral College. The debate In the past 200 years, there have been “more proposals for constitutional amendments on changing the Electoral College than on any other subject” ("How the Electoral College Functions"). Presidential elections in the year 2000 rekindled the long held debate about the efficacy and democratic nature of elections through the Electoral College.

In that year, George W. Bush beat Al Gore through a very small margin of Electoral College votes despite the fact that Al Gore was leading in the popular vote count. The controversy that was raised was eventually decided in the Supreme Court which ruled to stop voter recounting and the Bush was consequently accepted as the winner. So, the question that became fresh in everyone’s minds was why in the future the Americans should not decide on their President through the more representative popular vote rather than through the indirect Electoral College?

In the current system, a candidate can lose the elections through the Electoral College even if he or she has more cumulative nationwide popular vote. Gore lost the election because the electoral votes in the swing state of Florida eventually went to Bush. Proponents of election through popular vote (Neale 2-3) present two arguments against the Electoral College method. Firstly, they claim that the idea of not considering popular national vote is against democratic principles. According to them, the intermediate step of Electoral College takes away the national voter’s franchise and that the choice for the person holding