The System of Electing the President - Term Paper Example

Electoral College is not an adequate process to elect US president Contents Introduction 2. Electoral College 3. Electoral College is not an adequate process to elect US president 4. The main disadvantages of Electoral College system are 5. References- Introduction The United States of America is the greatest democracy on earth and its president is often referred to as “the leader of the free world.” The American voters do election of the President and Vice President of the United States indirectly. This is done with the help of an arrangement known as the Electoral College system and this is not an adequate process to select U.S. president. Our system of electing the president does not serve the country well. In this system- getting the most votes doesn’t guarantee you win the election. This system has many problems. To understand these problems first we will have to understand this system. Electoral College An institute known as the Electoral College elects the President and the Vice President of the United States indirectly. There are several possible systems are present to elect the president of US and Electoral College is one of them. Other ideas are- One idea was to have the Congress choose the president. A second idea was to have the State legislatures select the president A third idea was to have the president elected by a direct popular vote. "Committee of Eleven" in the Constitutional Convention proposed an indirect election of the president by a system College of Electors. The election of the president is similar to the election of Pope in the Roman Catholic Church. Function of the College of Electors in choosing the president is same as the function of College of Cardinals electing the Pope. The structure of the Electoral College can be mapped out to the Centurial Assembly system of the Roman Republic. According to this system, the adult male citizens of Rome were divided, according to their wealth, into groups of 100 and this group of 100 is called Centuries. Each group of 100 was allowed to cast only one vote either in favor or against proposals submitted to them by the Roman Senate. In the Electoral College system, the States work as the Centurial groups but they are not based on wealth. The size of each States Congressional delegation determines the number of votes per State. The Electoral College consists of 538 electors; the number of U.S. House members (435) plus the number of U.S. Senators (100) plus the electors for the District of Columbia (3); a majority of which (270 in total) a candidate must win in order to become president. Most states (48 in all) use a simple winner-take-all decision rule — the candidate with the most votes in the election gets all of that state’s electoral votes. Two states (Maine and Nebraska) use a proportional system to divide electoral votes according to the total number of votes each candidate has won. Each Elector was required to cast two votes for president. Number of electors allocated to Each State is equal to the number of its U.S. Senators (always 2) plus the number of its U.S. Representatives. Employees of the federal government and congress members were specifically prohibited from serving as an Elector in order to maintain the balance between the legislative and executive branches of the federal government. The person with the most electoral votes at least one over half of the total became president. If no one obtained an absolute majority in the Electoral College or in the event of a tie vote, the U.S. House of Representatives would choose the president from among the top five contenders and if this event occurs in case of vise president election then the U.S. Senate would break the tie by deciding between the two. Electoral College is not an adequate process to elect US president Now we will see that Electoral College is not an adequate process to elect US president. The Electoral College has been the subject of a lot of it critical. David Abbott and James Levine warned about that Electoral College would elect a “wrong winner”. “Wrong winner” means a President who wins the electoral count yet loses the popular vote and whenever this happened, they predicted that the Presidency will has to face a profound crisis of legitimacy. Among critics of the College, the possibility that the College would produce a “wrong winner” has been held, like the sword of Damocles, over the heads of the current system’s supporters, who are too enamored of the Framers’ invention to appreciate the impending doom. The many students of the Electoral College continuously give this warning that the College would soon “malfunction” by producing a minority President. This system has elected the person who came in second almost 10% of the time. In five out of twelve elections the outcome has hinged on just a few votes in a few states. Electoral College system will cause a constitutional crisis. Three times in U.S. history, the candidate with the most popular votes lost because he did not receive a majority of electoral votes. At that time we were lucky to avoid bloodshed, but there is no guarantee our fortune will hold the next time. We can justify this with this example of past event- In 1824, Andrew Jackson, John Quincy Adams, William Crawford, and Henry Clay were four fairly strong contenders in the presidential Contest. And after the voting no one got sufficient electoral votes to become president. Then according to the provisions of the 12th Amendment, in this condition the House of Representatives will choose of president and the House of Representatives narrowly selected John Quincy Adams despite the fact that Andrew Jackson had obtained the greater number of electoral votes. This election is often known as the first one in which the candidate who obtained the greatest popular vote (Jackson) failed to be elected president. The 2000 presidential election, one of the closest and most exciting presidential contests in the history of our republic, did in fact produce a “wrong winner.” George W. Bush, the forty-third President of the United States, won the electoral count but lost the popular vote. INSTANT RUNOFF VOTING (IRV) has many advantages over Electoral College system. Voting becomes simpler and practical by this system. A voter can simply rank the candidates according to his/her preferences. It is also known as “one-person, one vote system”. In this the person who receives vote in majority wins the election and becomes the president of UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. The main disadvantages of Electoral College system are 1. UNITED STATES OF AMERICA is so deeply divided politically that three or more presidential candidates split the electoral votes among them such that no one obtained the necessary majority and the result of this is that a minority president could be elected. 2. If popular support of one candidate is heavily concentrated in a few States while the other candidate maintains a slim popular lead in enough states to win the needed majority of the Electoral College. In this way a minority president could be elected. 3. Some believe that in this system small system get advantage. This is only mathematically true. There are 13 states with three or four electoral votes. All of them, except New Hampshire, are safe states and consistently break 6-R, 6-D. Combined these twelve small states have 11 million people and 40 electoral votes. Ohio just happens to have 11 million people but only 20 electoral votes. Clearly there is no advantage to the small states for their extra votes – they must join a majority of medium and large states on the sidelines and watch Ohio take much of the campaign attention. 4. One elector who pledges to vote for his partys candidate for president but nevertheless votes for another candidate called "faithless Elector". There have been 7 such Electors in this century and as recently as 1988 when a Democrat Elector in the State of West Virginia cast his votes for Lloyd Bensen for president and Michael Dukakis for vice president instead of the other way around. 5. Some believe that voter fraud would enhance if we use a popular vote for president. But it is not true. Truth is that a small amount of fraud in current system can have a deep impact on the outcome of a race because a few votes are needed to change an election’s results in current system on the other hand in popular vote system difference is too large between the winner and the looser. 6. In this system campaigning is not done by the candidates so they are not familiar with the problems of the peoples of the country but in popular vote system they have to campaign in all the country. Some believe campaigns only paying attention to our largest cities, ignoring vast swaths of the country, but this is not possible because the population of America’s top 50 cities only makes up 15% of the country’s population. So to win the election candidate will have to campaign in whole country. 7. The problem is that a majority of Americans do not understand how the Electoral College works. Perhaps the fear is that voters are baffled by the complexity of the Electoral College and that their bafflement violates a democratic norm. 8. Because of voter confusion and ignorance the Electoral College should be abandoned in favor of a direct election system and popular vote is the more legitimate democratic alternative. 9. The College diminishes the voting power of various political minorities, including both voters of color and voters who support third-party candidates. 10. In this system votes do not count equally across the country. 11. Voters have long wanted a popular vote for president. Gallop started asking this question in the 40s and support has always been between 65 and 80%. 12. Many of the leading newspapers of the country: The New York Times, the Chicago Sun Times, The Minnesota Star Tribune, the Los Angeles Times support the National Popular Vote plan. 13. This system also promotes corruption. For example, in 1884, Grover Cleveland won New York and its 36 electors by only 1,047 votes. And, in 2000, George W. Bush won Florida and its 25 electors by only 537 votes. In both cases, those candidates would have lost the election if they had lost those states. 14. The Electoral College is fundamentally a violation of public reason. The college does not respect citizens as free and equal since the average citizen does not directly elect the president nor is there a guaranteed legal requirement that his or her vote actually counts. 15. The structure of the college is not well defined which raises the question of its coherence with the basic structure. 16. The Electoral College also distorts and complicates Presidential politics. When one particular candidate appears to have an insurmountable lead in some states, then none of the competitive candidates has much incentive nor can afford to campaign much in those states. Instead, they spend most of their time and money in a few tightly contested states, ignoring most of the other states (often including large states such as California, for example). According to Rawls, a society is based on the principle of democratic equality. The first principle states “each person is to have an equal right to the most extensive basic liberty compatible with a similar liberty for others.” And the second principle holds: “social and economic inequalities are to be arranged so that they are both A) Reasonable expected to be to everyone’s advantage, and B) Attach to positions and offices open to all. The Electoral College is a violation of Rawls’ first principle in two senses. First, the college denies the general population the right to select the president and vice president directly and as such jeopardizes the basic structure as defined by the two principles. We were lucky to avoid bloodshed, but there is no guarantee our luck will hold the next time. The Electoral College system is undemocratic and dangerous. We must switch to electing our president by popular vote as soon as it is possible. The Electoral College should be abolished because it lacks a rational justification and contradicts the basic principles of democratic society. Electoral College gives disproportionate voting power to voters in some states over others. The president and vice president should be elected directly by the free vote of the citizenry. The Electoral College is an historical anachronism that distorts and complicates Presidential politics and violates basic democratic principles. The arguments in favor of it are baseless, and it stands in the way of effective electoral reform. Until the Electoral College is eliminated, our current two-party duopoly is unlikely to get the effective competition it needs so badly at the Presidential level. The Electoral College can and should be abolished by a Constitutional Amendment. Unfortunately, that wont be easy because 38 states will have to agree, and some smaller states may want to preserve their disproportionate share of power. We can only hope they are willing to put democracy and the national interest ahead of their own narrow self interest. The Congress of the United States of America should pass a Constitutional amendment to abolish the Electoral College and replace it with the direct election of the President of the United States of America. References- 1. LUIS FUENTES-ROHWERAND GUY-URIEL CHARLES, “THE ELECTORAL COLLEGE, THE RIGHT TO VOTE, AND OUR FEDERALISM: A COMMENT ON A LASTING INSTITUTION”, www.law.fsu.edu/journals/lawreview/downloads/292/FRCharles.pdf 2. Glenn W. Rainey, Jr. and Jane Gurganus Rainey, “Reexamining the Distribution of Power in the Electoral College: The "Constant Two", the 2000 Election, and Emergent Geosocial Cleavage in America” people.eku.edu/raineyj/ElecCollSPSAWebVersion.6-04.pdf 3. Christopher Pearson , “Testimony from Vermont State Representative Christopher Pearson October 18, 2007” www.nationalpopularvote.com/resources/Pearson-Testimony-PENN- 2007-10-18.pdf 4. Gracchus. “Presidential Election Method” www.educationinnovations.net/samples/provcon/us_government.pdf 5. William C. Kimberling, “THE ELECTORAL COLLEGE” www.sec.state.ma.us/ELE/elepdf/eleccoll.pdf 6. Joseph Grcic , “The Electoral College and Democratic Equality” www.cah.ucf.edu/philosophy/fpr/journals/volume7/grcic10.pdf 7. L. Paige Whitaker and Thomas H. Neale, “The Electoral College: An Overview and Analysis of Reform Proposals” fpc.state.gov/documents/organization/38002.pdf 8. George, “Why the Electoral College Should be Abolished” http://216.109.125.130/search/cache?ei=UTF-8&p=Why+the+Electoral+College+Should+be+Abolished+The+U.S.+Electoral+College+is+an+historical+anachronism+that+was+established+back+when+the&n=10&va_vt=any&vo_vt=any&ve_vt=any&vp_vt=any&vst=0&vf=pdf&vm=p&fl=0&u=www.nonprofitvote.org/wp-includes/docs/electionmethods_why_the_electoral_college_should_be_abolished.pdf&w=why+electoral+college+abolished+u.s.+electoral+college+historical+anachronism+anachronisms+established+back&d=A7s2LPL9PmxW&icp=1&.intl=us Read More