electoral college

electoral college

The US president is not chosen directly through popular vote, but rather through the Electoral College. The Electoral College is the concluding stage of the presidential election process and it’s an institution which was established by the Founding Fathers to elect the president indirectly. This organisation never meets, however the presidential Electors who make up the Electoral College meet in their state capitals to cast ballots for president and vice-president. In the vast majority of elections, the candidate who wins the popular vote also wins in the Electoral College stage. Although this wasn’t the case in the 2000 presidential elections, the Electoral College almost allows the winner of popular vote to also win the Electoral College stage. Whilst the Electoral College carries out many successful functions, some argue that it should be replaced with a national popular vote. In order to assess whether the Electoral College should be substituted by a national popular vote, the two opposing sides must be carefully evaluated.
The Electoral College has been criticised for suppressing the popular will, meaning it fails to epitomise the will of American citizens. There are two ways the Electoral College does this. The most evident way is that it may permit a candidate to win the presidency in spite of achieving the minority of votes across the country as a whole. This concludes in the majority of citizens being represented by someone they didn’t voluntarily elect, which can be seen as unfair and undemocratic. Admittedly this has only happened on three occasions, most notably in 2000 when Al Gore who achieved more popular votes (about 540,000 more than George Bush nationally) lost the presidency in the Electoral College against George W. Bush. A second way in which the Electoral College fails to represent the popular will of the people is through the presence of ‘rogue’ electors. A ‘rogue’ elector is a member of the US Electoral College who, for whatever reason,...

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