United States Electoral College

From RationalWiki

The United States Electoral College consists of 538 people who are selected every 4 years to elect a president for the United States. Sound oligarchic? Well.... it is!

However, the Electors have to cast their votes based on the people that they are representing. One could argue that the Electors serve no real purpose and under most conditions they'd be right. The electors themselves are just bodies to cast the apportioned votes. However, under some conditions the electors could change their votes and during particularly close elections this has potential to spark what many like to call a constitutional crisis.

Each state has the same number of electors as their representation in Congress, so the minimum is 3, and currently the state with the most is California, with 55. The District of Columbia (a/k/a Washington, D.C.) also has 3.

It is also possible for electors to cast their vote for a different candidate than the state's voters sent them to vote for. These are called faithless electors, and have never been punished.^[1] This has happened, but only rarely, and never in sufficient numbers to change the outcome of an election.

[edit] Pro and Con

In 2000, Al Gore won the popular vote by ~500,000. Unfortunately, due to the electoral college, the person with less votes won. That would be George W. Bush.

One argument is that the above paragraph fails to make sense and as such neither does the electoral college system and that the electoral college system completely destroys the chance of a third party to win the election, because they would have to beat out the big parties in enough states to gain the electoral votes, which would be really hard.

The main argument behind the use of a system like the electoral college is that it prevents the development of factions. In a pure democracy 51 percent of the voters could control the other 49 percent, but in the electoral college system the minority still has a strong voice. Another reason often given in the US is that it equalizes the power between states to some degree. If elections were just about popular vote a candidate could run a campaign appealing only to a handful of the most populated states. With the electoral college system a much larger block of states must be won. (However, with the first past the post system in place in most states, only a handful of important states are currently considered in play anyway.)

Note how somebody could win the popular vote, and still lose the electoral vote.

Another problem is the severe imbalance between the wide, open less populated states and the densely populated states. Wyoming has a population of 515,004 ^[2] and 3 electoral votes, ^[3] whereas Calfornia has a population of 36,457,549 ^[4] and 55 electoral votes^[3]. This amounts to 5.8 × 10^-6 electoral votes per person in Wyoming compared to 1.5 × 10^-6 per person in Calfornia. Essentially, a Wyoming voter is valued by the electoral college at 3.8 times more than a California voter ((5.8 × 10^-6) ÷ (1.5 × 10^-6)). Republican strategiest Karl Rove took this into account in the 2000 and 2004 electrons.^{[citation needed]}

[edit] History

The term electoral college was not written into law until 1845 but was spelled out in the constitution under Article II, Section 1, Clause 2. "Each state shall appoint, in such manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a number of electors, equal to the whole number of Senators and Representatives to which the State may be entitled in the Congress: but no Senator or Representative, or person holding an office of trust or profit under the United States, shall be appointed an elector."

Of all the Founding Fathers the one most closely linked to this method of election is James Madison. In Federalist Papers No. 10 Madison spells out the dangers of factions and imparting too much power into a simple majority. In Federalist Papers No. 39 he further develops the idea in that the the Federal executive should be elected in a manner that combines the state and federal system. He argued that the Constitution was designed to be a mixture of federal (state-based) and national (population-based) government. The Congress would have two houses, one federal and one national in character, while the President would be elected by a mixture of the two modes, giving some electoral power to the states and some to the people in general.

Moreover, it can be argued that the system was set in place because a poor farmer in Georgia would not be able to know enough about prominent people in Massachusetts or even Virginia to vote for them. Therefore, local people vote for a local representative, who is then entrusted with the vote. The same idea could have been achieved by having Congress select the President, but this would have then made the President beholden to the Congress, rather than to the general people.

[edit] See also

• 2000 U.S. Presidential Election
• 2004 U.S. Presidential Election
• 2008 U.S. Presidential Election

[edit] Footnotes

1. ↑ This is despite the fact that several states have laws making this illegal. See wp:Faithless elector for more
2. ↑ http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/56000.html
3. ↑ ^{3.0 3.1} http://www.fec.gov/pages/elecvote.htm
4. ↑ http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/06000.html