The Electoral College System :: essays research papers

The Electoral College System   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  You walk in to the voting booth on the first Tuesday of November to cast your vote for who you think should be president. You take your ballot into the box believing, as most people do, that your vote will be counted along with the rest of the population. You do this because you believe it could be the deciding vote for the presidential race. Well, you are wrong. Your vote only decides who the electors that join the Electoral College in December will be, but the elector can always change his or her vote. How can this be right? What happened to the idea of a democracy where every citizen had his or her say? The Electoral College worked in the beginning because there were no political parties or political campaigns. During the next four presidential campaigns, political parties began to emerge in the United States. During the presidential election of 1800, two candidates from the same party received an equal number of votes. It took the House of Representatives thirty-six tries to break the tie. The tiebreaker involved bribes and other political dealings that the Electoral College was designed to prevent. This all prompted the Twelfth Amendment to the Constitution in 1804.   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  The Amendment requires that each Elector cast one vote for president and another vote for vice president. If that system does not come up with a majority winner, then the House of Representatives selects the winner from the top three contenders. The U.S. Senate selects the vice president from the top two contenders if one candidate does not receive the majority vote.   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  In a winner take all state; if a candidate receives 51 percent of the vote, he automatically wins the electoral votes for the state. If that state happens to be California, he has won 54 of the 538 possible votes. That is 1/5th of the amount of votes needed to win the presidency. So, if a candidate won only ten of the states' electoral votes, he can win the presidential race without taking into account the other 40 states (Procedural). That is just not the way a democracy is supposed to work. I believe that it is time for the United States Government to start realizing that the campaign process is getting out of control. The majority of presidential candidates only want to win a state's electoral votes. They do not concentrate on the smaller states.