1 POS2041.004 The Electoral College The United States of America is unique because of the rights guaranteed in the Constitution.

One of the most prized rights guaranteed within the Constitution is the right to vote for the president of the United States. Unlike the citizens of other countries the citizens of the United States get the chance to choose who will run the country for the following four years. Heres the best part, at the end of those four years if the citizens decide that president did a poor job they get the opportunity to choose someone else for the job. There is another aspect of United States presidential elections that makes them even more unique compared to other counties. The candidate does not necessarily have to receive more votes than his/her opponent. Instead the candidate must receive the majority of the Electoral College votes. The Electoral College is unlike any other election system around the world and the Framers designed it to alleviate some of the confusion of the election process, however over the years it has changed and the time may have come to do away with the whole darn thing. The Electoral College was the result of a compromise between those Framers who argued for selection of the presidency by congress and those who favored selection by direct popular election (487). When the idea was introduced in the late 1800s it made sense. Since there was no form of mass media back then most common citizens knew little about presidential candidates outside of their own state. Because of this the voters had almost no choice but to vote for the candidate from their state, making the probability of any candidate securing a majority unlikely. So instead electors from each state would be voted for to elect the president for the voters. This way Men of character with a solid

2 knowledge of national politics who were able to identify, agree on, and select national statesmen (487) allowing the uninformed to be vicariously informed. The system was designed to work without parties, cover the presidential nominations and elections, and produce a nonpartisan president. As the college was originally designed Each state designated electors equal to the number to the sum of its representation in the House and Senate (487). These electors each had two votes to cast in the college, one for president and one for vice president, only one of which could be from the electors state. Also, the electors could only vote for a candidate once. Whoever won the majority of the electors was designated as the president and the candidate with the second most electors was designated vice-president. In the event of a tie or if no candidate won the majority the decision went to the House of Representatives. The Framers devised [the college] specifically for the type of political system they foresaw for America in perpetuity: a nonpartisan, consensus-based, indirectly representative, multicandidate system (487). Due to the changes America has endured adjustments had to be made to the Electoral College. The Electoral Colleges first controversial election was in 1880 when the electors voted for Thomas Jefferson for president and Aaron Burr as his vice-president. Since the votes for president and vice-president had the same weight, Jefferson and Burr ended up having a tie. The twelfth amendment to the constitution corrected this, providing Separate elections for each office, with each elector having only one vote to cast in each (488). That was not the end of the controversy over the Electoral College, however. Multiple cases of one candidate losing the popular vote and still winning the electoral majority have occurred. The most recent evidence is from the 2000 election between Al

3 Gore and George W. Bush. Bush had 271 of the Electoral College votes and Gore had only 267, however since the margin was so small multiple recounts were held in Florida since any of the contested states would have granted Gore the majority. After the Supreme Courts decision in Bush v. Gore which stopped the recount in Florida, Bush became the president. To stay current with states population sizes the Electoral College, through reapportionment, is altered every ten years to reflect population shifts (489). This ensures that each state gets its fair share of electors.

4 Works Cited O'Connor, Karen, and Larry Sabato. American Government Continuity and Change. 2008 Alternate Edition. New York: Pearson Education, Inc., 2008.