Joseph Bowman

Loudermilk
ENG 1201
3-26-20

The Electoral College Literature Review

The Electoral College has been used as the United States’ form of voting for centuries,

but in 2020, it is a debate topic among many politicians who are campaigning for the presidency.

Many claim it to be a poor way of conducting voting in the United States. So why, then, is the

Electoral College an ineffective way of representing the American people? That is what will be

explored in this essay, and why, if at all, we should be getting rid of a system that has been in

place for so long.

The Electoral College works like this: each state gets a set number of electors that

correlate to the state’s population, with a minimum of 3. The number of electors equals the

number of Senators plus the number of Representatives from the state (each state has 2 Senators

and a minimum of 1 Representative, hence a minimum of 3 electors). Usually, the electors vote

in accordance with the election results, however, this is not required. As of the 2016 presidential

election, there were 538 Electors across the 50 states and Washington D.C, and 270 of these

electoral votes are required to clinch the presidency. The total number of electors has not

changed, but how many votes acquitted to each state changes every 10 years after a census

(Wolf, “The Electoral College, Explained.”).

Across the researched articles, there’s a common point about the Electoral College’s

inability to be accurately representative of the vote of the American public. NPR writer Danielle

Kurtzleben writes in her article “How To Win The Presidency With 23 Percent Of The Popular

Vote” about how the Electoral College can be easily exploited to win the majority of electoral

votes (270) while only having the popular vote of 23 percent of voters. This would, realistically,
never happen at this dramatic of a scale, but it allows for more realistic iterations, say winning

the Electoral College with 40, 45, or 49 percent of the total voter pool.

As Mark Rush writes in his Gale article “The Electoral College Will Never Make

Everyone Happy”, 2 of the last 5 presidential elections have resulted in a winner of the College

that did not win the popular vote. However, he has a different view of why this happens. Rush

argues that it isn’t the system of election, but rather that politics, in general, have always

operated this way, and that it is actually a very democratic institution. This directly contradicts

the ideas of the group called The National Popular Vote, who are detailed in Jose Del’s article

for the New York Times, titled “Should the Electoral College Be Eliminated? 15 States Are

Trying to Make It Obsolete”. The National Popular Vote has gained traction since 2006 and is

attempting to do away with the Electoral College altogether with a pact that has been signed by

15 states and by Washington D.C, all under the grounds that the popular vote system is much

fairer and more democratic than the latter. The electoral college is no stranger to changes like

these, as according to the National Archives Database on the system, titled “The Electoral

College”, the system has received over 700 proposed changes in the past 200 years. Now, it’s

being debated whether or not America should do away with it altogether.

 Works Cited

Del, Jose A. “Should the Electoral College Be Eliminated? 15 States Are Trying to Make It

Obsolete.” The New York Times, The New York Times, 22 May 2019,

www.nytimes.com/2019/05/22/us/electoral-college.html.

“The Electoral College.” National Archives and Records Administration, National Archives and

Records Administration, 23 Dec. 2019, www.archives.gov/electoral-college.

Kurtzleben, Danielle. “How To Win The Presidency With 23 Percent Of The Popular Vote.”

NPR, NPR, 2 Nov. 2016, www.npr.org/2016/11/02/500112248/how-to-win-the-

presidency-with-27-percent-of-the-popular-vote.

Rush, Mark. “The Electoral College Will Never Make Everyone Happy.” The Conversation, The

Conversation, 1 Oct. 2019. Gale In Context: Opposing Viewpoints, link-gale-

com.sinclair.ohionet.org/apps/doc/AXNWME162776212/OVIC?

u=dayt30401&sid=OVIC&xid=fdb87bf4. Accessed 28 Mar. 2020.

Wolf, Zachary B. “The Electoral College, Explained.” CNN, Cable News Network, 1 Mar. 2020,

www.cnn.com/2020/03/01/politics/what-is-electoral-college-history-

explained/index.html.