The Electoral College - Essay Example

The Electoral college The Electoral College is a system of indirect voting applied for the presidential elections in the USA. Its full name and description are given in the free Wikipedia encyclopaedia as follows: The United States Electoral College is the official name of the group of Presidential Electors who are chosen every four years to elect the President and Vice President of the United States. (Wikipedia, The US Electoral College) The Electoral College concept can be interpret as an opposite voting mechanism to the majority system which counts directly the citizens’ votes and whoever candidate gets the majority of votes becomes president of the state. If the majority system had been applied to the Presidential elections in 2000, for instance, Al Gore would have been the winner since he received the majority of popular votes. When the Electoral College cast their votes the winner in that elections turned out to be his opponent: G.W. Bush. I will refer to the case as one of the four exceptions of the general rule according to which if a candidate wins the public vote he presumably wins the Electoral college vote too. During the times of the state legislation formation a group of framers, The Founding Fathers, known as the "Committee of Eleven" in the Constitutional Convention, proposed an indirect election of president through a College of Electors: The function of the College of Electors in choosing the president can be likened to that in the Roman Catholic Church of the College of Cardinals selecting the Pope. The structure of the Electoral College can be traced to the Centurial Assembly system of the Roman Republic. Under that system, the adult male citizens of Rome were divided, according to their wealth, into groups of 100 (called Centuries). Each group of 100 was entitled to cast only one vote either in favor or against proposals submitted to them by the Roman Senate. (Kimberling, The Electoral College) In the Electoral College system, the States serve as the Centurial groups and the number of votes per State is determined by the size of each State's Congressional delegation. How do you become an electoral voter? – It is simply a matter of winning the majority of residents’ votes on the voting day. Every four years, on the Tuesday following the first Monday of November, millions of U.S. citizens go to local voting booths to elect the next president and vice president of the country. Their votes are recorded and counted, then winners are declared. But the results of the popular vote are not guaranteed to stand because the Electoral College has not cast its vote. The size of the Electoral college has been set at 538 since the election of 1964. Each state is allocated as many electors as it has Representatives and Senators in the United States Congress. The number of electors is equal to the total membership of both houses of Congress (100 Senators and 435 Representatives) plus the 3 electors allocated to the District of Columbia, totalling 538 electors. How different is the process in different states? – For 48 states it's known as the "winner-take-all system." The "district system," is observed in both Maine and Nebraska. In these states, two electors' votes are made based on the candidate who received the most votes statewide. The remaining electoral votes go by congressional districts, awarding the vote to the candidate who received the most votes in each district. How the electors are chosen in each state? – All depends on the state legislature. According to Howstuffworks web site there are two common ways of selection: The elector is nominated by his or her state party committee (perhaps to reward many years of service to the party). The elector "campaigns" for a spot and the decision is made during a vote held at the state's party convention. (Howstuffworks) According to the Constitution there are no real educational or racial restrictions in order to classify for elector. In fact, electors are usually people devoted to politics, active political party members or political activists who hold strong political opinions and have substantial knowledge of the political environment in the state. Of course, there are limitations in sense that no Representative, Senator of ‘high-ranking U.S. official in a position of “trust or profit” (howstuffworks) can apply or qualify for elector’s position. Each state provides its own means for the nomination of electors. In some states, such as Oklahoma, the Electors are nominated in primaries the same way that other candidates are nominated. Other states, such as Virginia and North Carolina, nominate electors in party conventions. In Pennsylvania, the campaign committees of the candidates name their candidates for Presidential Elector (an attempt to discourage faithless Electors). All states require the names of all Electors to be filed with the Secretary of State (or equivalent) at least a month prior to election day. (Wikipedia, US Electoral College) The ‘Maine method’ is a combination of the two main modes of selection: with ballot (winner-take-all) and district mode (the state is divided into district and each district nominates its elector). In 1828, New York used its own variant of the Maine method for choosing electors. Just as Maine and Nebraska now do, voters in each congressional district would select one elector. Then these electors would in turn choose the remaining electors, instead of these electors being directly determined by voters statewide. Each elector gets one vote. Thus, a state with eight electors would cast eight votes. There are currently 538 electors and the votes of a majority of them -- 270 votes -- are required to be elected. Since Electoral College representation is based on congressional representation, states with larger populations get more Electoral College votes. (Longley, R., The Electoral College system) In order a candidate to win the election he must receive 270 of the 538 votes. In case no candidate wins the majority the case is passed into the hands of the House of Representatives by virtue of 12th Amendment of the Constitution who choose from the top three candidates. The election process takes a long period of 2-3 months: Why the delay between the general election and the Electoral College meetings? Back in the 1800s, it simply took that long to count the popular votes and for all the electors to travel to the state capitals. Today, the time is more likely to be used for settling any protests due to election code violations and for vote recounts.(Wikpedia, The US Electoral College) The proponents of the Electoral College system claim the existence of the indirect voting system protects the federal interest of the state, gives opportunity to the small states to participate equally powerfully into the elections, holding the powers, even able to “swing the elections” (howstuffworks), The Electoral College also affirms the two big political parties – the Democrats and the Republicans, not leaving space for other political formations. Diachronically speaking the emergence of the indirect voting system happened before the birth of the fist political parties in the U.S. .The Framers of the Constitution wanted to ensure large public support of the future president by introducing the Electoral College system. However, large public support doesn’t mean legal acknowledgement and true representation of the popular vote and of the public will as William Kimberling states in his article ‘The Electoral College’. As a matter of fact very often the electors would vote opposite the public opinion. Nevertheless, proponents of the system claim that it ‘enhances the minority rights and encourages stability through the two-party system.’ (Wikipedia, The US Electoral College) There are cases when the opinion of the electors and the people confront and the Electoral College vote then has the decisive power. And in the history of American policy there are four such cases: 1824 John Quincy Adams won the majority of the Electoral College; in 1876 Rutherford B. Hayes won “a one-vote margin in the Electoral College, despite the fact that he lost the popular vote to Samuel J. Tilden by 264,000 votes” (howstuffworks); in 1888 Benjamin Harrison won the Electoral college vote against Grover Cleveland and in 2000 Bush defeated Al Gore with the help of the Electoral College vote of Florida state (howstuffworks). According to Wikipedia article on US 2000 Elections ‘Gore failed to win the popular vote in his home state of Tennessee, which both he and his father had represented in the Senate. Had he won Tennessee, he could have won the election without Florida’. A curious breaking down of the electorate in the November issue of the Time (20 November 2000) shows that Bush supporters were mainly white, male, Christian or protestant voters whereas Gore received the support of all the minorities. It is one of the wildest presidential campaigns in American history which campaign commercials depict Al Gore as ‘a serial exaggerator’ (Debate Transcript, 2000) and Bush, in return, as ‘bumbler’’ (Debate Transcript, 2000) In his article ‘The Electoral College: Bulwark against Fraud’ Richard B. Darlington argues that the remarkable features of the present system is that: “the federal government has virtually no control over the system”, a statement I completely agree with, and if the electoral college system is replaced by a simple majority system then the whole election system should be modified – a nationalized body of government officials to be introduced with which the threat of ‘major fraud’ boosted up following some statistical data about fraud by federal officials. A nationalization of the slightest type would work against the primary federative principle of political existence of the Americans state Works cited: Bonsor, Kevin, How the Electoral College works, from http://people.howstuffworks.com/electoral-college.htm; Commission on Presidential Debates (2004), 2000 Debate Transcript.. Retrieved on October 21, 2005., from http://www.debates.org/pages/trans2000b.html; Darlington, B. Richard, Cornell University, The Electoral College: Bulwark Against Fraud, from http://usgovinfo.about.com/od/thepoliticalsystem/a/electcollege.htm; Kimberling, C. William (1992), The electoral college, revised May 1992, FEC Office of Election Administration from http://www.votescount.com/books/elecoll.htm; The Time, (2000), The Wildest Election in History, retrieved 20 November, 2000 from http://www.time.com/time/teach/glenspring2001/3.html; The Time, (2000), Breaking Down the Electorate, retrieved 20 November, 2000 from http://www.time.com/time/teach/glenspring2001/12.html Wikipedia, United States Electoral College, from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Electoral_College; Wikipedia, United States Presidential Election 2000, from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_election%2C_2000 Read More