The electoral college is the system used in
the United states to elect the president and
the vice president.
In US presidential elections, people don’t
vote for the president,
they vote for electors who then vote for the
president and vice president.
There are 538 Electors divided out by state,
with the states with larger populations getting
more electors.
Whoever wins the popular vote in each state
gets all the electors in all but 2 states,
for example when Hillary Clinton won the popular
vote in California in 2016 she got all 55
electors.
What this means is that there isn’t really
a single presidential election,
there are 50 individual ones in each state.
In this video we will learn about the pros
and cons of the electoral college,
why some want to abolish it because they say
it’s undemocratic and archaic, being more
than 200 years olds
and why others think it’s essential to american
democracy
The biggest pro of the electoral college is
that it supposedly prevents a demagogue getting
into power.
a demagogue is a leader who relies on people’s
emotions and prejudices to get into power
as opposed to using rational argument, and
at the time the constitution was written,
the founding fathers feared that if the president
was voted in by an uneducated and uninformed
population, people could fall prey to this
kind of a person.
When the constitution was being drafted the
founding father james madison wrote about
these fears in the federalist papers,
arguing that the electoral college was needed,
to act as a kind of middlemen between the
population at large and government.
Having just freed themselves from the tyranny
of king George
the founding fathers also wanted a system
that provided a balance
between an unelected king and complete democracy,
The electoral college was thought to represent
that balance, because it allows people to
vote
for the electors,
but the electors the ones who actually vote
for president.
Opponents of the electoral college argue that
it is archaic and not needed anymore.
In response to the idea that it guards against
an uninformed population voting in a demagogue,
they would argue that nowadays people are
a lot more educated.
The electoral college also doesn’t respond
to the will of the people, it’s undemocratic
in two elections in the past twenty years,
most recently in 2016, the candidate who lost
the popular vote became president.
The electoral college also reinforces the
two party system which deprives people of
choice as they are forced to choose the lesser
of two evils, again and again.
opponents argue along these lines that as
other parts of the constitution have been
modernised with amendments
such as by rewarding women and blakc people
the vote,
so should the voting system be updated by
replacing the electoral college with a popular
vote system that accurately reflects modern
times
Those in favour of the electoral college maintain
that it is still a system that needs to be
in place today because it provides a level
of certainty that a system of popular vote
would not.
It prevents the need for recounts or run off
elections.
Also, in a popular vote system, candidates
could just ignore small states and go to larger
ones like california or texas to run up the
vote,
but because of the electoral college, they
are forced to campaign in all states, leading
to a more national campaign.
Opponents of the electoral college reject
this idea, arguing that instead it leads to
candidates taking certain larger states for
granted and campaigning almost exclusively
in swing states like florida and ohio.
Also because of the way electors are distributed,
it leads to smaller states getting more electors,
meaning votes in these states quite literally
mean more than in larger states, which is
hardly fair.
Overall it seems that the electoral college
is favoured by some who see it as a moderating
influence on american politics, because it
gives smaller states more power, and
it is designed to help prevent demagogues
from getting into power.
opponents of the electoral college see it
as archaic
and undemocratic, they argue that people’s
votes should matter, the candidate who gets
the most votes should win.
that’s the electoral college.
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