Electoral College Advertisement Analysis

To reiterate, the best way to improve democracy in the U.S. is by individualizing, localizing, and cleaning up elections and the voting system, but not everybody agrees. The first criticism to this position is that individualizing the voting system is giving additional power to the uninformed voter. This is understandable for the reason that these voters have already made an impact in the current elections, and giving those with outdated, or uninformed views will do nothing but hurt the elections. However, the manipulation of uninformed voters by the candidates is very common, and candidates practice advertising tactics such as attack ads to alter the view of these uninformed voters. Jeffrey Koch, author of “Campaign Advertisements’ Impact
on Voter Certainty and Knowledge of House Candidates’ Ideological Positions” explains that the “issue attack ads lead citizens to believe they know more than they actually do, failing to produce the democratic ideal of [an] informed electorate” (Koch). The second criticism is that the U.S. democracy has survived up until now; changing something that works seems illogical. This criticism is understandable since the U.S. democracy still functions to this day. However, the creation of the current U.S. democracy was over two hundred years ago, and the moral and technological innovations that have transpired since the government’s birth call for a few changes in the U.S. Government.
Now that I have dealt with the criticisms of my positions I will now go through my plan to make it a reality.
The first step in my plan would be to change our current presidential voting system by eliminating the use of an Electoral College. The elimination of the Electoral College would solve a few different issues with our voting system today. Bernard Grofman, and Scott Feld, authors of “Thinking about the Political Impacts of the Electoral College” described some of the major flaws with the electoral college, starting with “the original Justification for its existence, the designation of sets of knowledgeable individuals who will meet in isolation in their respective states to deliberate and to make informed choices, has zero relevance to the modern world” (Grofman). The belief that the President of the United States is elected entirely by the vote of the people is heavily endorsed. Therefore, one of the biggest flaws of the Electoral College system is the possibility of a candidate to be the winner of the Electoral College majority but still be the minority in the popular vote. Consequently, candidates focus on the few states with the most votes in the electoral college which isolates some states to the election entirely creating a population of uninformed
voters.
The Electoral College is not the only flaw in U.S.
democracy, however, corruption and extreme competitive advantage with relations to campaign funding are extremely prevalent as well. Which brings up the second step in my plan: to clean up the presidential campaigns by limiting the funds awarded to each running candidate by using clean elections. When it comes to running a campaign in the United States presidential elections, money is one of the major factors. With political campaigns being expensive candidates cannot always fund their campaign by themselves. Therefore, candidates reach out to donors for money to fund their campaigns. These donors influence the results of the elections substantially and can have a significant impact on who wins the election. The solution to this problem would be to switch over to a clean election system. The idea of clean elections involves public funding to candidates, meaning that each candidate would get a set amount of money to run his or her campaign. Clean elections would not only level the playing field between all candidates running in an election, but it would also reduce corruption within the U.S. democracy by cutting out the big corporations paying for the candidate that best benefits them. With less corruption and equal playing fields, this could also create an opportunity for a third-party candidate to claim a win in an
election.
Lastly, part of cleaning up the U.S. voting system would include the opportunity for voters to choose the candidate that they agree with and excluding the pressure of voting for the already popular parties. This point highlights the third step of my plan: to influence a strong change in the U.S. two-party system by either destroying the Republican and Democratic parties entirely, or strongly introducing competition to lower the popularity of the two parties. However, with the two-party system already extremely dominate in U.S. political elections, it would be next to impossible to eliminate them. Barry Tadlock, an associate professor of political science at Ohio University, pointed this out. Dr. Tadlock explained that a third party must be extremely popular among voters even with a level playing field. The republican and democratic viewpoints are too deeply rooted in beliefs of U.S. citizens, and changing them would take an alteration in other fields of our government (Tadlock). However, with a clean election system in place, there is an opportunity for a third-party candidate to make a better appearance. With the elimination of the Electoral College the popular vote wins the election, and with completely evenly funded campaigns, there is a very strong possibility of a third-party taking a dominate role.
With my plan to improve U.S. democracy in place, there will be a more individualized, and less corrupt government. However, these steps are not small and simple and will take some time to complete. Additionally, these steps could propose the question of a revolution if not done correctly, and though this might seem disastrous it might not be. Which brings up the question of if a revolution would be good for the U.S. Democracy.