Electoral College Analysis

The United States of America is one of the oldest democracies in the world, having continuously elected a head of state since George Washington’s election in 1792. (Barksdale 2014) However, the United States is particularly unique in one aspect of its democracy in that its citizens only indirectly elect the President. When presidential elections are held every four years, Americans head to the polls to officially choose the “electors” that will represent their respective states in the body that actually elects the president and the vice president, the Electoral College. So what exactly is the Electoral College? It consists of 538 electors where each state has a number of electoral votes equal to its total number of representatives to Congress
Among the most apparent implications of the Electoral College is that the election is effectively decided in a few number of “swing states”. (Heuvel 2012) In an entrenched two-party system as seen in America, it means that both parties – the Democratic Party and the Republican party – need to pay close attention to the partisan leaning of every state. For most of America’s electoral history, there would be states that voted the same way every time (“base states”) and a relatively few that produced mixed results and would effectively determine the winner of the election (“swing states”). (Heuvel 2012) Since there is no extra incentive in winning more than the necessary majority of the electoral votes, candidates or parties would not feel the need to run the table in order to win the general election. For instance, this would mean that the candidates would concentrate their limited allocation of resources such as campaign visits and television advertising in “swing states” such as Florida and Ohio rather than the “base states” such as California and
(Roth 2016) Also, the method of using congressional representation to allocate electoral votes gives extra weight towards less populous states compared to more populous states. Wyoming has 187,875 people per elector while California has 677,345 people per elector. (Melchor 2012) However at the moment, reform seems to be far from being achieved as both the Democratic Party and the Republican Party seems content with the status quo. Any effort intending to abolish the Electoral College in favor of a system that addresses the disparity between the popular vote and the electoral vote has been met with predictable resistance from representatives and senators from Southern and smaller states who argue that abolishing the Electoral College weakens their states’ political clout. (Silver