Electoral College Dbq

During 1787, delegates, known as the founding fathers, met in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania to form a new system of government. Creating a functioning and fair way to elect public officials proved to be a difficult task for the founding fathers. They attempted to find a way to balance the power between individual states and the national government. This was eventually laid out in Article II, Section 1 of the Constitution, which made the Electoral College the form voting system the United States uses to elect the President and Vice President. There are people in present day society who firmly believe that the constitution is still very relevant today and believe that it gives a fair and equal representation of all the states. Even though the
Many people have considered this form of electing the president to be outdated and no longer needed for the government. Although there is still an ongoing debate, on whether the Electoral College is still affective, it continues to be upheld and functioning today, despite earlier changes to the constitution itself, including abolishing, adding, and revising certain amendments. If the presidential elections were simply based on the popular vote, the United States would no longer be represented as a Constitutional Republic, but as a democracy. As explained in a Washington Post article by Charles Lane, a journalist and editor for the website, there is still need for the Electoral College in the United States, as he stated, “our current system elevates popular-vote losers to the presidency: that's because popular votes cast in a state-by-state contest for 270 electoral votes do not reflect the national will. Rather, they reflect the results of a competition
Each state is granted a certain number of electorates depending on the population size, but despite the size, states are guaranteed to have at least three electors and all states receive two senators. In an article by Jonathan Turley, he explains why the electoral college gives more disadvantages to larger states, “The greatest irony of the Electoral College is that it does precisely the opposite of what the Framers intended: Rather than encouraging presidential candidates to take small states seriously, it results in turning most states into near total irrelevance. With our two-party monopoly on power in the United States, candidates spend little time, if any, in states that are clearly going to go for the other party -- or even for their own party. . . The result is that elections are dominated by swing states while campaigns become dominated by the issues affecting those states” (Turley). Some also may argue that it not only ignores larger states, but United States territories as well as. Territories, such Puerto Rico and Guam do not get votes because they are not considered states and do not have a specific constitutional amendment that recognizes them in the elections, but the people born there are recognized as citizens of the United States. But citizens that move to a different country and even astronauts are still allowed to participate