How To Eliminate The Electoral College

I’m going to be talking about if we should eliminate the electoral college. On December 13, 2000, vice president Al Gore conceded the presidential election to Governor Bush. A day earlier, a lengthy and expensive manual vote recount process in Florida was stopped by the United States supreme court despite Bush leading by only 537 votes with Bush winning the states by 25 electoral votes put him over the needed threshold of 275. This election result was highly unusual not just because of Supreme Court decisions it was also the 4th time in united states history that a candidate had garnered majority of the popular votes but lost the election. As you all also have heard this type of scenario happened again with Hillary winning the popular vote
but Trump winning the electoral college. Gore received 50,996,582 votes and Bush received 50,456,062 votes. Bush and Trump won because of the electoral college, which is a complex way of determining the future leader of America. Why does America use the electoral college? Why isn’t a simple vote count enough to determine the president? Well when America goes and votes they are in fact not actually voting for the president but rather they are casting a group of electors who will then vote for the president as they see fit.
To reduce any chance of confusion rather than having people explicitly vote for electors on the ballot the presidential candidate a given group of electors is pledged to vote for is put on the ballot instead. Another common misconception about presidential voting in the united states is that the president is elected once the general public’s votes are tallied up. Again because the general public does not technically vote for a president, but rather on which electoral college representatives will get to vote for president, the president isn't officially elected until the following January. Specifically on January 6th the current vice president opens voting during a joint session of Congress. It’s during this session that electoral votes are tallied, with the deadlines for those to being submitted late in December. This may be to be something of a technicality, but there are many completely legal scenarios in which a different president may be chosen than the one who appears to have won after the general public has cast their ballot for electors. So who are these votes that actually elect the president and how are they
chosen? there are only two federal laws that pertain to who can be an elector. The first one comes from Article 2 of the constitution, which states that “No senator or representative, or person holding an office of Trust… shall be appointed an elector.” The second is a provision buried in the 14th amendment that says any state official that was involved in an insurrection or rebellion against America is also barred from being an elector. Beyond those two restrictions, anyone can be an elector. As for those who end up being an elector, that depends on the political parties and how a given state legislature sets the method of selections. But in a nutshell each states political parties nominate a group of electors who are extremely loyal to their respective parties.
Their number is equal to the number of electoral votes the state has, which in turn is equal to the number of senators (two per state) and number of representatives (determined by population)said state has or in the case of the district of Columbia, a set three electors thanks to the 23rd amendment. An elector cannot vote for a vice president and president who both are from the elector’s home state. This rule was meant to ensure an elector could not vote for two of their state’s “favorite sons”. Today this is obviously not an issue for anyone so long as the presidential candidate picks a vice presidential candidate from another state of their owns. On election day whichever political party’s candidate whether it be democratic or republican or third party wins the majority of the states votes that slate of electors becomes the ones who get the vote for the president in their respective states. For example in 2012 Californians voted for the 55 party selected democrats who in turn all cast their 55 votes for the Obama Biden ticket. Now there are currently two exceptions for this all or nothing approach, Maine and Nebraska, they both used district
system. In this system the states popular majority is accounted for some electors votes but others vote based on congressional districts popular majority within the state. This can potentially result in the splitting of the votes for instance in 2008 Nebraska ended up with 4 republican electors and 1 democrat. And there are no federal laws or constitutional provisions that require electors to cast their votes in accordance with the states popular vote result. There are some states laws that pertain to this 29 states and the district of Columbia have laws that require the electors vote the way the popular vote has instructed them to. That said penalties are not to severe in most cases failure to inhere to these state laws by so called faithless electors could result in a fine or a replacement as an elector. That also leaves 21 states that do not have such laws allowing electors to vote as they see fit instead of how the general public directed them to. It turn out this seems to have been with the founders of the nation intended. It should be noted here that according to the national archives more than 99% of the times electors have voted as instructed and no elector has ever been prosecuted. However there have been 22 times involving 179 electoral votes that faithless electors have bucked the system. The most recent was in 2008 when an elector apparently voted for a person named John Edwards rather than the democratic