Electorasl College
The Electoral College: Is Attendance Smart?A common misconception among Americans is that when they vote they elect the President. The truth is not nearly this simple. What in fact happens when a person votes is that their vote goes for an Elector. This Elector (who is selected by the respective state in which a vote is cast) casts ballots for two individuals, the President and the Vice-President. Each state has the same number of electors as there are Senate and House of Representative members for that State. When the voting has stopped the candidate who receives the majority of the Electoral votes for a state receives all the electoral votes for that state. All the votes are transmitted to Washington, D.C. for tallying, and the candidate with the majority of the electoral votes wins the presidency. If no candidate receives a majority of the vote, the responsibility of selecting the next President falls upon the House of Representatives. This elaborate system of Presidential selection is thought by many to be an 18th century anachronism (Hoxie p. 717), what it is in fact is the product of a 200 year old debate over who should select the President and why.In 1787, the Framers in their infinite wisdom, saw the need to respec
As citizens, the framers entrusted everyday citizens with the right to influence the actions and fate of our government, even if only through a small article in the newspaper. Statistical analysis by one scholar, Charles W. In fact, Richie noted, Florida came within a few votes of passing such a measure a decade ago. When Hayes left office in 1881, one wag observed he had come in with an electoral majority of one but departed by unanimous consent. Second, instead of winner-take-all elections in which all of a state's electoral votes go to the candidate who wins most of the state's votes, states should award their votes proportionately to the number of votes various candidates received in each state. The question of why they did this remains, but the fault lies at the feet of the media for keeping the citizens left uninformed and unable to cast a reasonable vote. Also, because the allocation of electoral votes is based on data from the last census now 10 years old - it cannot allow for recent population migrations. Despite this, the fact remains that the possibility of an unfaithful elector does exist and it exists because the systemis designed to navigate around direct popular election of the President. Presidential campaigns would be waged even more on television, not in the flesh. Kennedy and Richard Nixon in 1960, or that between Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford in 1976, there is an even chance that the electoral count will contradict the popular vote. Even more serious, the winner-take-all provision effectively disenfranchises the "losing" party in every state. They said that one man equals one vote. But four states, all but one in the South, sent in competing sets of returns, and it was up to Congress to determine which were valid. The third instance in which a president was elected without a popular majority was the least controversial.
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Acceptance Essays
