Centerville High School

Centerville, South Dakota

Teacher: Terri Buechler

 

 

The Electoral College

By James Johnson

 

My opinion concerning the way we elect our President through the electoral process is that the direct election process would be better than the Electoral College.  The direct election process is better because it would be a lot harder to scam the polls and favor one candidate.  The way it is now for the Electoral College we send our Electors to go and vote.  When they go and vote they could say they were going to put their vote on one candidate, but when they get there, they could change their vote to a different candidate.  I also think we would benefit from using the direct election process because there would be a lot less whining about the election. 

 

In the election of 2000, Al Gore kept wanting to get the Supreme Court to get Florida to recount the votes just because he was losing.  If we would have had the direct election process that would not have happened, because President Bush would have gotten the President spot right away instead of messing around with courts to get Florida to recount the votes.  I think that we should have it so a voter can vote online or have the voting done on computers and have it all computerized so that it would be much easier and probably a lot less confusing and frustrating.  I think that the people did the best they could do handling the election with all the frustration and confusion that Florida was going through.  I think that the people in Florida really handled their part of the election well.  Florida could have gotten into some major lawsuits with the candidates that were running and the federal government.  The reason it could have got into some major lawsuits and court action is because of the counting of the votes; the candidates could have taken them to court to get them to recount the votes over and over again.  Another reason it could have gotten really out of hand, starting with violence, people could have started protesting that our country does not know how to elect a President.  That really could have gotten out of hand. 

 

This way of electing president is still a lot better than the communist government system.  If we were to have a communist government system, we would not even be able to elect whom we want for our President, well at least we get a little bit of a choice.  In the communist government system the communist government would just assign us a President, and we then have to live with it for however long they elect him or her for.  I think that we have a better election process than the communist government system.  At least when I get to go and vote my vote will at least count for something in the polls, but in the communist government I would not even get to vote, and I would not like that because I like to voice my opinion.

 

There would also be another way that I think that would be a good way to elect our President.  That is the proportional plan which allows us to keep the Electoral College, but we change the number of votes that got to a certain candidate.  The proportional plan consists of splitting up the Electoral College.  For an example, Florida has twenty-seven Electoral votes.  In this mock election there are 4 candidates running: candidate 1, candidate 2, candidate 3, and candidate 4.  After voting candidate 1 got 39 percent, candidate 2 got 30 percent, candidate 3 got 12 percent, and candidate 4 got 8 percent.  In the proportional plan all the electoral votes would be split up instead of going all to Candidate 1.  The candidates would get a rounded decimal percent of the votes.  Candidate 1 would get 11.53 electoral votes. Candidate 2 would get 9.1 electoral votes.  Candidate 3 would get 4.24 electoral votes.  Candidate 4 would get 3.16 electoral votes.  This would help the third party candidates out a lot.  It would help them because most of the time third parties get very few electoral votes or even do not get any at all.  With the proportional plan, like I had for an example, it would help them so the race looks a little closer to the other candidates when going by electoral votes.

 

I really hope that some of my opinions that I have given you can help make the election process better in ways of making it harder to fraud and easier on each state so they do not have as much pressure on them.

 

 

Required Questions

 

 

1. The President and Vice-President were elected from different parties in 1796; the election resulted in John Adams, a federalist, as President and Thomas Jefferson, a Republican, as Vice-President.  The one with the highest votes got President and the runner-up got Vice-President.  In 1804, the 12^th Amendment changed the voting process to have electors vote separately for President and Vice-President.
2. There were four ways that were suggested to elect President from 1808 to 1846.  In 1808, there was a proposal to choose the President by lot first surfaced, at first the candidates had to come from retiring Senators.  In 1816, the first direct-vote plan was defeated 21 to 12 after being proposed by Senator Abner Lacock.  In 1826, it was said that the President be elected by the majority of the elector vote but none of the four had the majority.  In 1826, Charles Haynes introduced the automatic plan, which meant that who ever received the highest popular vote in that state would get all of that states electoral votes.
3. Five U.S. Presidents who were elected without the majority of the popular vote are John Quincy Adams, J. Buchanan, A. Lincoln, W. Wilson, and R. Nixon.
4. The winner take-all-system states that whoever gets the most popular votes in that one state, gets all of that state’s electoral votes.  It is used in every state except Maine.
5. Electors vote on the first Monday after the second Wednesday in December.  The results are known in January after they are counted.
6. The third party would get an advantage if they substituted a direct vote plan for the Electoral College because it would split up the states Electoral votes based on how many popular votes they received, the third party would then get some votes instead of none.
7. Two arguments for a direct vote system are first it would give advocates of direct elections claim such a system would always ensure that the candidate with the greatest popular vote would win the office of President, and second it would give equal weight to every vote.  Two against a direct vote system are it would encourage minority parties because there would be a greater probability that two major parties wouldn’t receive a majority, and second it would weaken the power of the states and strengthen the national government, that could be good or bad.
8. There are many differences between the district plan, the proportional plan, and the winner-take-all plan.  The winner-take-all plan is for example that California has 40 electoral votes, and the one with the most popular vote would go to that one person.  Under the district plan they would be split based on the subdivision of that state.  The proportional plan would be that if a state has 4 electoral votes and one got 75% of the votes he would get 3 electoral votes.  The other one, which would have 25%, would get 1 electoral vote.
9. In 1969, four points that experts agreed should be included in an ideal plan for electing U.S. Presidents are first the need for a quick decision and clear-cut winner.  Second, the victor should be the people’s choice winner of the most popular votes.  The third is the president-elect should have a mandate to govern, a legitimacy which comes from a good margin of victory.  Fourth, the ideal system should not undermine the two-party system.  All agreed that the method of electing the president holds broad implications for the political system as a whole.
10. Democrats claimed that some of the votes in Florida never had been counted.  They thought that some of them had not been counted because of the “chad,” which is the punch hole that didn’t come off all the way. That meant that the democrats wanted a recount. That is why it took so long in Florida.  The Republicans claimed that the votes were counted two even three time, because they were counted by the computer and then some of them were pulled out and spot checked to see if it was working properly and it wasn’t so some of them got counted again.  I don’t really care about the deal.
11. No, I don’t really know if Florida and the US Supreme Courts politicized their decision; I didn’t pay much attention to it.  No, why would I read about the courts decision on the Internet, I have better things to do.
12. I didn’t really care about the election of 2000, just as long as Clinton got out of there. [Back]