The Electoral College is an important and often controversial process by which the United States selects the president every four years. The electoral college, proponents say, makes U.S. presidential elections less contentious by providing a clear ending. When voters go to the polls on Tuesday, they will be choosing which candidate receives their state's electors. Of course. Under the Electoral College system, although smaller states do not have as much influence as places like California, New York, or Texas, their votes still matter because their (at minimum) three electoral votes guarantee at least some representation of their state’s collective will out of the 538 total votes. Most of us know this. Many small states are also considered to be safe for one of the two political parties and are also ... voter turnout does not affect the election results due to entrenched political party domination in most states. The idea that the Electoral College was designed to protect small states and protects them today is a myth worth busting. It is wrong to lump the mathematical bonus small states get from having two Senators with the bonus they get from having extra electoral votes; in the Senate, that bonus has a real, practical effect on government policy; in the Electoral College, it does not. View Homework Help - Voting in America.pdf from HISTORY US GOVERNM at Henry M. Gunn High. The case for a National Popular Vote has nothing to do with balancing out power between big and small states. How are members of parliament chosen in the UK? The Electoral College was created to count slaves as three-fifths human. The candidate who receives a majority of electoral votes (270) wins the Presidency. The Founding Fathers created the Electoral College system as a compromise between having the president elected by Congress and having the president elected by the popular vote of qualified citizens. It’s never been about helping the small states, but helping the red states. Voting In America How does the Electoral College system work? hansel May 14, 2002, 4:51pm #2. Generally, states award all their electoral college votes to whoever won the poll of ordinary voters in the state. Why, then, do small states cling to the idea? 3. This is to be an argument about a specific aspect of the Electoral College system. Since white voters constitute a majority of the electorate, at least for now, that might actually be the easiest road to the presidency for some candidates. by Raffi Piliero. The 2016 election made clear that the Electoral College does not weigh votes from all states equally. These complaints have largely been prompted by the 2000 and 2016 presidential … Based on population, this leaves small states with more electors per resident than big states. The electoral college distorts the popular vote, because small states get more votes than populous states. Almost every close election has been decided by a narrow margin in large states. The electoral college benefits voters in certain swing states, which vary from election to election (for example, Vermont was a swing state in 1992 but is not a swing state now). The State Department said humanitarian assistance remains exempt from the aid suspension. The Electoral College was a compromise. The electoral college gives small states more weight in the political process than their population would otherwise confer. Pro #2: It provides a clean, widely accepted ending to the election (most of the time). The Electoral College is made up of 538 electors who cast votes to decide the President and Vice-President of the United States. The Electoral College is being challenged as an anachronism. A new analysis suggests the power of your vote is closely linked to voter turnout in your state. It's an unfair, undemocratic dinosaur that states will eventually abolish. Trump is … How Does the Electoral College Help Small States? First, I want to make one thing clear: I do NOT want this thread to degenrate into another argument about the year 2000 elections, the hanging chads, etc. It's widely recognized that without the Electoral College, one could win the presidency with a few key states. But the State Department early Friday said that does not mean all the roughly $272 million in security and development assistance will immediately start to flow, and it depends on more recent “developments” — an apparent reference to the deadly conflict in Ethiopia’s Tigray region. How does abolishing the electoral college change anything for Wyoming and Hawaii? I happen to oppose the whole system, and think the President should be elected directly by the people. The Electoral College decreases the advantage a political party or campaign might gain for encouraging voters to turn out, except in those swing states. Even more troubling, though, is that without the Electoral College one could win by just appealing to white voters. Several states have passed legislation to join the compact, but it would come into effect only when participating jurisdictions represent a majority of the Electoral College. Successful candidates usually come from large states. In almost every state, the candidate to gain the highest number of votes will win the electoral vote for that state. Each state has the same number of votes in … The Founders sought something quite different. How states can fix the Electoral College and prevent future Trumps. Presidential candidates pay more attention to larger states. Claim: The Electoral College is supposed protect minority voting interests and prevent special interests. As far as I can tell, none of the delegates to the Constitutional Convention thought that the final version of the Electoral College… Electoral College is a system where every state How does the Electoral College work? The current system does not benefit small-population states, however. So, far from empowering those small states, the Electoral College pretty much insures that Presidential candidates will ignore them. While such states have fewer people per electoral vote than big states, there"s a reason for the conventional wisdom that the 2004 election came down to winning two of the big battlegrounds of Pennsylvania, Ohio and Florida. Here is an explanation of how the British electoral system works. The small states, especially, could not be safe in such a world. The Electoral College is undemocratic? The Electoral College does not help small states Those extra two votes almost never matter. As a plan to elect our next President by popular vote—the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact—progresses toward its goal, proponents of the Electoral College are speaking up in its defense. That's why it works. It gives small states more representation than their population warrants, but still ignores what the minority of people in every state want. “Each voter in a ‘small population’ state casts a larger share of those two electoral votes than does a voter in a ‘larger population’ state,” he said. With the Electoral College, however, electors chosen by the voters of those states do vote 100 percent for whoever wins that state overall, ignoring the votes of millions of citizens who had a different preference. That Presidential candidates will ignore them myth worth busting vote has nothing to with. 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