by Stephen Pate

Created on: December 11, 2009   Last Updated: December 12, 2009

Should the Electoral College be abolished?  Many people think so.  Many people consider it an outdated limit on direct democracy in the United States.  But if more people realized how it works and why the Founding Fathers inserted it, I think they would be less willing to abolish it.

The Electoral College is a group of electors voted by the people of the states to vote for them in the Presidential-Vice Presidential election.  Each state is allocated a number of electors equal to the number of seats they hold in Congress, two for their Senators and however many for their Representatives.  How these electors are chosen are determined by the state legislatures.

Early in the founding of the United States, the Electoral College was critical to the election of the President.  Transportation and communication was extremely slow compared to how it is now.  Having all of the citizens vote for President and Vice President would have been too unwieldy.  To collect the ballots and carry them to one place to be counted would have caused the political process to be too slow.

They were also afraid that a purely popularly elected executive would be too affected by the changing will of the people.  The Founding Fathers wanted a democracy but were extremely wary of mob rule.  They tended to favor representative democracy over direct democracy.  The Electoral College is an example of this.

Instead, they established an Electoral College.  Rather than vote directly, people would vote for, in a manner determined by the individual state legislatures, electors to represent them in the election of President and Vice President.  This would allow an electoral system that would be more federal in nature than popular. 

Just as the House of Representatives would represent the people and the Senate would represent the states, the Electoral College would be a mixture of these systems.

How this system has evolved over time is that people vote within their state for the Presidential ticket.  Whoever gets the majority of votes in a state gets the total number of electoral votes from that state.  Whichever Presidential candidate gets an absolute majority of the electoral votes, which is 270 out of 535, wins the Presidency.

There are many criticisms of the Electoral College.  The most well-known criticism is that it is a barrier to direct democracy.  The Electoral College system also puts too much focus on swing

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