by Nick Towers

Created on: April 18, 2010

Since the founding of our nation, the Electoral College has served as the process by which the president has been elected.  Despite the long standing tradition of its use, the system is simply too flawed to continue onward.  Rather, the time has come for it to be replaced by the more democratic method of direct popular vote.

Throughout the great amount of time with which it has been in use, the Electoral College has actually hindered the voice of the American people.  Such instances include the 1824, 1876, and most notably the 2000 election for the presidency.  In these elections, the candidates who received the highest popular vote, and were thus the choices of the American people, found themselves on the losing end. Just look at Al Gore, America’s real choice for president in 2000, who had over 500,000 votes more than George W. Bush, yet still got edged out.  As America was founded upon the principle of rule by the people, injustices such as these go against everything the nation stands for, and thus the Electoral College is un-American.

One reason, possibly the major reason why the Electoral College was put in place, is that at the time of America’s founding, citizens bore more loyalty to their individual states than to the nation as a whole. The instilling of the Electoral College was primarily a demand of the Southern, slave states, who due to their small populations desired a way to include their slaves in the voting process. They approved of this method because it allowed 3/5 of their slaves to be counted in the population, adding to their electoral vote number.  This being taken into account, the Electoral College was implemented in order to support slavery, possibly the darkest blemish on America’s history.  While the Electoral College served this purpose in the early days of the nation, now, in a post- Civil War United States, few, if any citizens have more loyalty to their state than to the country as a whole. This being the case, the Electoral College no longer serves the purpose of appeasing the states.

Possibly the greatest reason why the Electoral College should be done away with is that it takes away incentive to vote.  Such incentive is taken away due to the fact that by process of the Electoral College, only votes on the winning side are counted, only the winning side getting electoral votes.  Since many states are inherently right-wing or left-wing, those who bear political

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