To Be Popular or Not?

The Constitution is one of the founding documents of the United States, and the steps to electing a new president with the electoral college is found in Article II. According to electoral-vote.com each state gets the same number of electors equal to the number of representatives they have in Congress. Each state chooses their own electors but these electors are the actual people voting for the president. What the general public is voting for   is a slate of electors who have pledged to vote for a certain presidential candidate. Most states today have a "winner-takes-all," system, according to NARA, which means that all of the electoral votes go to the same candidate, the candidate who won the state's popular vote.

The Electoral College is an traditional system that many feel has its advantages and disadvantages when it comes to picking the next president of our country. For example, according to the Chicago Sun Times Blog, some disadvantages are that sometimes the candidate with the most popular votes will not be the winner in the electoral college. George W. Bush in 2000 is a strong example, because he did not win the popular vote, but managed to win the electoral college. Another example of a disadvantage that the electoral college according to How Does the Electoral College Work?, is that the "swing" states receive a larger amount of attention from the candidates, because they need that specific states electoral votes. If the election was based off of popular vote, then more attention will have to be payed to all states, because then each individual vote would count. Lastly the electoral college makes the election difficult for third party candidates because the majority, at least in a winner-takes-all state, has to vote for the third party.

According to Slate, one advantage of the electoral college is the fact that it is able to produce a clear winner. If the electoral college was changed to popular vote, the "what if" possibilities would increase and the entire system would need to be reevaluated. Another advantage of the electoral college, according to keyframe5, is that the smaller, less populated states play a role in the election, and prevent the bigger states such as Texas and California from controlling the election.

picture source: Chicago Sun Times and C-SPAN