Many people have the dream of wanting to become president at some point in their life. However, it is a challenging commitment to become president because the process has many requirements. The requirements are: being a natural born citizen, minimum age of 35, and a US resident for over 14 years. The first step of the process is defining the Primaries and Caucuses. In a primary and caucus, party members vote for the best presidential candidate who will represent their political party. Then, in a national convention, each party selects the final candidate, and they campaign throughout the country to earn votes of the people from within. Once the national convention comes to an end, general election commences, and people cast their votes for their favored president and vice president. The final step of the voting process is the Electoral College. In an electoral college, each state has electors. Each elector casts a vote and out of 538 votes, the candidate that gets more than half, 270 electoral votes first wins the election; the number of electors each state has depends on the number of representatives in Congress. For centuries, the Electoral College has provided a unification of America. But, these days, modern Americans think this imposed system complements the injustice against their rights in their democratic country.
In the electoral college, each of the states is allotted a number of electoral votes. These votes depend on the number of the state’s congressional members; two for the state’s senators and a variable number for the state’s representatives, a total of 538. As a result, states with a small population have less electors. Because candidates know that larger states have more influence on the results due to their higher electoral votes, they tend not to campaign in small states. Therefore, people of small states won’t vote and will lose interest as they are disconnected from the candidates: they will feel disconnected because candidates don’t bother to campaign in smaller states. The electoral college, which implements a winner take-all nature, a candidate with less popular votes can get elected. This implies that if Candidate A was to win the majority of the accumulated popular votes within the nation, but Candidate B won the majority of the larger states votes, Candidate B would win since larger states have more electoral votes. Due to this systematic problem, this system discourages citizens from smaller states from voting, triggering more people to lose interest in voting during the presidential race.
The electoral college also contradicts democracy. In a democracy, it is everyone’s right to elect their leaders. but in the electoral college, only the big states with greater electoral votes determine the inauguration of the president, not the whole country. In addition, the smaller states are discouraged from voting because of the discrimination against their state. As mentioned previously, it is only strategic for the candidates to commit and devote their time and effort to campaign in big states, where their victory lies. However, they tend to disregard the other interested electorates in smaller states as they purely focus on the electoral votes. The people of the smaller states will know that candidates don’t care about them, and that their votes don’t matter, making them feel like an outcast. If America classifies themselves as a patriotic nation with a true form of democracy, every state should have the same number of electoral votes so all the states’ votes matter and that the united country decides the winner, not by influential states.
In the early 1800’s, before the implementation of the electoral college, each state in America was segregated like an independent country. Furthermore, communication and transportation systems between states complicated the running of presidential campaigns nationally. In order to provide relief for the existent problems, they came up with the electoral college as a solution. In modern times, American citizens have become much more aware and patriotic of their country, which also increased the understanding of political movements and issues. With further interests, people have come to realize the imperfections of the current voting system and are expressing their anger and frustration. People’s understanding of the democratic system is impacting their thoughts, thus increasing their voices to raise the understanding that the democratic system is where people’s opinions matter the most. However, the electoral college is contradicting this definition of democracy and instead putting larger states first and discouraging smaller states to vote, when candidates should care about everyone as a whole. Instead of this unfair system, the US should use a system that is fair and cares about the people’s opinions.
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