Should the electoral college be abolished in favor of a national vote

With that in mind I will be going over my opponent"s case/rebuttal and will do my best to refute her points. Con's Contention One: The Electoral College increases deliberative democracy. How completely false! If anything the Electoral College decreases deliberative democracy because it is set up in a way where people have less power than the Government in deciding who is president. I don't understand how the Electoral College "encourages people to be more involved in the political process" if in the Electoral College, they have less power. Con provided no evidence to that statement. Con just placed quotes which could also be applied even more so to a National Vote since in a National Vote, the people would have more power There are two problems with this argument 1) My opponent fails to understand the definition of deliberative. DELIBERATIVE-Relating to or intended for consideration or discussion. [1] All she states is that the electoral college takes power away from the people, she doesn't address the fact the it encourages more informed voters. Therefore since my opponent doesn't address a single one of my points in my first contention you can extend all those arguments. 2) My opponent makes an unsubstantiated claim with no warrant or evidence. She simply makes the automatic assumption that a national vote is better and then uses this assumption to prove her point-clearly a case of circular logic. Clarification- although she doesn't expressly label it as such I will be referring to her arguments about how easy it is to create a national vote as her first contention. National Popular Vote is a simple concept: whoever gets the most total votes of all cast throughout the United States"wins. Now, you might assume that this will never come to pass, in part because it is so hard to amend the constitution and get rid of the Electoral College. In fact, it turns out to be surprisingly easy. My opponent then goes on to give an in depth explanation about how to create a PV (popular vote) without an amendment. (Actually quite interesting I encourage readers to take a look at it) Regardless this is wholly irrelevant to today's debate as my opponent is not required to show how a national vote if feasible only that it is preferable to the Electoral College. Con's Contention Two: The Electoral College protects against fraud. "National Popular Vote has argued that a direct election would reduce the likelihood of a close election and decrease the feasibility of fraud. They contend that the large nationwide pool of 122 million votes would make a close outcome much less likely than it is under the current system, in which the national winner may be determined by an extremely small vote margin in any one of the numerous statewide tallies. " Again I would like to point out that my opponent drops almost my entire second contention addressing neither minority nor majority fraud and instead chooses to merely focus on only my third sub point so you can extend those arguments. But even if you look to her rebuttal of my third sub point you see she takes it completely out of context. She straw man"s me and states that I argue that the Electoral College prevents close elections but that is completely inaccurate. Impact c) Professor Jan Ting explains that under direct vote "if the popular vote should be close "legal battles over counting votes could erupt in "all states where any ballots could be contested. " Abraham Taylor of the Center for Accuracy in Media explains that the benefit of the Electoral College is it "isolates the problem and deals with it on a micro level. Without the present system the problem would [be] magnified dramatically as nationwide recounts would have been required. " Jan Ting explains that the impact is that only the Electoral College prevents dangerous delays in election results. Clearly in arguing that in an event of a close election the Electoral College isolates the problem to a local level. Or makes recounts significantly easier. My opponent fails to address this so you can extend this as well. Con's Contention Three: The Electoral College prevents polarization "Supporters of the compact argue that under the current system, campaign focus " in terms of advertising spending, visits, and addressing of regional or state issues " is largely limited to the few swing states whose electoral outcomes are competitive, with politically "solid" states largely ignored. The maps to the right illustrate the amount spent on advertising and the number of visits to each state, relative to population, by the two major-party candidates in the last stretch of the 2004 presidential campaign. Supporters of the compact contend that a national popular vote would encourage candidates to campaign with equal effort for votes in competitive and non-competitive states alike. " . http://en.wikipedia.org...... So, in a nutshell, the Electoral College already polarizes. A NPV would make it so that every vote counts. "Presidential campaigns ignore 41 states because electoral votes are currently awarded to the candidate who gets the most popular votes within each separate state. Candidates, therefore, ignore states where they are comfortably ahead or hopelessly behind. " . http://www.usnews.com...... In the Mitt Romney and Obama campaigns, they only focused on swing states, which are only nine states. That's about 80 % of Americans ignored. ng States do not conduct even half of the country's wishes. Just because they are at the "political center" doesn't mean that they represent America. That just means that they are politically moderate. What would be the most accurate reflection of what America wants is a popular vote! ( i know this is like a paragraph ahead of the prevous statements so try not to get confused, im just putting it here for convience purposes) My opponent claims that ignoring solid states is not "fair" and that we can't justify a swing state system since swing states don't accurately represent the country's will. Let"s look at the facts in 2012 Ohio a major swing state voted for Obama by a margin of 3%[2] meanwhile if we look at the popular vote what we see is that Obama won by 3.8% points that seems like a pretty accurate reflection of the public's will to me. Now let"s look at how people in the big cities voted. Remember my opponent stated "But there is a much larger population in those areas, which means more Americans. The vote should put these people in importance because most Americans in the country are concentrated in large urban cities. That means that large urban areas are what determines the majority of the public's opinions. " In Cities with population greater than 500k Obama won 69-29 percent [3] or a difference of forty percent to the of the .8% represented by Ohio. I Fail to see how that is fair? In conclusion My opponent barley addresses my case and when she does she simply dismisses it without logical warrant. Furthermore she fails to demonstrate how a national vote will create a more "fair" election while the con gives you clear statistics demonstrating the necessity of the Electoral College. Therefore I urge all of you to vote con in today's debate. 1). https://www.google.co.il... 2). http://www.270towin.com... 3). http://www.wnyc.org...