Impromptu, with rebuttal

These are certainly three very interesting topics, and though I'm very tempted by the second one, I'll go PRO on the motion that: The President of the United States should be elected by popular vote. Under this system, every four years, every U.S. citizen would vote for who they wanted to be President. All of the votes would be added, and the person with the most number of votes wins, subject to any recounts if the vote is close. In the extremely unlikely event of a tie, a run-off election would be held, maybe a week or two later. No electoral college, no deciding vote in the House of Representatives (like in 1824 [1]) - just one popular vote, which is the ultimate decider. In presenting my case, I will divide it into two sections: one, on the fairness of the system of election by popular vote; and the other, on the unfairness of the electoral college system. This is despite there being significant cross-over between the two - even so, I have split it up as I have both to make the text easier to read, and also to separate two separate, if interlinked, strands of argumentation. === FAIRNESS OF ELECTION BY POPULAR VOTE === Whichever state the President comes from, he (or, maybe not too far into the future, she) represents the whole of the United States. He/she makes decisions that affects every US citizen, both domestically through federal law and internationally through America's reputation abroad. As such, everyone eligible to vote in the country should have an equal influence in who becomes the President as anyone else. This clearly happens when the popular vote is taken into consideration - take the comparable results of New Mexico and Florida in the 2000 Presidential election as an example. In Florida, there were 537 votes between Bush and Gore [2], with 27 electoral votes going to the winner [3]. In New Mexico, the result was closer, with 366 votes being the difference between Gore and Bush - however, only 5 electoral votes went to the winner in this state. Under the current system of choosing the people who will ultimately elect the President by state electoral votes, therefore, 269 people in Florida (the amount of people who would have needed to switch from Bush to Gore, in order for Gore to win) had a bigger influence on who became the President with their 27 electoral votes than did 184 people in New Mexico (the relevant amount, vice versa, in New Mexico), with their 5 electoral votes. If it had been done by popular vote alone, then this big disparity would clearly not exist - indeed, given that Gore won the popular vote by over half-a-million votes [4], neither state would have had a bigger influence than the other, and Bush would have needed to garner support from more than just several thousand people in a few swing states in order to win. Why is it the case that Floridians are presumed to have a larger stake in the outcome of who becomes President than do New Mexicans? Granted, the number of electoral votes are allocated indirectly according to state size and population, but why does this matter? As mentioned earlier, the President of the U.S. is not any more the President of Florida than he/she is the President of New Mexico. Responsibilities given to the Office of President affects everyone equally - influencing the creation of federal laws (and being able to veto them), appointing judges to the Supreme Court, advancing and forming America's reputation on the world stage, and so on. All of these are things that affect everyone on equal lines, beyond state boundaries. So why is it that the size of the state in which an American lives has an impact on their influence on this election? How can such a system possibly be fair? === UNFAIRNESS OF ELECTION BY ELECTORAL COLLEGE === Two words: Al Gore. Seriously though, in addition to the unfairness already mentioned, unfairness also creeps into Presidential elections every time the electoral college result conflicts with the popular vote. Many times the electoral college and the popular vote give the same result, as for example in 2008 when Barack Obama won both the votes [5] - in these cases, given that there is no difference and the arguments made in the previous section, there's no reason why the popular vote couldn't have been used as the decider. But 4 times in electoral history, there has been a disparity between the two. [6] That may not seem like a lot, but when you consider that the result affects who leads the country for 4 years - and in 2000, gave Bush the incumbency advantage that the Republicans would not otherwise have had that helped him retain power for another 4 years - this disparity becomes all the more pressing and important. Two of the results spring out - firstly, we have the half-a-million votes extra that Gore received, and yet it was a mere 537 extra votes in Florida [2] that famously gave the result to Bush. If the election had been decided by the popular vote, the controversy over the hanging chads, et al., wouldn't have mattered one jot - the Presidency would have gone to Gore by a mile. The second result that springs out in particular is 1824, when John Quincy Adams became President. As it turns out, he won neither the popular vote nor the electoral college vote. It is only because his main opponent, Jackson, didn't have a majority of electoral college votes - even though he was the unequivocal winner of the popular vote - that Adams ended up winning, given that the State delegations in the House of Representatives voted in his favour. [1] Here, the unfairness is different from that seen in 2000 - in that the same person got more popular votes and electoral college votes - but it is still clearly unfair, in that that person did not end up being elected President. The system must surely change. === CONCLUSION === The Office of President of the United States is a federal responsibility, and the holder of that office has control over matters that affects every U.S. citizen equally. A system, therefore, that allocates different states a greater say in accordance to their size is fundamentally unfair and should not be in place. Furthermore, it is easy to see how the electoral college system can skew the result, such that the person who commanded the support a majority of U.S. citizens did not become President. This happened most recently, and famously, in 2000 when Bush Jnr. was elected President despite having half-a-million fewer votes than his nearest rival, Gore. This office is so important, and the holder of the office so powerful, that we cannot allow such an unfair system to continue. In many elections, yes, the two systems under question give the same result. In those instances, if they both give the same result, then there seems to be no reason not to change it. But given the importance of these elections, the unfairness of the electoral college system, and the skewed results that it is liable to give, there are very good reasons why we should change it. The U.S. President must be elected by popular vote, not by the electoral college. Sources: [1] http://www.archives.gov... [2] http://www.fec.gov... [3] http://en.wikipedia.org...(United_States) [for some reason, debate.org doesn't like brackets in URLs - but I'm sure you all know which page I mean anyway :-)] [4] http://www.archives.gov... [5] http://www.archives.gov... [6] http://www.archives.gov...