Dear state senator,

Do you think that we should keep the Electoral College? We should keep the electoral college because the founding fathers established it in the constitution as a compromise between election of the president by a vote in congress and election of the president by a popular vote of qualified citizens. The Electoral College process consists of the selection of the electors, the meeting of the electors where they vote for the president and vice president, and the counting of the electoral votes by congress. Your state's entitled allotment of electors equals the number of members in its Congressional delegation: one for each member in the House of Representatives plus two for your Senators. The electors are generally chosen by the candidate's political party, but state laws vary on how the electors are selected and what their responsibilities are.

You help choose your state's electors when you vote for President because when you vote for your candidate you are actually voting for your candidate's electors. The Certificate of Ascertainment also declares the winning presidential candidate in your state ad shows which electors will represent your state at the meeting of the electors in December of the election year. Your state's Certificates of Ascentainments are sent to the Congress and the National Archives as part of the official records of the presidential election. Abolishing the electoral college! According to a Gallup poll in 2000, taken shortly after Al Gore,Richard Nixon,Jimmy Carter,Bob Dole,the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and the AFL-CIO-thanks to the quirks of the electoral college-won the popular vote but lost the presidency, over 60 percent of voters would prefer a direct election to the kind we have now. Under the Electoral College system, voters vote not for the president, but for a slate of electors, who in turn elect the president.

The single best arguement against the Electoral College is what we might call the disaster factor. Consider that state legislatures are technically responsible for picking electors, and that those electors could always defy the will of the people. In the same vein, "faithless" electors have occasionally refused to vote for their party's candidate and cast a deciding vote for whomever they please. Perhaps most worrying is the prospect of a tie in the electoral vote. In that case, the election would be thrown to the House of Representatives, where state delegations vote on the president.

At the most basic level, the electoral college is unfair to voters. Because of the winner-take-all system in each state, candidates don't spend time in states they know they have no chance of winning, focusing only on the tight races in the "swing" states. It's official: The Electoral College is unfair,outdated, and irrational. The best arguements in favor of it are mostly assertions without much basis in reality. And the arguements against direct elections are spurious at best. It's hard to say this, but Bob Dole was right: Abolish the electoral college! The Electoral College is a widely regarded as an anachronism,a non-democratic method of selecting a president that ought to be [overruled] by declaring the candidate who receives the most popular vots the winner. There are five reasons for retaining the Electoral College. The first reason is certainty of outcome. The second reason is everyone's president. The third reason is swing states. The fourth reason is big states. And the last reason is to avoid run-off elections.

It can be argued that the Electoral College method of selecting the president may turn off potential voters for a candidate who has no hope of carrying their state. But of course no voter's vote swings a national election, and in spite of that, about one-half the eligible American population did vote in election. Voters in presidential elections are people who want to express a political preference rather than people who think that a single vote may decide an election [source 3: In defense of the Electoral College: five reasons to keep our dispised method of choosing president]. That is why we should keep the Electoral College.