Dear Senate,

It's offical, The Electoral College is unfair, outdated, and irrational. The best arguments in favor of it are mostly assertions without much basis in reality. And the arguments against direct elections are spurious at best. It's really hard to say this, but Bob Dole was right: "Abolish the Electoral College."

The Electoral College is a non-democraic method of selectiong a president that will be by declaring the candidate who receives the most popular votes the winner. According the the "In Defense of the Electoral College" article," the Elecoral College method is not democraic in a modern sense.....it is the electors who elect the president not the people." So bascially we are voting for the electors and we keep our finger crossed that they vote for the president we want. It is unpractical that the people vote for the president they would like to govern their counrty and then the opposite party wins. According to a Gallup poll in 2000, taken shortly ater Al Gore, 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 elecion to the kind we have now. The last election was yet another close one thanks to the Electoral College, which the popular vote winner lost the presidency. After all of this the Electoral College still has its defenders...

At the most basic level, the Electoral College is unfair to voters, because of the winner-take-all system in each state. Candidates that don't spend time in states they know they have no chance of winning, focusing only on the tight races in the "swing" states.  During the 2000 campaign, seventeen states didn't see the candidates at all, including Rhode Island and South Carolina, and voters in 25 of the largest media markets didn't get to see a single campaign ad.(Source 2)

The Elector Voters in toss up states are more likely to pay close attention to the campaign- to really listen to the competing candidates knowing that they are going to decide the election. But other types of voters just like the "play around" according to article two.

The Electoral College restores some of the weight in the political balance that large states lose by virtue of the mal-apporionment of the Senate decreed in the Constitution but is this system really the most logical one to use?(Source 3). True this system has worked for many years but it is time for a change. People are starting to think it is unfair and really poinless to even vote when the president they want will possibly not win anyway.

The single best argument against the Electoral College is what we might call the disater factor.( Source 1) The American people should consider themselves lucky that the 2000 fiasco was the biggest election crisis in a century; the system allows for much worse. Consider the state legislatures are technically responsible for picking electors, and that those electors could always defy the will of the people. (Source 2) Back in 1960, segregationists in the Louisiana legislature nearly succeeded in replacing the Democratic electors who would oppose John F. Kennedy. So that popular vote would not have gone to Kennedy. (Source 3) 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.

Under the Electoral College system, voters vote not for the president, but for a slate of electors, who in turn elect the president. There are some reasons for retaining the Electoral College but it still lacks democratic pediree. And the people should have the right to vote on the president they think is the best for

OUR

country. After all its,"We the people" not," We the electors".

Sincerley,

Highschool Student