"Does Electoral College Work?"

Today I am going to write about how electoral colleges work. The Electrical College is a process, not a place. The founding fathers established it in the Constitution as a compromise between election of a President by a vote in Congress and election of the President by a popular vote of qualified citizens. Do you want to learn more? Then just keep on reading and I will tell you more.

The Electoral College process consists of the selection of the electors, the meeting of the electors where they vote for President and Vice President, and the counting of the electoral votes by Congress. Our state's entitled allotmeant of electors equals the number of members in its Congressional delegation: one for each member in the House of Representatives plus two for our Senators.

Each candidate running for President in our state has his or her own group of electors. The electors are generally chosen by the candidiate's political party, but state laws vary on how the electors are selected and what their responsibilities are. Most states have a "Winner-take-all

" system that awards al electors to the winning presidential candidate. However, Maine and Nebraska each have a variation of "proportional representation."

What have Richard Nixon, Jimmy Carter, Bob Dole, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and the AFL-CIO all, in their time, agreed on? Answer: Abolishing the electoral college! They're not alone; according to a Gallup poll in 2000, taken shortly after 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 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. Sometimes state conventions, sometimes the state party's central commitee, sometimes the Presidential candidates themselves. The single best argument against the electoral college is what they might call the disaster factor. Perhaps most worrying is the prospct of a tie in the electoral vote. At the most basic level, the electoral college is unfair to voters.

The Electoral College is widely regarded as an anarchronism, a non-democratic method of selecting a President and ought to be [overruled] by declaring the candidate who recieves the most popular votes the winner. The advocates of this position are correct in arguing that the Electoral College method is not democratic in a modern sense. It is the electors who elect the the President, nort the people. When you vote for a Presidential candidate you're actually voting for a slate of electors. Yet this has happened very rarely. It happend in 2000, when Gore had more popular votes yet fewer electoral votes, but that was the first time since 1888. There are 5

reasons for retaining the Electoral College despite its lack of Democratic pedigree

Certainty of Outcome

Everyone's President

Swing States

Big Sates

Avoid Run-Off Elections