Dear State Senator,

Many people today have very strong oppinions on why or why not we should keep the Electoral College. I am writing to you today to tell you some of the reasons why the Electoral College should not be used anymore.

The Electoral College, like most things, has room for error. However this is the type of error that you want to try as hard as possible to avoid. Any error here could lead to the false election of a President and Vice President. Now maybe the falsely elected President and Vice President have some wonderful ideas on how to help our country as a whole, but in carrying out their wonderful sounding plans, may have to hurt or cut back other resources to do so which could hurt us. This is just one example of how the Electoral College can go wrong.

The Electoral College has been used for many years and has become an anachronism. We consider ourselves a democracy yet we use a non-democratic method of selecting a president. With the Electoral College comes the certanty of outcome. The winning candidate's share of his/her Electoral College usually exceeds the share of the popular vote. The Electoral College requires the president to be a candidate with a trans-regional appeal. Any candidate with regional appeal is very unlikely to be succeful as president. The residents of the other regions will most likely feel disenfranchised and that this candidate is not really their president. The swing states tend to pay closer attention to the campaigns and to really listen to what the competeing candidates have to say. The residents in the swing states tend to be the most thoughtful voters. In the Electoral College, they try to restore a political balance between the large and the small states. With the Electoral College you avoid the problem of an election where no candidate recieves a majority vote which would complicate the presedential election process.

All of these reasons are great and everything but there is always going to be a flaw in the system. Some believe that is is the people who vote in the presidents, however, all we are doing is electing the slate of electors who are are the real people who elect the president. In the Electoral College there is a disaster factor. The electors chosen could always defy the will of the people. These electors can be anyone who does not hold public office. Voters cannot always control who their electors vote for and some voters get confused about the electors and vote for the wrong candidate.

The most worrying part though is the prospect of a tie in the electoral vote. If a tie were to happen, the election would be thrown off to the House of Representatives, where the state delegations would vote on the president. Due to the fact that each state casts only one vote, one single representative from Wyoming, representing 500,000 voters, would have just as much say as the 55 representatives from California, who are representing 35 million voters. The House's selection can hardly be expected to  refelct the will of the peple in the states. The elections can be only a few swing voters away from a catastrophe.

The Electoral College is unfair to the voters in its most basic level. Due to the winner-take-all system that is in place in each state, the candidates don't spend as much time if any at all in the states they know they have no chance of winning, and spend most of if not all of their time on the tight races in the 'swing' states.

Like everything it would take some timw to get used to the changes and I understand that. I also understand that election by popular vote has its flaws as well. It is time to change from an outdates, irrational, and unfair method. Thank you for your time and consideration about this. I hope you consider changing from the Electoral College to election by popular vote.

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