Why is there an electoral college in America?

When the nation was founded, there were 13 colonies who all wanted to retain their local power. From day one the question was how to create a type of federal government to unite the colonies and protect themselves as a nation but still maintain the states’ individual powers and rights to enact law. Add to that the component of a president during a time when they all vehemently opposed any form of monarchy or giving too much federal power to one person.

They decided a president was needed but that the STATES would elect the president. The electoral college was not originally designed to protect against the people mindlessly being swayed to favor a tyrant, even though many Americans today are taught that in their middle school classes. That part of the electoral college is certainly there, but it was much more about coming to a system where the states could elect the president by the voice of the people and still be representative of population. For instance, Rhode Island has as much right to elect the president as California, but obviously the number of votes from Rhode Island cannot be equal to California because of the striking difference in populations.

So each state has a certain number of electoral votes depending on its population. Then, each of the counties vote, the votes are counted, and the majority of votes for that state determine who the state votes for in the electoral college. The candidate with the must support from the states is elected president.

One interesting scenario was in 2000 when there were more people in total who voted for Al Gore but (despite the controversies in counting votes) the George W. Bush had more electoral votes. In that situation the Supreme Court quickly sided with the electoral college and not the popular vote: the states had elected their president, regardless of the overall number of total votes.

It allows the states to manage all the voting.

Basically, a state – we’ll pick Vermont – has 3 electoral votes, because its population gives it 1 seat in the House of Representatives and its status as a state gives it 2 seats in the Senate. Exactly how Vermont chooses to apportion those 3 votes is up to the government of Vermont. It’s theoretically possible that Vermont could pass a state law saying that Vermont’s 3 electoral votes go to the candidate of the same party as the sitting governor.

In the early days, when this system was devised, it was done to ensure that the several states still had considerable power. The framers of the Constitution saw that centralized power had good aspects and bad ones from their point of view, and tried to minimize the centralized power in such a way that it enabled the good aspects and put checks on the bad ones. Keeping the states involved as states in the electoral college was one of the ways of accomplishing this.

More recently, one of the major benefits is that it allows the elections to be certified and valid. Suppose that in the 2008 Presidential election, Vermont buys voting machines from a totally incompetent manufacturer, and this isn’t revealed until the night of the election, when Vermont, with a population under a million, reports that 120 million people have voted for the Republican and 135 million people have voted for the Democrat—and worse, as there’s no paper trail, they can’t establish how many people actually voted or who they voted for. If the margin of victory in the national election is under 200,000 votes otherwise, the whole thing would be a disaster under a simple majority system—there’s no way of knowing whether Vermont would sway the election or not. But under the electoral college system, it’s possible to say, well, the Republican has 315 electoral votes, the Democrat has 217, even if the state went strongly for the Democrat, the Republican would still win nationally.

On another level, it uses the two-party system adversarially to minimize voting fraud. Once a party gets to 51% of the vote—enough to cast the whole state’s electoral college votes for that candidate—there’s no point in further cheating. Otherwise, there would be a significant temptation for a party that strongly controls an area (Democrats in Massachusetts, for instance) to conduct widespread vote fraud and inflate the number of votes for their candidate significantly, “cancelling out” votes for their opponents from other areas.

So there are several benefits to doing it this way. Whether they outweigh the benefits of “one man, one vote” approaches is a different question.

In the old days when they didn’t have computers or voting machines it made it easier for the states to submit there votes in a timely fashion

The electoral college was a way for the southern Slave states to expand their influence on the nation. Each slave counted for 3/5th of a person and the calculation of electoral votes was therefore weighted in favor of the slave states. It was a compromise to keep the colonies together. America.

Thanks for your answers

I still can’t see a reason to have the electoral college today, the only benefit seems to be that it is easier to count at a national level

Most of the reasons seem to be that “originally”, or “in the early days” or “when the nation was founded”. The most recent reason was given by cwilbur – to minimise voting fraud. I know that America has a reputation of having dodgy presidential elections, but is it that hard to not have a system open to fraud? Why would Vermont, say, buy voting machines in the first place – doesn’t the normal mark an X in a box system work as well?

our population is hugh counting paper ballots would take forever

@jonno

You have to understand that the idea of the electoral college isn’t something that will either provide benefits or not. This is a fundamental political theory inherent in the system America was built upon: the states elect the president, not a federal tally of votes.

My theory is that Americans’ grounding on the power of the states vs. the federal powers changed dramatically as a result of the Great Depression and FDR’s New Deal. The states couldn’t cure the crisis and the federal govt. stepped in and saved the day. Ever since, Americans have at least put the federal govt. first in their thinking.

The shift in the relative power of the states and the federal government goes back considerably further than that: there was this little dustup in the 1860s to determine whether the federal government was more powerful than the states or vice versa.

As far as voting machines: it’s a techno-fetish thing. Decisions about how to run elections are made at a very local level: often at the city or county level. In 2000, the local boards of elections in Florida made some very stupid decisions that got a lot of national attention, and so there was a knee-jerk reaction. Congress decided that the problem was paper ballots (possibly encouraged by lobbying by Diebold and Siemens and a lack of lobbying on the part of pencil manufacturers) and provided a carrot-and-stick bill to encourage voting boards to modernize, pushing electronic voting machines. A lot of county boards that understand pencil-and-paper voting just fine saw the Florida debacle and decided that they’d go with whatever Congress recommended, because at least that way if there was another debacle they could blame Congress.

The electoral college today still favors certain states over a popular vote system. It also prevents urban areas with large populations from being favored over rural areas. If the country were to switch to a popular vote, then strategically, candidates would give all of their attention to the areas with the greatest population density, and in the media markets that reached the greatest population. Thus, candidates would spend all their time in the New York to ‘Washington metro area, Chicago, LA and a few other urban areas. New Hampshire, Iowa, Wyoming, and other areas that now see campaigns regularly, because their electoral votes are committed in strategically significant primaries and caucuses. So there are advantages other than just placing the power to elect in the states, depending on what state or area you are in.

Another way to look at it: The number of electoral votes is proportionate not only to the population of the state, but also proportionate to the number of Senators and Congressmen from that state. Thus, the constituents of each of those legislators, as represented through the legislator, has roughly the same amount of influence on the presidential election. Since legislators frequently have quite a bit of influence over the voters in their district, and given the way legislation is put together in this country, the electoral system encourages a candidate to spread the wealth equally between legislators. If we went to a popular vote, the legislators in the more populous districts would have more influence and thus receive more pork than legislators in less populous districts in the same state, as it would not be as efficient to campaign in less population dense districts.

Moving to a popular vote would also make it much easier to “buy” votes. Simply propose legislation that would favor the greatest number of people. In many ways we would have a “tyranny of the majority.”

America really doesn’t have that bad of a record when it comes to voting fraud, there’s just been a lot of attention due to the last few elections.

why dont we tell our school children that the popular votes cast by the public are not the votes by which our president is elected. at least i was’nt taught this in school.

You probably were told about it and weren’t paying attention. Wait, I’m being too harsh, I forgot how History/Social Studies have been politicized and stripped from school curricula.