reforms in elections
...so had to deal with the country’s fear of an oppressive ruler as a result of the tyranny imposed upon the colonies by British rule. The founders agreed that the best way to select a president would be to elect responsible trusted people of the government to become apart of the Electoral College. In effect, the President would not be elected by popular vote, but by the votes of the electorates. The electorates are representative of each state. There are a number of electorates per state equal to the amount of persons in both the House of Representatives, and the Senate. The District of Columbia although not a state, also has three votes to cast. The Electoral College was a brilliant 18th century device to solve the problem of electing a president with states ranging in size. Although brilliant in the 18th century, is the Electoral College still efficient in today’s political society? One of the major drawbacks to the Electoral College is the fact that it can at times be very undemocratic. If a candidate wins the votes in certain states, and gets all their electoral votes, it is possible to win the Presidency, without getting the most popular vote. An example would be found in the Benjamin Harrison and Grover Cleveland race for the presidency in 1888. The defeated candidate (Grover Cleveland) polled 5,444,337 popular votes to 5,540,050 for Benjamin Harrison; however, Cleveland received only one hundred and sixty eight electoral votes to Harrison’s two hundred and thirty three. One reason given for this upset is that Democrat Grover Cleveland, ran up huge popular majorities in several of the eighteen States which supported him while the Republican challenger, Benjamin Harrison, won only slender majorities in some of the larger of the twenty States which supported him. Cleveland’s majority of the popular vote throughout the population of the nation did not matter to four hundred and one electors who decided that Harrison should win. On the same note, in 1976, the electoral vote gave Gerald Ford the victory even though Jimmy Carter won the most popular support. Because of cases such as these, there are many theories circulating to fix the college or just completely abolish it. One idea to abolish the Electoral system came from Steven Hill, a writer from the Christian Science Monitor. He believes that the U.S. should incorporate the use of an “instant runoff” system. This system is used in the United Kingdom, Australia, and Ireland. An instant runoff allows voters to rank their first, second, and third choices on the same ballot. By doing this, a voter has allowed the government to use their second and third choices as votes if the party candidates do not meet a required majority for presidency. Another way to solve the problem with the Electoral College is to send percentages of electoral votes, or ignore the winner-take all system. For instance, say that in Florida, who has twenty-five votes, eighty percent of the popular vote supports the democratic nomination, whereas the other twenty percent went for the republican nomination. Then twenty electoral votes would go to the democrat, and five would go to the republican. Another way to solve this problem would be to base electoral votes solely on the population. This could be accomplished in two different ways. The first would be to separate the nation into regions with approximately the same population, and give them each votes. In this, there would be no actual state borders, just a set number of voting regions. The second way to base the election on the ...