preview

Should Electoral College Be Abolished

Decent Essays

The founding fathers created the Electoral College as a compromise for the Constitutional Convention. Since the delegates could not agree on a solution for the problem of creating a system to elect the President, it was given to the Committee of Eleven on Postponed Matters. Ultimately, that committee decided to create the Electoral College. The first system consisted of electors which each had two votes for president. Whoever obtained the most votes would become president, and the person who received the second most amount of votes In order to compromise for the best solution possible, they added a limitation that electors could not cast votes for two candidates from their own state.They justified this restriction for three reasons. One reason the committee chose to use the Electoral College was the electorate system promotes federalism or a system of government where the individual states share power with the central state. One example of a federalist system is the United States. The United States’s central government sets laws for the whole country, but each individual state can make their own …show more content…

One change was after the election of 1800. Two of the candidates, Thomas Jefferson and Aaron Burr, had both accumulated the most amount of votes, so, consequently, the vote went to the House of Representatives. Untimely, Jefferson won, and this victory prompted the Twelfth Amendment.( Larson 29) Congress wrote in the Twelfth Amendment ”The Electors shall meet in their respective states, and vote by ballot for President and Vice President, one of whom, at least, shall not be an inhabitant of the same state with themselves...” The text outlines the changes to the Electoral College, which include that there is a difference between the vote President and Vice President. Moreover, it says that electors cannot cast both of their votes for people who are residents of their own

Get Access