Should Electoral College Be Abolished

¶ … election of George W. Bush over Al Gore in 2000, who won the electoral vote in spite of losing the popular vote, rekindled a controversy that has been going on for some time now: has the Electoral College mechanism lived its time?

According to the United States constitution, each state is entitled to choose its electors for president and vice-president as a number equal to the total number of representatives and senators the respective state has. The choosing itself is left to the states, by direct popular vote in each state. If the voting for President is a tie, the Constitution specified that this would be decided upon in the House of Representatives. In the initial way the Electoral College was designed by the founding fathers, the winner of the majority of electoral votes would win the election and become president, while the runner-up would become Vice-President. Of course, it is necessary to look at things as they were in the times the founding fathers deigned the mechanisms: no political parties, for instance.

One of the negative implications of the Electoral College, as pointed out by many theoreticians, is the "winner take all" method, according to which the candidate that has won most number of votes in one state will win the entire number of electoral votes the respective state has. This would mean, in their opinion, that many individual votes would have simply been "wasted"

. Their line of argumentation is quite simple and is exemplified by the Bush-Gore election of 2000. In this case, if we consider, for example, the state of Texas, the 2.5 million votes that went to Al Gore in this case were wasted because they had no significance on the overall result, as all electoral votes went to George W. Bush, who had won the state.

The supporters of the popular vote claim that the popular vote is "the more legitimate democratic alternative"

. The case where the popular vote result did not correspond with the electoral vote occurred only on three occasions in history, enough, however, to give way to discussions about the democratic legitimacy. The democratic alternative argument seems more than reasonable. Indeed, a president democratically elected is supposed to represent the interest of the majority of the population. In the case when he does not represent the majority, we should, theoretically, be in a democracy dilemma.

Despite all the faults and negative aspects often associated with the Electoral College, many of which have been previously presented, there are numerous voices that turn to its support. One of the arguments in this sense comes from Polsby and Wildavsky, who argue that "there is no serious reason to quarrel with the major features of the present system, since in our form of government 'majority rule' does not operate in a vacuum but within a system of 'checks and balances

." The idea behind this statement relies on the fact, similarly pointed out by other theoreticians, that the president elected by electoral vote is not necessarily a 'wrong president', mainly because the electors have a similar role the Senate has when passing laws. The popular power is passed on to the electors in a similar way.

Close to this idea is the idea of legitimacy. Assuming that the electoral vote elected a 'wrong president', in what way would this president be less legitimate than a president elected by popular vote? The example of George W. Bush is quite evident. Even if he failed to win the popular vote in 2000, he overwhelmingly did so in 2004, which showed that the majority of the American citizens agreed with his policies over the previous four-year term.

A third argument refers to the "to the function played by the Electoral College, particularly after a close election"