The U.S. Electoral College: How It Works and Why It Falls Short
This paper examines the United States Electoral College system, tracing its constitutional origins and explaining its mechanics — including the 538-elector framework and the 270-vote threshold required to win the presidency. It compares the Electoral College to proportional representation and mixed proportional representation systems used in many Western democracies, highlighting key structural differences. The paper then contrasts these systems, noting that the winner-take-all nature of the Electoral College can produce a president who lost the popular vote. The paper concludes with an argument that the Electoral College is fundamentally undemocratic because it renders millions of votes effectively meaningless, and calls for its replacement with a system that more accurately reflects the will of all American voters.
- Introduction: Overview of the paper's four objectives
- How the Electoral College Works: Constitutional origins and mechanics of the Electoral College
- Comparing Voting Systems Around the World: Proportional and mixed proportional systems as alternatives
- Contrasting the Electoral College with Alternative Systems: Winner-take-all versus proportional vote allocation
- Is the Electoral College Democratic?: Normative argument that the system suppresses voter voice
- Conclusion: Summary and call for electoral reform
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What makes this paper effective
- The paper maintains a clear four-part structure — description, comparison, contrast, and opinion — that gives readers a logical progression from factual background to evaluative argument.
- It grounds claims in authoritative sources, including the U.S. National Archives, Black's Law Dictionary, and peer-reviewed research, lending credibility to both the descriptive and argumentative sections.
- The opinion section is explicitly framed as such, distinguishing analysis from argument and demonstrating intellectual honesty about the paper's normative stance.
Key academic technique demonstrated
The paper demonstrates effective use of definition-based argumentation: by anchoring the concept of "democracy" in a formal legal definition, the author constructs a measurable standard against which the Electoral College can be evaluated. This moves the argument beyond opinion into a logically testable claim — that the Electoral College fails to meet democracy's own definitional criteria.
Structure breakdown
The paper opens with a brief introduction that maps its four objectives. Each subsequent section addresses one objective in turn: explaining the Electoral College, comparing it to global alternatives, contrasting structural differences, and rendering a normative judgment. The conclusion synthesizes these threads and ends with a policy recommendation, giving the paper a satisfying argumentative arc from description to prescription.
Introduction
This paper has four objectives: (1) to describe the voting system in the United States and explain how it works; (2) to compare the American electoral system with other types of voting systems; (3) to contrast the American electoral system with those other systems; and (4) to offer an opinion as to which type of electoral system is the most democratic. The paper concludes with a summary of significant findings concerning the voting system in the United States.
How the Electoral College Works
The voting system used in the United States to elect the president and vice president is known as the "Electoral College," which was created by the Founders as a compromise between having the U.S. Congress elect the president and vice president and holding a direct popular vote of qualified citizens. According to the legal definition provided by Black's Law Dictionary, the electoral college is "the college or body of electors of a state chosen to elect the president and vice president; also, the whole body of such electors, composed of the electoral colleges of the several states" (p. 520).
Interestingly, although the origins of the Electoral College are found in the Constitution, the term itself does not appear there. Federal archivists report that "the Electoral College is the process by which the United States elects the President, even though that term does not appear in the U.S. Constitution. In this process, the States (which includes the District of Columbia just for this process) elect the President and Vice President" (Electoral College, 2023, para. 2). While the phrase "electoral college" is absent from the Constitution, the document does refer to electors in Article II and the 12th Amendment (Electoral College History, 2023). The Electoral College is currently comprised of 538 electors — determined in part by state population levels, with each state receiving one electoral vote for each member of the House of Representatives and one each for both senators. A total of 270 electoral votes is required to win the presidency (What is the Electoral College?, 2023).
Comparing Voting Systems Around the World
The modern American electoral system is the legacy of debates during the slave era over the proper representation of individuals from each state in selecting the nation's executives. Today, many other countries use proportional representation and mixed proportional representation, both of which are regarded as producing more democratic election results. Proportional representation is a popular voting system in Western democracies in which legislators are elected in multi-member districts and the number of seats a party wins is proportional to its share of the vote. At present, proportional representation is used in 21 out of 28 Western European countries, including Austria, Germany, and Spain (Proportional representation voting systems, 2023).
Mixed proportional representation electoral systems blend the plurality or majority system with proportional representation. In this alternative, half of the legislature's members are elected in single-member district plurality contests while the other half is selected through a party-list vote to ensure proportional representation. Proponents of the mixed proportional voting system argue that it provides the best features of other voting systems (George, 2019). Both proportional representation and mixed proportional representation offer a viable alternative to America's Electoral College, as discussed further below.
Conclusion
The research was consistent in showing that the Electoral College voting system used in the United States today to elect the president and vice president provides smaller states with disproportionate political clout that is inherently undemocratic. Despite calls to replace the Electoral College with a direct presidential election based on the total popular vote, the system will likely remain in place unless and until the body politic recognizes that many of its votes for president do not truly count — as was the case in 2016 and on several prior occasions. It is long past time for this antiquated, cumbersome, and profoundly unfair voting system to be replaced with an alternative that more directly reflects the will of the American people.
References
Black's Law Dictionary. (1999). St. Paul, MN: West Publishing Company.
Electoral College. (2023). U.S. National Archives. Retrieved from https://www.archives.gov/electoral-college
Electoral College History. (2023). U.S. National Archives. Retrieved from https://www.archives.gov/electoral-college/history#whyec
George, J. (2019, May). Mixed member proportional system: An alternative electoral system to Indian democracy. Online International Interdisciplinary Research Journal, 9(2), 126–131.
Proportional representation voting systems. (2023). Fair Vote. Retrieved from https://fairvote.org/archives/proportional-representation-voting-systems/
Revesz, R. (2016, November 16). Five presidential nominees who won popular vote but lost the election. The Independent. Retrieved from https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/popular-vote-electoral-college-five-presidential-nominees-hillary-clinton-al-gore-a7420971.html
What is the Electoral College? (2023). U.S. National Archives. Retrieved from https://www.archives.gov/electoral-college/about
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