The presidential election is the United States biggest and most important elections. Every four years we put a new leader into office by everyone going to their local voting booth and checking off a box for their preferred candidate, but what most Americans don’t realise is that they are not actually voting for one of the candidates, for example in The U.S’s previous election Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump they are voting for a side in the Electoral College a group of electors who have pledged to a certain side and then they vote for a candidate and the side with the most electoral votes from each state wins all the votes from that state and if a candidate gets 270 votes they win the election. This middle man in the election has caused a lot of trouble in the 2000 election and in the 2016 election and now the public is asking the question has the Electoral College outlasted its stay or is it relevant in our changing times.In the 2016 election the candidate that won the election did not win the popular vote, something that has only happened one other time in The United States’s history. So people are finally noticing the middle man in the election process. Newsmax has listed pros and cons of this process and they mention that the process “dissuades people from voting” and makes the public feel as if “their vote does not matter” but this is not true, the election process is just so complicated that people don’t understand it and feel like their say is worthless.
On the other hand a positive of the Electoral College is that it gives more power to the states. And allows the smaller states to have a greater say in the election. But really the public wants the election to be on their level, from people to president, not people to state to president. And maybe the Electoral College was made in an attempt to protect the American people from mob mentality, but would that not take away from our freedom of speech? The whole issue is complicated and I believe that it would be best if we abolished the Electoral College to simplify the election process.
The reason I say this is because would it not be rationally better to make sure that all American citizens have the chance to really know how much their vote is worth rather than the government attempting to protect them from a mob mentality. Our society should teardown what we know about voting and start again with something that will work well in our modern age.
21st Century Citizenship 