The Score on The Electoral College [Last Modified on 2006.12.03]
The electoral college was established for various reasons, nearly all of which are now obsolete. This renders the electoral college obsolete, and it should therefore be abolished. The fact that the electoral college is, in most cases, under no obligation to vote as their constituents vote is most egregious, and obfuscates the electoral process by producing results which go against what the people of our nation have voted for.
There are numerous views on why the electoral college was created by the Constitutional Convention in the first place. These include: small states' rights; the inability to campaign nationally (meaning that each state would wind up casting most of its votes for a local candidate without any real knowledge of others); Southern favoritism (since slaves, counting as 3/5 of a person, gave the south more influence without taking slaves' views into account); a belief in the general public's lack of competence to make an intelligent, informed vote (the only reason that remains somewhat valid to this day); and the lack of political parties (meaning that each candidate would be able to campaign on local issues only since that's where their vote would come from, instead of a party platform which was well known nationally). The majority of these reasons are outdated today.
In its initial implementation, the Electoral College functioned without any popular vote behind it. Indeed, the Electors themselves simply cast two votes based on their own personal preference, both for President, with the winner taking that office and the runner-up becoming Vice President. After four elections, when political parties had arisen, the 12th Amendment was passed which had the Electors cast one vote for President and a separate vote for Vice President. However, the current system in which the popular vote of a given state determines how that state's Electors cast their votes is nowhere to be found in federal law. In fact, only about half of the states have any rules governing how their electors must cast their votes — the rest are not in any way bound to cast their electoral votes in relation to how the popular vote is cast.
Public opinion has long favored a direct popular vote, but to date, nothing has been changed. Over the past century, there have been no less than 587 constitutional amendments proposed to abolish or materially change the Electoral College system; all of them have failed.
One example of the failure of this system was the 2000 election, in which Al Gore won the popular vote by approximately 500,000 votes, but lost the election. An example of a near failure of even more extreme impact was the 2004 election — in which, if John Kerry had received approximately 130,000 more popular votes in Ohio, he would have won the state's electoral votes and thereby won the election, even though he still would have lost to Bush in the popular vote by approximately 3 million votes. Another near failure of the Electoral College took place in 1968 when presidential candidate George Wallace was nearly in a position to trade southern electoral votes to Nixon or Humphrey in return for turning a blind eye to segregation in the south.
At best, the electoral college is not needed anymore since the reasons for its creation are now outdated. At worst, it hangs over each election — threatening to cause a popular winner to lose (as in 2000, and almost in 2004), making it impossible for third party candidates to win (as in every recent election), and leaving open the possibility of corruption and vote buying that cannot be legally challenged (since electors in a given state — a state that, like nearly half of those in our country, does not possess any laws governing how electors must cast their votes — may decide to vote for a candidate who loses the popular vote by any margin, and there would likely be no legal recourse).