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What is the Electoral College?

Should We Still Use an Electoral College?

Name, Title

Yes!!

[T]he existence of the Electoral College creates

some important "requirements" for presidential candidates. As we have just seen, it forces them to attend to the voters in small states. It leads them to campaign everywhere, not just through television, but in person. To be sure, the states with the largest number of electoral votes — California, New York, Texas and, yes, Florida — sometimes get the lion's share of attention, but not this year. Battleground states, many of them small like Iowa and Oregon, received more attention just for having an electorate that had not made up its mind. Were elections decided by popular vote alone, candidates would be inclined to concentrate their efforts in the most populous states and cities.  Voters in rural areas could forget the candidates' concern with farm issues.  States with small populations such as Rhode Island or Delaware would disappear into their larger neighbors during presidential campaigns, and distant places such as Hawaii and Alaska could forget about ever seeing presidential campaigners.

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Dr. James M. Banner, read more here!

No!!

“The Electoral College, which is written into the Constitution, is more than just a vestige of the founding era; it is a living symbol of America’s original sin. When slavery was the law of the land, a direct popular vote would have disadvantaged the Southern states, with their large disenfranchised populations. Counting those men and women as three-fifths of a white person, as the Constitution originally did, gave the slave states more electoral votes. Today the college, which allocates electors based on each state’s representation in Congress, tips the scales in favor of smaller states; a Wyoming resident’s vote counts 3.6 times as much as a Californian’s. And because almost all states use a winner-take-all system, the election ends up being fought in just a dozen or so “battleground” states, leaving tens of millions of Americans on the sidelines.”

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The New York Times Editorial Board, read more here!

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