What is the point of the electoral college?

Question

i get how it works, but i don't understand why it is in place... shouldn't the country just get to vote who we want to be president and by individual votes?

Answer 1

The same as having a Senate and House of Representatives to equalize the States.  It is actually the States that vote for the President and we the people in the States decide how our State is going to vote.

Answer 2

so we dont have nut jobs like gore as president

Answer 3

It was a good idea at the time, but now it is obsolete.

Answer 4

The electoral college is designed to give smaller states and rural states stronger influence than they would normally have in presidential elections.  An election based on popular vote would enable candidates to focus on the larger cities and states and completely ignore the others.

Answer 5

The electoral college was put in place partially to keep the common man voting directly for president since some founding fathers did not feel that farmers were educated enough to select a president.  The common male voter of the day would select representitives to state legislatures and other states offices.  Those representitives would then select the electors for their state to attend the electoral college.  The members of the college would vote on behalf of their states, rather than allowing popular vote to select the president.  Part of the design was to allow for a republic form of government; in other words, an indirect representation of people in the government.

Answer 6

It might help to think of it this way. Imagine if we were going to elect a "President of Earth". The initial proposal might be simply to have everybody in the world have one vote. The problem with this is that basically China would get to decide who our president was every time. Okay, so we make it so every nation gets one vote and people in each nation vote separately on who that vote will be for. Of course, this makes it so that an individual in Luxemborg has *way* more influence than a single person in, say, India. We probably would end up with some sort of compromise between the two extremes, where China and India get more say than El Salvador and Burkina Faso, but not so much more that the small nations have no influence at all.

This was pretty much what the thinking was when the Electoral College was established. The reason it seems so much more objectionable to us now then it did to people then is that in 1789, people thought of themselves as citizens of their state much more than of the United States. A man from Philadelphia would identify himself as a "Pennsylvanian", not an "American". So the Electoral College made sense for the same reasons I outline above. We don't really think of ourselves as state citizens anymore, so it seems strange that we're not just having one national election.

Personally, I can see both sides of the argument on whether to retain the Electoral College; it basically depends on how much you like Federalism. What I don't understand, however, is why people who want to abolish the Electoral College don't also want to abolish the Senate. Surely the same objection to disproportionate representation applies there as well...

Answer 7

It was originally instituted for a couple of reasons.

First, to facilitate the election process.  Travel and communications a couple of hundred years ago were more time-consuming than today.

Second, it was part of a compromise to ensure that the smaller states were not just ignored, much the same way the Senate came about.

While the first reason is no longer valid in today's world, many consider the second to still be a good reason.  What it boils down to, though, is that's the way the Constitution says to do it and it would require an amendment to change.