Why The Electoral College Is Wrong

The United States always claims that we are living in a democracy, but do we really? For centuries, the Electoral College has been selecting our presidents rather than the voters of the United States. The Electoral College was put in place to compromise the congressional and popular votes during a presidential election. What’s the compromise when only the congressional votes count? Voters from each state elect a person to go vote for them, but some electors can still vote whichever way they please and there is nothing that we can do about it. In Robert Speel’s article titled “ These 3 Common Arguments For Preserving the Electoral College Are Wrong,” published by Time Magazine, Speel talks about the common arguments people make to why the Electoral
The first flawed argument Speel mentions was that the electors filter the passions of the people. His reason to why the argument is flawed is that electors don’t always vote in favor of the people. To complete the warrant he provides statistical evidence, such as “one Gore elector....cast a blank ballot in 2000,”(Speel) and a “Kerry elector...in 2004 voted for vice presidential candidate John Edwards for both president and vice president.” (Speel) Even though there are only a few electors that make mistakes, it can still make a big impact on the direction of the election. For example, in the 2016 election most Republicans were not big Trump supporters, but when voting they were required by their state law to keep their party pledges. Speel stated that the Republican electors could have voted for Paul Ryan to stop Trump from gaining the majority and that would have left the decision to the U.S. House of Representatives. Here Speel is stating that most electors when voting feel obliged to stay loyal to their party even though they and the people they represent don’t like the candidate in of their party. The next argument that Speel states is flawed is the thought that rural areas would get ignored if we didn’t have an Electoral College. His reason to why the argument is flawed is that the Electoral College actually “causes candidates to
The use of logos was found throughout the whole article as he presents many statistical examples to support his argument. For example, Speel was talking about the drastic differences between popular votes and electoral votes; he gives an example about how Donald Trump won Pennsylvania and Florida with about 200,000 votes and earned 49 electoral votes. Meanwhile, Hillary Clinton won Massachusetts by almost a million votes but earned only 11 electoral votes (Speel). Here, Speel is trying to expose one of the many flaws of the Electoral College by showing that it does not make sense that a candidate can beat their opponent by more than 800,000 votes in one state and still not get close to half the amount of electoral votes that their opponent got. Although the article is mainly full of logos, Speel was still able to insert some ethos and pathos. In the beginning of the article, Speel talks about Hillary Clinton’s promise about abolishing the Electoral college when she took office as the New York Senator. He next states that “She never pursued her promise – a decision that must haunt her today. In this year’s election, she won at least 600,000 more votes than Donald Trump, but lost by a significant margin in the Electoral College.”(Speel) Here, Speel effectively uses pathos to make the audience feel bad for Hillary Clinton because the one thing that she tried to get rid of was the reason why she lost