Tuesday, March 5, 2013

Some stuff I wrote about the Government



Why the electoral collage should be abolished

America’s political system is a democracy. That means that everyone’s vote should be equal. You probably knew that. But the votes aren’t equal. Why? Because of a terrible, terrible system called    the Electoral College.
Most Americans cast their ballot on Election Day thinking that that vote is going to go to the candidate of their choice. The truth is they go to the states electors. Each state has a certain amount of electoral votes determined by population (574,000 people a vote).  When you vote you’re actually asking the electors to vote for the candidate that you chose. Most of the time they do but there they can actually use the votes for whoever they want.  This means there is a chance that your vote doesn’t even count. That’s not democracy.

But it’s not just the Electors which are the problem.  There are 538 Electoral votes (the number of representatives and senators in the House of Representatives and the Senate). I said before that the electoral votes ­­­­­ are divided evenly among the states. However there’s a law which says that all states must have three votes regardless of population. This seems fair but the problem is that there is a limited amount of votes. This means that states don’t have all the votes they should. Ohio is missing 2 electoral votes, Texas 6 and California 10. I said earlier that each vote represents 574,000 people. That means 5,740,000 people who live California actually live in smaller other states according to the Electoral College.  Plus the Electoral College doesn’t protect the smaller states from the bigger ones by taking so many votes away from them. People running for President don’t visit the smaller states and they don’t visit the larger states where most of the people live, they visit the swing states. Swing states are basically states that have a good amount of electoral votes but don’t have a fixed political party (as opposed to states like Texas who always vote republican or states like California who always vote democrat).

And of course there are the territories, that aren’t states but 4.4 million people live in. And these people aren’t allowed to vote even though they are citizens of the U.S.  This is even less fair when you consider citizens that are abroad can vote over the mail.  Even U.S. citizens in space can vote. Do 4.4 million people just not exist?

The Electoral College pretends people don’t live where they do, makes our votes worthless and makes U.S. citizen not be able to vote. This is wrong. This is not democracy. This should be abolished.
 

Works sited:

How the Electoral College works CGPgrey youtube.com YouTube Nov. 7  2011
The trouble with the Electoral College   CGPgrey youtube.com YouTube Nov. 7  201E
Electoral College (United States) Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electoral_College_%28United_States%29



I did this a bit ago. Like it?

Tovah

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