Nov 05, 2020 13:00:00

What is an 'electoral college' that elects the president of the United States by voting by representatives rather than by the people directly?

In the

United States presidential election, which is currently underway, voters choose 'electors' to represent each state, rather than directly choosing the president, who becomes president and vice president. We have adopted a system called the ' electoral college,' in which votes are cast. Time , an overseas news magazine, summarizes why such a system is adopted.

Voting History: The Real Reason the Electoral College Exists | Time
https://time.com/4558510/electoral-college-history-slavery/

In the United States, the governor is elected by general voting in all states, but the electoral college is adopted as the method of electing the president. If you are hiring an electoral college, the number of votes cast by the elector will determine the outcome of the election, so in some cases the most popular candidates in the general election will be rejected. In fact, in the 2016 presidential election, Hillary Clinton was slightly ahead of Donald Trump in the general vote .

'Five reasons' and 'Five things to do in the future' why Donald Trump won and became president --GIGAZINE

By Gage Skidmore

Some argue that the electoral college was adopted 'to balance the interests of the more populous and less populous states,' but the deepest political division in the United States is between large and small states. Time points out that it exists between the north and south, and between the coast and the inland.

In the first place, the electoral college is a system born from the situation that 'in the United States, which has a vast continent, there is not enough information for the general public to directly and wisely choose a voting destination from among presidential candidates.' In the 1780s, when the Electoral College was introduced, there was no radio or television method, newspapers existed, but the literacy rate was low, and voters had little opportunity to learn about the policies and claims of the presidential candidate. Therefore, it seems that the system of electoral colleges, in which trusted celebrities in the area vote as 'electors', worked well.

In the Electoral College at that time, the electors had two votes each, and it was decided to vote without distinction between the president and the vice president. Therefore, it seems that the electors voted so that the presidential candidates of each party would have one more vote than the vice presidential candidates. However, in the 1800 US presidential election, the Democratic-Republican elections Thomas Jefferson and Aaron Burr received the same number of votes.

The solution to this problem was the Twelfth Amendment to the United States Constitution , which was proposed in 1803 and applied from the 1804 presidential election. The Twelfth Amendment allows each party to nominate a presidential candidate and a vice presidential candidate separately, and all presidential elections since 1804 are based on this Article 12.

If the reason for the creation of the Electoral College system was 'lack of knowledge of the general public,' this problem was almost resolved by 1800. So why is the system of electoral colleges still abandoned?

In the past, Pennsylvania-based James Wilson has suggested that the presidential election should be a general vote, but Virginia-based James Madison said, 'Southern states have such a proposal. I can't accept it, 'he denies the idea of adopting a general voting system in the presidential election. Madison, the representative of the southern state, refused to vote because the southern part had a slave population of more than 500,000 and these slaves did not have the right to vote. Instead, Madison proposed an electoral college system, in which each slave is allowed to vote at a rate of three-fifths of the free people.

As a result, states with a large slave population will have great power in the presidential election. In fact, in the 36 years since the adoption of the electoral college system, the president has been elected from a party based in Virginia, which has a large slave population, for 34 years. For example, Thomas Jefferson, the third president of the United States, has a support base in the southern region, including Virginia, and most of the electors who voted were elected from the southern region.

It seems that politicians based in the northern part of the United States also proposed to adopt the general voting system when the revised Article 12 was proposed, but since politicians in the south denied this, it ended up being general in the presidential election. Voting was never adopted. In other words, Time points out that the conflict between regions from the latter half of the 18th century to the beginning of the 19th century led to the creation of a strange system of electoral colleges that is still maintained in the United States today.