Proposals to change how the United States Electoral College system works

This shows the one electoral vote that then Senator from Illinois Barack Obama got in Nebraska due to how that state awards it's electoral votes

 There have been numerous proposals to change how the Electoral College system works in each state, one of which was proposed by the Pennsylvania state senate majority leader Dominic Pileggi (he is from the Republican Party). He proposes that the state of Pennsylvania should change the way it awards it's electoral votes from the winner takes all approach (this means that which ever candidate wins the popular vote in that state also gets that states electoral votes) which is used in most of the fifty states with the exceptions being in the states of Maine and Nebraska to a system where by eighteen of the electoral votes would be awarded to which ever candidate wins a particular congressional district e.g. if you won the popular vote in nine of the congressional districts you would get nine of Pennsylvania’s electoral votes. The remaining two would be awarded to the candidate who won the state wide popular vote. This Proposal by Pileggi is similar to the systems already in place in the two already mentioned states of Maine and Nebraska (President Obama got one electoral vote from Nebraska in the 2008 U.S. Presidential Election). Another proposal to change how the Electoral College works comes from a person called Hal Nickle from California, they wanted it changed by getting the Secretary of State of California to determine the percentage of the popular vote received by each Presidential candidate down to the nearest one hundredth of a percentile and then multiply what ever the percentage is by the number of Presidential Electors California has which is 55, then if the number of electoral votes each candidate got did not equal the number of electors, the rest would be awarded to the candidate with highest percentage of the popular vote, (this proposal did not qualify to go on the ballot. The full proposal can be read here  https://oag.ca.gov/system/files/initiatives/pdfs/13-0049%20%2813-0049%20%28Electoral%20Votes%29%29.pdf?). If this were how the electoral votes were awarded in California then in the 2012 U.S. Presidential Election President Obama would have got 35 electoral votes and former Governor of Massachusetts Mitt Romney would have got 20. My personal opinion on this would be to leave the Electoral College as it is even if it is somewhat unfair.

How Does The United States Electoral College Work

How the Electoral College works is that each state chooses a certain number of people called electors, how many electors the states chose was stated by Alexander Hamilton in Federalist No. 68 "the people of each State shall choose a number of persons as electors, equal to the number of senators and representatives of such State in the national government" (http://thomas.loc.gov/home/histdox/fed_68.html). The number of electors is the same as each states number of electoral votes. Most of the time these electors cast their votes for whichever presidential candidate has won the popular vote in that state, though there have been quite a few times where there has been what is called a faithless elector. This is where at least one of the electors in a state votes for a candidate other than the one who won the popular vote. Some examples of this in presidential elections have been in the 1988 U.S. Presidential Election where a faithless elector in West Virginia cast their vote for the Democratic parties Vice Presidential candidate then Senator Lloyd Bentsen of Texas, another example was in the 1976 U.S. Presidential Election where a faithless elector in the state of Washington cast their vote for Ronald Reagan who had at the time previously served two terms as Governor of California, he would also go on to serve two terms as President of the United States winning landslide victories in the 1980 and 1984 Presidential Elections respectively. A third and final example is in the 1956 U.S. Presidential Election where a faithless elector in Alabama cast their vote for Walter Burgwyn Jones (he was a circuit court judge at the time) instead of the Democratic parties candidate for President Adlai Stevenson II. There have also been numerous other examples of faithless electors in U.S. Presidential Elections. There have been various proposals to change how the electoral college works, some of which I will try and discuss in another blog post.    

What Is The Electoral College

Electoral Map of the 2012 U.S. Presidential Election

The Electoral College is basically how the United States of America elects their President every four years. Each of the fifty states and the capital Washington D.C. is assigned a number of electoral votes and in most of these states during the election the Presidential candidate who wins the popular vote in that state wins all of the electoral votes in that state. The exception to this is in the states of Maine and Nebraska, in these states the candidate who wins the states popular vote gets two electoral votes and then the winning candidate of each of the states congressional district gets one electoral vote. Each state assigns a number of electors who have one vote for President and another for the Vice President, sometimes these electors go against the rest and vote for the candidate who did not win the states popular vote they are called faithless electors. Some examples of this are  in the 1988 Presidential election the Democratic parties Vice Presidential candidate Lloyd Bentsen (1921-2006) received one electoral vote from a faithless elector in West Virginia, another example is in the 1912 Presidential election where former President Woodrow Wilson (1856-1924) won two electoral votes in California from two faithless electors.

With the Electoral College system a Presidential candidate needs to win a minimum of 270 out 538 electoral votes to win the election. This can still happen despite the fact that the candidate may not have won the nation wide popular vote as was the case when in the 2000 Presidential election when then governor of Texas George W. Bush got 47.9% of the popular vote where as the current Vice President at the time Al Gore got 48.4% but lost the Electoral vote 271 to 266. Another problem that can occur is that neither candidate gets the minimum number of electoral votes required to win the election, the only time this has ever happened was in the 1824 Presidential election where then Secretary of State John Quincy Adams (1767-1848) got 84 electoral votes, then Senator Andrew Jackson (1767-1845) of Tennessee got 99 electoral votes, the Secretary of the Treasury at the time William H. Crawford (1772-1834) got 41 electoral votes and the Fourth candidate Speaker of the House Henry Clay (1777-1852) of Kentucky got 37. Since none of them got enough electoral votes it went to the House of Representatives to decide (this is what would happen in the 2016 Presidential election) they chose John Quincy Adams who went on to serve one term as President from 1825-1829.