The Electoral College
When the Constitutional Convention gathered in 1784 they had the difficult task of determining how our government should be assembled and what systems we should use to elect them. They quickly decided congress should have the powers to pass laws and the people should elect these people to ensure they are following the will of the people. But who should elect the president?
Congress was the initial choice of most of the framers, but then they realized they first dilemma; by having congress elect the president, he would be loyal only to congress and not the people. The second and most logically thought was to have the people elect the president. However, this too was a problem in the eyes of most of the framers. They felt that people were prone to being rash and emotional and therefore could not be trusted to make a wise decision. So then congress settled on the final choice, which was to be a compromise between the smaller and larger states, which would ensure that the president would be fairly and wisely selected and that smaller states would have the same power as larger states. This system is called the Electoral College.
In the Electoral College, each state is granted one vote for every representative and one for every senator, thus ensuring that each state would be equally represented when electing the president.
However, the same question arises every four years, are the ideals that were used to create the Electoral College system over 200 years ago still applicable today or have that outlived their intended purposes? In order to answer that we must first explore the purposes for setting up the Electoral College and then determine how relevant it is to today.
The first purpose for setting up the Electoral College was to ensure that congress did not have too much power. When the system of government was finally decided on, our founding fathers understood the importance of the balance of power within the three branches of the government. They called this system checks and balances. This system was set up to ensure that the government would remain loyal to the people and loyal to their states (Hamilton). In The Federalist Papers, No. 68, Alexander Hamilton discusses the importance of having the president elected by the Electoral College. He said that in order to ensure that we do not end up with the same problems that America had with the monarch of England, it was important that the balance of power was spread throughout the government and that no one portion have too much power.
Another reason Alexander Hamilton gave for not having congress elect the president was that the founders wanted to reassure states that they had not given up all their power to a federal government. In order to ratify the constitution, the framers knew that it would have to be approved in each of the thirteen states. They also knew that these states would be skeptical of a powerful central government that would have the ability to take away all their rights. So, they would have to make sure that each of these states was comfortable with the amount of power given to each branch of the central government.
This point is also clearly evident today. During the election this year, the Republican Party ran on a platform that included the premise of a smaller government. This platform was in line with an MSNBC poll that was taken in July 2000, which asked this question, “Do you think it is important to limit the size of the federal government?” Over 72 percent of the 4,143 people surveyed said they believed that it is important to limit the size of the government. So even in the age of government programs which help support the citizens of this nation, people still understand the importance of keeping our government small.
The second purpose for the Electoral College was to give smaller states the same rights and powers as the larger states. There are two primary reasons why the smaller states have the same, if not more, power than the larger states when it comes to electing the president. The first is, a presidential candidate must receive 270 Electoral votes in order to win the presidency (Law). To do so that means that he would need to receive Electoral votes from a wide range of states and cannot limit himself to a certain region of the country. This means that some of the smaller states will receive the attention of presidential candidates.
The second reasons smaller states have the same, or more power, as larger states is in how the Electoral votes are distributed (Law). If you take a state such as Alaska, with a population of 619,500, which has three Electoral votes, this means that they have one vote for every 206,500 in population. Compared to California, which has a population of 33,145,121, and 54 Electoral votes. That works out to be one Electoral vote for every 613,799 in population. That means that someone who votes in the state of Alaska has three times the voting power of someone who votes in California. This is what ensures that candidates for president do not ignore these smaller states.
Another way to see the effect of size is to look at the analogy of a coin toss. For a simple example, let’s assume that only two candidates are running, A versus B, and each vote is like a random coin toss, with a fifty percent chance of going either way. In your state of three, there’s a fifty percent chance that the other two votes will split, one for A and the other for B, and thus a 50 percent chance that your single vote will determine the election. Therefore candidates will give each of the three of you a lot of respect.
As a nation gets larger, the citizens voting power shrinks. If you are part of a five-voter nation, the other four voters would have to split, two for A and two for B – for your vote to turn the election. The probability of that happening is 3 in 8, or 37.5 percent. As the nation’s size continues to go up, individual voting power continues to drop.
This power of the smaller states was especially evident during this year’s election. For the first time in many years, the candidates knew that the election would be close. Because of this, presidential and vice-presidential candidates visited smaller states in record numbers. For example, Oregon, with its 7 Electoral votes had 17 visits from these candidates during this election. This more than tripled the number of visits during the 1996 presidential race and reinforced the importance of smaller states having the Electoral College.
The third, and last purpose, for the Electoral College was that the framers did not trust the “mob.” (Natapoff). They believed that a large electorate could easily “fall prey to passions, rumors, and tumult.” Electors were supposed to consider each candidate’s merits more judiciously, not just blindly follow the popular will.
Akhil Amar, a government professor at Yale University, argues that the Electoral College was set up 200 years ago because, “Common people may not have enough accurate information to make a wise decision and therefore needed someone to ensure the right choices would be made.”(Onion).
James Madison, chief architect of the Electoral College, also wanted to protect each citizen against, “the most insidious tyranny that arises in democracies: the massed power of fellow citizens banded together in a dominant bloc. A well-designed democracy might include obstacles to thwart an overbearing majority and to prevent a candidate from only wooing the largest bloc.” Madison further explained in the Federalist Papers (No. X), “a well-constructed Union must, above all else, break and control the violence of faction, especially the superior force of an overbearing majority. In any democracy, a majority’s power threatens minorities. It threatens their rights, their property, and sometimes their lives.”
Unfortunately, this has been an ongoing problem since the constitution was written. Some examples of the masses making poor decisions that affect the lives of many can be seen in places like Nazi Germany, where the masses supported the Third Reich and there efforts to eliminate the Jews. This is still happening today in places like Yugoslavia, where the majority continues to elect Slavadon Malosivich even though he continues to kill the people of Bosnia and Croatia. To prevent these types of things from happening in a democracy, you must install safe guards against this and that is why the framers decided to use the Electoral College system to protect the American people.
However, there are some people who feel that the Electoral College has problems. The most widely talked about problem with the Electoral College is the rare occasion when someone can actually win the popular vote and loose in the Electoral College. Just such a scenario is beginning to play in this year’s election. It appears as though Al Gore has won the popular vote while it appears that George W. Bush will win the Electoral College. And this to some people seems very unfair and undemocratic. There are a few problems with this theory. The first is, in order to protect the American people against tyranny, this things may happen. Although, in the last 220+ years, only 5 times has the winner of the popular vote not been elected president. That’s a pretty good track record by any measurement. Second, even though Al Gore did win the popular vote, he knew well before the election that the only majority that mattered is in the Electoral College. The easiest way to explain this would be Natapoff’s explanation of the 1960 World Series.
The more that Natapoff looked into the nitty-gritty of real elections, the more parallels he found with another American institution that stirs up the same emotion, baseball’s World Series. In the World Series, for example, the team that gets the most runs overall is like the candidate who gets the most popular vote. But to become champion, that team must still win most of the games. In 1960, during a World Series as nail-bitingly close as that year’s presidential battle between Kennedy and Nixon, the New York Yankees, with the combination of Mantle, Marris, and Bill “Moose” Skowron, scored more than twice as many total runs as the Pittsburgh Pirates, 55 to 27. Yet the Yankees lost the best of seven series four games to three. Even the Yankees fans conceded that the Pirates deserved to win in this hard fought battle.
Runs must be grouped in a way that wins games, just as popular votes must be grouped in a way that wins states. The Yankees won three blowouts (16-3, 10-0, 12-0), but they couldn’t come up with the runs they needed in the other four games, which were close (Table A). In sports, we accept that a true champion should be more consistent than the 1960 Yankees. A champion should be able to win at least some of the tough, close contests by every means available – bunting, stealing, pitching, and dazzling play in the field – and not just hit home runs against third-rate pitchers. A presidential candidate worthy of office, by the same logic, should have a broad appeal across the whole nation, and not just play strongly on a singular issue to isolated blocs of voters. Therefore it can be argued that just because you get more votes, it does not mean that you are the best person for the job.
Table A - 1960 World Series:
Game 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 Total Runs Total Wins
Pittsburgh Pirates 6 3 0 3 5 0 10 27 4
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Arab Isreali Conflict
Arab-Israeli Conflict The Arab-Israeli conflict came about from the notion of Political Zionism. Zionism is the belief that Jews constitute a nation (or a people) and that they deserve the right to return to what they consider to be their ancestral home, land of Israel (or Palestine). Political Zionism, the belief that Jews should establish a state for themselves in Palestine, was a revolutionary idea for the 19th Century. During World War I, Jews supported countries that constituted the Central Powers because they detested the tyranny of czarist Russia. Both the Allies and Central Powers needed Jewish support, but Germany could not espouse Zionism due to its ties with the Ottoman Empire, which still controlled Palestine. British Prime Minister Lloyd George & Foreign Secretary Lord Balfour, favored Zionism and supported their cause in a letter that became known as the Balfour Declaration, ensuring that the British government would control Palestine after the war with a commitment to build the Jewish national home there, promising only to work for the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine and not harm the civil and religious rights of Palestine’s existing non-Jewish communities. After the Great War, Britain’s Forces jointly occupied the area known as Palestine with Faysal’s (Iraq) Arab army. The British set up a provisional military government in Jerusalem that soon became a struggle between Jewish settlers and the Arab inhabitants. In April 1920, the Palestinian Arabs revolted, killing Jews and damaging property, opening the Arab nationalist revolution in Palestine. The League of Nations awarded the Palestine mandate in 1922, charging Britain with carrying out the Balfour Declaration, encouraging Jewish migration to Palestine and help create the Jewish national home. But the Arabs suspected the British mandate would hold them in colonial bondage until the Jews achieved a majority in Palestine. Winston Churchill issued a white paper denying that the British government meant to give preferential treatment to Jews with a proviso for restricting Jewish immigration to conform to Palestine’s absorptive capacity. Another action that seemed to violate the mandate was the creation of the Emirate of Transjordan, removing two-thirds of Palestine that lay east of the Jordan River from the area in which Jews could develop their national home, claiming the partition was only temporary. During the first civilian governor of Palestine, it looked as if Jewish-Arab differences would be resolved when more Jews emigrated out of Palestine than immigrated and with the presence of a complementary relationship among the two peoples, but the hopes dissipated during the 1929 Wailing Wall Incident. The Wailing Wall (a.k.a. the Western Wall) is a remnant of the second Jewish Temple, symbolizing the hope that one day the Temple will be rebuilt and the ancient Jewish rituals revived; but the Wall also forms a part of the enclosure surrounding the Temple Mount, which the Dome of the Rock and al-Aqsa mosque stand atop; Muslims feared that Jewish actions before the Western Wall could lead to their pressing a claim to the historic site. In 1928, Jewish worshipers brought some benches to sit on. The police took them away several times, but the Jews kept putting them back. To Muslims, this activity was an attempt by the Jews to strengthen their claims to the Wall and retaliated by running a highway past it to distract the worshipers. Several fights broke out that escalated into a small civil war. Arabs perpetrated massacres in other places in Palestine. The British constabulary was inadequate and Britain sent a commission of inquiry; later issuing a report that justified the Arab position. The colonial secretary, Lord Passfield, placed blame on the Jewish Agency and the Zionists, and Britain tightened restrictions on Jewish immigration. Due to domestic embarrassment, the British government issued a letter explaining away the Passfield condemnation, hardly appeasing the Zionists, but angering the Arabs. As Arab animosity increased, the Arab Higher Committee in Palestine called for a general strike, paralyzing the country for several months. The British sent another commission of inquiry, headed by Lord Peel, which recommended partition, giving a small area of northern and central Palestine to the Jews, while leaving the most to Arabs. But the Palestine Arabs opposed the partition, fearing its’ acceptance would be a step toward their loss of Palestine. Britain scaled down the offer and eventually retracted it. Seeking a peace plan that would satisfy all parties, Britain called a conference of Jewish and Arab leaders in 1939; but no agreement was reached. Then, Britain issued the White Paper, announcing that the mandate would end in ten years, providing Palestine with full independence. Jewish immigration would be limited until 1944, after which it could continue only with Arab consent. The White Paper seemed to sell out Britain’s commitment to help build the Jewish national home. The Arabs also rejected the White Paper, stating it postponed their independence and did not stop Jewish immigration. As World War II came to a close, Zionist terrorist groups, such as the Irgun Tzvei Le’umi and the Stern Gang, blew up buildings and British installations in Palestine. The British went before the UN General Assembly in 1947, admitting that it could no longer maintain the mandate. The UN created the Special Committee on Palestine, who recommended partitioning Palestine [again!] into seven sections: three for Arabs, three for Jews and one for both. Neither the Palestinians nor the Arab countries welcomed the plan. The Zionists did not like the plan completely, but accepted it as a step toward forming the Jewish State. But Jewish paramilitary groups soon seized lands not allotted to them, while Arab commandos retaliated against Jewish targets. Both sides committed acts of terrorism against civilians. Large numbers of Palestinians panicked and fled to nearby countries. In May 1948, the Jewish Agency Executive Committee declared those parts of Palestine under Jewish control were now part of the State of Israel and that the provisions of the White Paper limiting Jewish immigration were null and void. Zionists urged the Arab inhabitants of Israel to play their part in the development of the state, on the basis of full and equal citizenship. But many Palestinians distrusted the Zionists and looked to their Arab neighbors for help. In 1947-48, a war ensued between the Israel and the Arab nations. The Arab armies, underestimating the Israeli forces and determination, were defeated. From the Arabs’ perspective, their defeat in Palestine humiliated their armies and discredited their regimes. The UN secured several cease-fires, each time fighting resumed; finally an armistice between each Arab country and Israel was agreed upon separately, after Israel had pushed Arab forces out of the Gaza area. The UN Conciliation Commission had assembled a conference for both sides to settle their outstanding differences, but negotiations broke down before they could even meet. Israel wanted a comprehensive settlement, while the Arabs demanded Israel to withdraw from the lands not allotted to the Jewish State in the 1947. The refugees suffered the most. Some voluntarily left their homes before the conflict started, while others had fled during the fighting. Israel claims that Arabs had broadcast orders to Palestinians to leave in order for their armies could easier move against Israelis, but no evidence has been found to prove Israel’s allegations; Arabs claim Jewish extremists terrorized Palestinians until May 1948 and the Israel Defense Force drove out other Arabs during the later phases of the war. The Palestinians ended up in camps near Israel’s borders with no state of their own. Arab countries could not absorb them; those who did, found it economically difficult. Palestinians rejected assimilation [resistance is futile] because they wanted to return home and Israel refused to re-admit all the refugees. The Palestine disaster uprooted more than half a million Arabs and they would support any leader who returned their homes and dignity, particularly the Ba’th party, which called for militant resistance against Israel. The growing frequency of Arab fidaiyin (commando) raids caused Israel to take stronger military measures. When Britain and France prepared to attack Egypt for nationalizing the Suez Canal, Israel wanted to take an active role in the offensive, hoping to teach the Arabs a lesson. Israel wiped out the fidaiyin bases in Gaza and broke Egypt’s blockade of the Gulf of Aqaba; but due to US pressure, Israel withdrew from the Sinai Peninsula and the Gaza Strip. In 1964, the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) was formed, with the objective of regaining the Palestinian homeland and the destruction of Israel. The PLO sabotaged part of Israel’s national water- carrier system and engaged in guerrilla campaigns against Israel, causing serious casualties and property damage. Israel retaliated by striking commando bases within the Jordanian West Bank. Then in June 1967, Israel had a preemptive strike on the airfields of surrounding Arab nations, causing the Six-Day War, breaking the blockade at the Gulf of Aqaba (Egypt), captured the West Bank and the Old City (Jordan), and took the Golan Heights (Syria). The strike was initially for defensive purposes, but Israel decided to keep the spoils of war as bargaining chips, fueling Arab fears of Israeli expansion. The UN Security Council devised a plan - Resolution 242 - for all members to accept. The resolution called for the withdraw of Israeli forces from territories recently occupied, in return for the recognition of Israel’s right to exist, ignoring the rights and interests of the Palestinians. With the resolution so ambiguous, the parties read into the resolution, seeing different viewpoints, it is amazing that they agreed to abide to the resolution. But international rivalry continued as the US and the USSR secretly supplied arms into the region. In 1973, Egypt and Syria planned a surprise attack on Israel, known as the Yom Kippur War. Egypt went into the Sinai and Syrians went down the Golan Heights. The first week of fighting, Israel concentrated on the north, leaving Egypt to successfully take back parts of Sinai. Israeli forces eventually drove out most of the Egyptian forces with the exception of the Third Army, which was still trapped in the peninsula and could have been crushed. But the diplomatic virtuoso of Kissinger reasoned that the Egyptians were more willing to talk peace if Egypt could keep some of its initial gains and peace talks ensued between the two nations. And without Egypt’s anti-Jew activities, many of the other Arab nations followed. However, the debate over where the Palestinians should reside is still an important issue concerning peace in the Middle East. Does Israel want to give up their claims to Jerusalem and will they have security should they decide to share the historic city? It seems that distrust and suspicion are very much alive in the world, particularly in the region. I am not an expert in such a delicate diplomatic situation, but not even an expert could say what the formula for peace is when both sides are not willing to trust one another. But I think the ingredient for peace requires some economic diplomacy…well, a lot of it! The Israeli government seems to be taking the hard-line stance in dealing with Palestinian demands of a common capital city. And negotiations between the US and Israel does not seem to be anymore productive. The US has to do a little economic arm-twisting, such as withholding foreign aid; to persuade Israel to cease erecting housing projects in disputed areas. But how politically viable is withholding foreign aid from Israel when there is a strong Jewish lobby in DC? Don’t think good ol’ Bubba will want to risk losing anymore political support. The most feasible plan for peace and stability in the Israeli-West Bank area is to give as much foreign aid to the Palestinians as is given to the Israelis, so that Palestinians can build the economy in the West Bank, giving them a future to look forward to, while waiting for a peace plan to be ironed out. Third party military presence on the border area of the West Bank and Israel seems acceptable, too.
Works Cited
Word Count: 1995
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