Reviews for Why the electoral college is bad for America

The average rating for Why the electoral college is bad for America based on 2 reviews is 5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2016-07-26 00:00:00 Megan Markless Let's start with this: "At the core of the democratic process is the view that all votes must be counted as equal. In an election for a national officeholder, each voter has a right to expect that he or she will stand in the same relation to the national official as every other voter." I live in Utah. My vote for President is worth bupkis. Why is that fair? How is that democratic? Why should a handful of voters in Ohio or Florida get to choose the President? This book clearly lays out why we have the electoral college, why this system is messed up in so many ways, why the defenders of the electoral college are so wrong, and why we should have a direct election to choose our President.

Review # 2 was written on 2020-10-15 00:00:00 James Fritz Author Edwards logically and factually proves his thesis as to why the electoral college ought to be drummed out of existence. Interestingly, instead of beginning with the historical context of its origins, he begins with how the electoral college works, how it among other things, cheats the voters in a particular state who vote for the “losing” candidate who may actually have more popular votes. Most important in his discussions may be the idea of political equality or more important the political inequity that the electoral college tends to foster. The biggest takeaway from Edwards’s chapter on history is the recorded fact that the electoral college was not a well-thought-out concept that received rigorous attention from its founders. No, Philadelphia was hot that summer, and men [and I mean only men] formed the electoral college in a hurry, so that they could find cooler places in which to spend the rest of their summer vacations. At every turn, Edwards has an answer for those who would retain the electoral college, especially by noting when the proponents begin with false premises. The e.c. does not protect the smaller states, as some claim. It does not maintain cohesion and harmony among citizens. Candidates are not more attentive to small states with a low number of electors nor to large states that are entrenched in one party or another. In the book’s foreword, scholar Neal R. Peirce sums up what is most flawed about the electoral college: “The electoral college process, Edwards reminds us, doesn’t simply aggregate or reflect popular votes; it consistently distorts and often directly misrepresents the votes citizens have cast. Indeed, the unit vote actually takes votes of the minority in individual states and awards those votes, in the national count, to the candidate they opposed” (x). Don’t worry that Edwards's tome was published in 2004; nothing much has changed concerning the institution. Author Edwards’s study is prescient in that he states emphatically that what happened in 2000 with Bush v. Gore will happen again. Voilà, 2016! The United States must abolish the electoral college when it comes to voting for the office of the president. The time to do so has past. [This book published by Yale University Press has, by my count, five typographical errors derived mainly from a lack of close reading by copy editors—rather egregious for an Ivy League press, eh?]