{"id":75498,"date":"2016-11-26T07:04:24","date_gmt":"2016-11-26T12:04:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/madisoncountycourier.com\/?p=75498"},"modified":"2016-11-25T20:29:30","modified_gmt":"2016-11-26T01:29:30","slug":"letter-electoral-college","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/madisoncountycourier.com\/?p=75498","title":{"rendered":"LETTER: Electoral College"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"opinion_letters1\"<\/a>To the Editor:<\/p>\n

The framers of the U.S. Constitution created the Electoral College as a result\u00a0of a compromise for the presidential election process. During the debate,\u00a0some delegates felt that a direct popular election would lead to the\u00a0election of each state\u2019s favorite son, and none would emerge with sufficient\u00a0popular majority to govern the country.<\/p>\n

Other delegates felt that giving\u00a0Congress the power to select the president would deny the people their right\u00a0to choose. After all, the people voted for their representatives to the\u00a0federal legislature. The compromise was to set up an Electoral College\u00a0system that allowed voters to vote for electors, who would then cast their\u00a0votes for candidates, a system described in Article II, section 1 of the\u00a0Constitution.<\/p>\n

Each state is allocated a number of electors equal to the number of its U.S.\u00a0senators (always two) plus the number of its U.S. representatives (which may change each decade according to the size of each state\u2019s population as\u00a0determined in the Census).<\/p>\n

Whichever party slate wins the most popular votes in the state becomes that\u00a0state\u2019s electors\u2014so that, in effect, whichever presidential ticket gets the\u00a0most popular votes in a state wins all the electors of that state.<\/p>\n

The debate has started again as to whether the U.S. Constitution should be\u00a0amended in order to change the presidential election process. Some promote\u00a0eliminating the Electoral College in favor of a direct popular vote for\u00a0president, while others believe the Electoral College should remain\u00a0unchanged. Just as compromise solved the initial problems of the framers, so\u00a0it is that compromise can solve this problem.<\/p>\n

The solution is to change the\u00a0electoral votes to electoral points and reward each candidate a percentage
\nof points based on the percentage of popular votes received in each state.\u00a0This would eliminate the \u201cwinner take all\u201d system, thus allowing for all the\u00a0votes to count. A voter is more apt to believe their vote counted when a\u00a0percentage of popular votes are taken into account rather than the \u201call or\u00a0nothing\u201d system currently in existence. Further, this new system would\u00a0integrate the desire for a popular vote for president with the need for the\u00a0individual states to determine who actually gets elected.<\/p>\n

As for political primaries, the number of delegates awarded in each state\u00a0should be determined by the percentage of votes won by each candidate.<\/p>\n

For 2016, multiplying the percentage of votes each candidate received\u00a0{in each state} times the number of electoral votes {in each state} results\u00a0in the following: Clinton 256.985 and Trump 253.482.<\/p>\n

\n
Joe Bialek,\u00a0Cleveland, Ohio<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

To the Editor: The framers of the U.S. Constitution created the Electoral College as a result\u00a0of a compromise for the presidential election process. During the debate,\u00a0some delegates felt that a direct popular election would lead to the\u00a0election of each state\u2019s favorite son, and none would emerge with sufficient\u00a0popular majority to govern the country. Other delegates […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":70071,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[23678,23808,8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-75498","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-letterstotheeditor","category-opinion","category-top-story"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/madisoncountycourier.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/opinion_letters1.jpg?fit=570%2C300&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p43meu-jDI","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/madisoncountycourier.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/75498","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/madisoncountycourier.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/madisoncountycourier.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/madisoncountycourier.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/madisoncountycourier.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=75498"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/madisoncountycourier.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/75498\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/madisoncountycourier.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/70071"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/madisoncountycourier.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=75498"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/madisoncountycourier.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=75498"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/madisoncountycourier.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=75498"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}