Presidents and others that have been elected against majority

By Antong Li, Mengyao Wang, Chenlin Zhou, and Yi Hu.

Introduction

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Direct election

Direct election means voters choose the officeholders directly. The most commonly used systems are plurality system and two round system. Examples of direction election are the European Parliament and the United States Senate.

Indirect election

By contrast, in an indirect election, rather than voting for officeholders directly, they vote for electors, and the officeholders were finally decided by the electors voted by the voters. It is widely used in many union elections Because voters don’t vote for the the candidates directly, there will be occasions that candidates are elected without popularity, or the majority.
The United States president election is a typical indirect election system. Throughout the history of United States, four presidents were elected without winning popular votes.

Presidents election in United States

Election process

According to Article II of the United States Constitution,

“Article II
Section 1. The executive power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America. He shall hold his office during the term of four years, and, together with the Vice President, chosen for the same term, be elected, as follows:
...No person except a natural born citizen, or a citizen of the United States at the time of the adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the office of President neither shall any person be eligible to that office who shall not have attained to the age of thirty five years, and been fourteen Years a resident within the United States.”,

a person has to meet the following requirements to be a candidate for the presidency:

• At least 35 years old
• A natural born citizen
• A resident of the United States for 14 years
  

There will be many candidates for the presidency every year, and everyone has their own political views and preferable parties. Some of them will have similar ideas, so usually there are more than one candidate in the same political party. However, each party should only has one candidate to run for President. Therefore, a nominating process is needed for every parties. A series of the presidential primary elections and caucuses held in each state and territory in U.S, and presidential nominating conventions held in each political party are two main ideas to select one final nominee. (There are some people decide to run for the President without being a part of any political party, but such independent candidates need other requirement to stay on the campaign)

After the above selections, there should be only one Presidential nominee in each party. In the same time, this candidate need to choose a Vice-Presidential candidate to run the election together. Voters should consider them as a whole team, so they cannot choose a Presidential candidate from one party and a Vice-Presidential candidate from another party.

Now, it is time for general election and electoral college election. Nevertheless, by very rare chance, if no presidential candidate receives more than half of the electoral votes, then the House of Representatives will choose the President among the top three presidential candidates and the Senate will choose the Vice-President among the top two candidates.

the Popular Election

In the popular election, every citizen who is at legal age can vote. As a direct vote described in the beginning of this article, popular election is not how the United States President is chosen. The Founding Fathers of the United States of America thoughts direct vote was too chaotic and easy to make mistake. Instead, they designed a new electoral college system.

the Electoral college

The United States electoral college is the institution which elected president and vice president every four years. Electors are appointed to each states and the district of columbia. The number of electors in each state is equal to the number of members of Congress to which the state is entitled, except the District of Columbia is granted at least three electors, according to Twenty-third Amendment. In total there are 528 electors, consisting of 435 representatives and 100 senators, plus the three electors from the District of Columbia.

Electors are pledged to particular presidential and vice presidential candidates, though unpledged electors are possible. In all states except Maine and Nebraska, electors are elected on a ‘winner-take-all’ basis. That is, all electors pledged to the presidential candidate who wins the most votes in a state become electors for that state. Main and Nebraska use the ‘congressional district method’, selecting one elector within each congressional district by popular votes and selecting the remaining two electors by a statewide popular vote.

There are debates about electoral college, concerning its constraints in several aspects. First of all, the electoral college made it possible that a minority president ( one without popular votes) can be elected. The four presidents in the history of United States proved that the concern was not entirely unfounded.

Another constraint is the risk of so-called ‘faithless’ electors. A ‘faithless elector’ is one who is pledged to vote for his party’s candidate but nevertheless votes of another candidate. There have been 7 such electors in 20th century. Although none of the faithless electors changed the outcome of an election, the people’s wish of their election district were not appropriately represented.

There are also concerns about electoral college’s possible role in depressing voter turnout. Since each State is entitled to the same number of electoral votes regardless of its voter turnout, there is no incentive in the State to encourage voter participation. On the contrary, there may be even an incentive to discourage participation. A further outcome is that the public become less like to participate in voting, and the president then will be elected by a minor group of people in the country.

Despite the constraints, supporters of electoral college claim that there are also proponents of the current system. One proponent of the electoral college is that it contributes to the cohesiveness of the country by requiring a distribution of popula support to be elected president. With such a mechanism, a candidate is unlikely to win through the domination of one populous region over others or through the domination of large metropolitan areas over the rural ones. Thus, there is an incentive for presidential candidates to pull together coalitions of States and regions rather than exacerbate regional differences. This is especially important for large nations such as China, India, and United States.

Proponents also point out that Electoral College actually enhance the status of minority groups rather than depressing voter participation. This is because the voters of even small minorities in a State may make the difference between winning all of that State’s electoral votes or none of that State’s electoral votes.

Proponents also argue that the Electoral College contributes to the political stability of the nation by encouraging a two party system. This is true because it is extremely difficult for a new o minor party to win enough popular votes in enough States to have a chance of winning the presidency. Even if they win enough electoral votes to force the decision into the US House of Representatives, they would still have to have a majority of over half the State delegation in order to elect their candidate, in which case they will hardly be considered to be a minor party.

Presidents elected against popular votes in United States

Like many compromises, the electoral college system is not perfect. One major issue is that the winning candidate may not be winning the most popular votes. This happens several times in the history. The following cases show more details:

This is an rare case: even though Jackson earned the most electoral and popular votes, he failed to receive more than half of the electoral votes. The House of Representative chose Adams as the president. Candidate Adam won without being voted by most citizens.

Conclusion

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Reference:

wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indirect_election
wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_election
United States Constitution: http://2008election.procon.org/sourcefiles/USConstitution.pdf
http://uselectionatlas.org/INFORMATION/INFORMATION/electcollege_procon.php