In The Falcon student newspaper at Green Hope High School in Cary, North Carolina, staff writer Anaam Amin reports the results of a survey in which students at the school declare their support, or lack thereof, for the Electoral College.
US Electoral College map, 2020Many politicians, including President Donald Trump in 2012 and others, have argued that the Electoral College should be eliminated.
The electoral college is a disaster for a democracy.
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 7, 2012
Doing so would require a Constitutional amendment, but Article V may block this route. Others believe that if Congress doesn’t send an amendment to the states, states may act on their own to nullify the effect of the Electoral College.
One way or another, though, based on the overwhelming opinion of the young generation, the Electoral College seems ready to fade into insignificance.
At Green Hope High School, the informal and unscientific survey found that about 84 percent of students don’t support the Electoral College. Only about 13 percent of students said they support it.
Among the reasons given for supporting the Electoral College:
- I am super liberal, but I still feel this way because if the Electoral College was abolished, candidates would only focus on policies that benefit big cities.
- The president doesn’t necessarily directly govern the people, but also governs and assists state legislatures, so the balance between popular vote and state vote is good.
Reasons for not supporting the Electoral College were more numerous, but they included:
- I think that everyone’s votes should be counted and not land being counted; that way there is a better representation of the people.
- It is not representative of the entire population, and some voters are valued higher than other voters, which does not contribute to democracy.
Students in the survey were also asked whether they supported America’s current two-party system, where Republicans and Democrats split Congress and state houses.
Not surprisingly, more than three-fourths of the students who responded to the survey said they don’t support the current system.
“Most people don’t support either candidate but are forced to vote one way in order to choose the lesser of two evils,” one respondent who doesn’t support the two-party system wrote.
