Debate #2

This week’s debate was on the Electoral College. I thought overall the debate went fairly good. Both sides had some good points and both sides had some points that were somewhat confusing. I will talk about some of the points that the sides made and throw my personal input from the debate in as well. I will first talk about the con side. Their idea was that the Electoral College is a negative system for many reasons. The first point they brought up was that with the current system it is reduces the chance of having a minority president. What the pro side had to say to this was that if people really wanted and had enough support behind a third party candidate, then they could possibly win the state. The con side then talked about how if the 3rd party received 40 percent of the votes and the two major parties each got around 30, then once taken to the house, the third party would eventually loose. The con side also talked about the fact that since voting numbers are down, the Electoral College may have something to do with it. They then talked about how many people believe that if they think there vote is not important, then they just assume to not vote. There one major example was that if a candidate needs majority vote to win, then if one candidate gets 500,000 and the other gets 700,001 votes, then 200,000 votes were wasted because all the candidate really needed was one over the five hundred thousand. They also talked about the case that since we are in such a two party system many people vote against whom they do not want to win, instead of the candidate that they want to win simply because they feel there is not one they have full trust in. The pro side thinks it is better to have a two party system because the chance of a third-party or independent candidate getting elected is slim. So therefore what they say is that it is a mean for indirect voting. This part of the lecture was very confusing to me because I do not have a solid grasp on what indirect voting is. The girl from the pro side that was sitting nearest the center had much to say about this but to me it was all just rambles. To me the side that won the debate was the con side. I liked when the one gentleman brought up the facts that a couple of the states had more population than one state by itself, yet this one state had more electoral votes than the others combined. I think the Electoral College is a system which has more negative issues about it than the positives. I feel that a better system which could be used is a true one person one vote system. The pro side say that the electoral college is meant to be an equal representation of the people, but unfortunately it does not work out that way. I know you said in class during the break that if we do the one vote for every person and each one taken individually, then the idea of a recount would be impossible. Yet I believe that there must be a better way of voting than the current system in place.