Dear State Senator,

I am writing you a letter in regards of the electoral college. I believe we should abolish it completely. I believe that we should change our voting system to election by popular vote for the president of the United Sates. While it is a good system, it is not reliable and does not let the people truly decide who their representative will be. It does bring some certainty of outcome but not as much as it should.

The electoral college must be abolished because it does not let the people truly decide who their president will be. While it does allow them to vote for a slate of electors who then elect the president usually based off of the popular vote, they do not always vote for who they are supposed to. The slate of electors that the people vote for are supposed to be trusted to vote for what the popular vote says, they do not always do so. A good example of that is in 2000, when Al Gore ran against George W Bush. Al Gore won the popular vote nationwide over Bush, he still didnt win the presidency because the electoral college did not stay true to their word and voted for Bush. That is because, as shown in Source 3, paragraph 15, " When you vote for a presidential candidate you're actually voting for a slate of electors. So while you might think your individual vote makes a difference, it doesnt at all, for you are not choosing which presidential candidate to vote for, you are voting for someone else to vote for the president who might not always stay true to their word and vote for a different candidate.

Although the electoral college does bring better certainty of outcome than a popular vote, it does not have the certainty it claims to have. In Source 2, paragraph 12 it states, "Perhaps most worrying is the prospect of a tie in the electoral vote." This is a big worry because the electoral college holds a total of 538 votes which is definetely possible to cause a tie. If this were to happen, then the vote would be thrown to the House of Representatives where state delegations would vote on the president. Then the concept of the presidential campaigns would become pointless because the point of campaining is to try to win over large, swing states to ensure more votes. Because the bigger the states population, the more votes they hold in the electoral college. But that would only work if it was in the Senates hands because the amount of representatives in the Senate for each state is based off of population, whereas the amount of representatives in the House of Representatives is always two for each state. So if the vote was thrown into the House of Representatives hands, then whichever candidate who holds claim over the most states, regardless of size, would almost automatically win the election because each state holds equal say in their vote.

So because the electoral college is obviously unfair, it should be abolished. Because the voters are told they decide who reopresents them, yet they do not. There is a possibility, while slim that a president could win the popular votes, yet lose the election because of the way the electoral college is set up. So because it unfair to the presidential candidates, it should be abolished and we should have elections controlled by popular votes.    