The Electoral College System is a collective name for the electors who nominally choose the president and vice president of the United States. Electors from each state who are selected by the voters in the presidential election make up the Electoral College. Each state is entitled to a number of electors equal to the total number of senators and representatives it sends to the Congress of the United States. Each state must lave at least three electors.
There has been a lot of controversy surrounding the Electoral College System. Through out the history of the United States, there have been problems with the system used to elect the president and vice president of the United States. The United States" most recent conflict is the Al Gore and George Bush election in 2000. The state of Florida was under high surveillance after the U.S. believed there was a miscount. An illegal ballot in Palm Beach County resulted in an extraordinarily high number of missed-votes. (Dunn) A Democrat designed the ballots. There were over 33,000 votes that many people believe were for Al Gore that were not counted. Al Gore won the popular vote by 540,000 (final certified state totals). (Dunn). If the contested electoral count in Florida were simply tossed out, Gore won the Electoral College vote by 21 votes. (Dunn) If Gore had won Florida, he would have won by 46 electoral votes. By having the electoral vote in Florida awarded to Bush, he received only one vote more than the minimum number needed to win. The votes in Florida were miscounted. The Electoral College system has been in place for over 200 years and Americans are still not sure how it works or if it is the best system. (Wickman) .
The electoral system was devised by the drafters of the Constitution of the United States, who hoped thereby to entrust the responsibility to people whose choice would be unaffected by partisan politics. In the constitutional convention the drafters had to decide how much power they would entrust with the people of the United States, and how much should be controlled by representatives.