Electoral College: And Why We Should Change Intro

Intro #2

The next writing sample I believe shows effective writing. The title of the paper is “The Electoral College: And why we should Change.” It is an argumentative paper on why we should change from the Electoral College to the popular vote in U.S. elections. I wrote this paper around February 14, 2010. This was the last major writing assignment of the year, and I believe that I effectively argued my point and showed both sides. An example of my side of the argument is, the first and most important reason is that a candidate can win the popular vote but lose the electoral vote and thereby lose the election. This means that the more popular candidate would lose, and the least popular candidate would win. This has happened three times in U.S. history. It occurred in the Hayes/Tilden election of 1876, the Harrison/Cleveland election of 1888, and a in the more recent Bush/Gore election in 2000. To use the Bush/Gore election as an example, Bush received 50,456,002 (47.9%) of the popular vote and Gore received 50,999,897 (48.4%) of the popular vote (3). On the other hand those that argue that the Electoral College is a good thing say that it reduces the impact of voter fraud as argued by Jonathan Chait in a Los Angeles Times article. If you want to read more on this topic you can read the rest of my paper.