Abolishing the Electoral College Here in the United States we have two primary voting systems, which consist of the popular vote and the Electoral College. The Popular vote is just that, popularity. The most desired and popular candidate is awarded the majority of votes cast by the citizens of the United States. The Electoral College, on the other hand does not consist on the votes directly cast by citizens but by a group of people elected by the citizens. This group of officials also known as “presidential electors” makes up the Electoral College.
Furthermore, the actual turnout was only 61.4%, so they were only representing around a third of the population. In this sense, representative democracy does not operate effectively in the UK as most of the population did not vote for the winning party. Britain follows a representative system because we are all represented by MPs in Parliament who will take care of local problems and take important grievances to the government. When we vote for these MPs, we give them the legitimacy to make decisions for the constituency but expect them to take the majority
As compared to their predecessors and contemporaries, they were most certainly the more democratic party. But, they were somewhat less democratic than present-day Democrats. Most states had either universal white manhood suffrage or taxpayer qualifications for voting rights, and there was a higher voter turnout. For their time, they were an extremely democratic party, but they did not advocate woman’s suffrage or non-white suffrage. However, as shown by Documents B and C, Jackson’s decisions concerning the National Bank certainly did not show a democratic trend; nor did his actions portrayed in Document G, nor the ones that made Document F necessary.
However other commentators have argued that mid-term elections are not merely a referendum on the performance of the President because the turnout is almost always low. What this means is that not a huge amount of the electorate actually vote. For
However the HOC is not effective in carrying out this function because ethnic minorities are not fairly represented as there are now only 27 MP’s that are from ethnic minority groups, this is not representative of society as a whole. Labour recognition of ethnic minorities is the best out of all political parties as they have chukka umanna, who is of Nigerian and Irish descent. As well as this, the gender representation in the HOC is also poor as only 21 percent of the HOC is female, leading to women being underrepresented in politics. Younger views are also not fairly represented as the average age of MP’s still remains high, which could affect the political interest of younger people. The FPTP electoral system doesn’t allow fair representation as it only allows the winner to take the seat in any constituency, this means that parties that have a large share of the votes, don’t win seats accordingly.
Before only property owners with a certain franchise could vote whereas after all householders with property worth £10 or more per annum were allowed. These changes basically still only allowed the wealthy to vote as working class and vagrants still didn’t have the money to buy property and therefore could still not change how the country was run. So the change to the vote wasn’t too effective. Another big change the act enforced was the distribution of seats in parliament. Places like Cornwall and Sussex lost the amount of MP’s as they were known as rotten boroughs (boroughs that sent too many MP’s to parliament compared to the size of their constituency and population) and industrial towns like Manchester gained more MP’s which is what they needed as they were growing in size due to new factories.
As shown in 2010 where in the general election the Green and other small parties combined achieved 7.9% of the votes but the Green party was the only one of these parties to gain a seat and they only won one seat. This can encourage tactical voting with people voting for parties not that they want to win but for parties they feel will stop the parties they dislike from winning. However there are also positive attributes to the FPTP voting system as it provides a straight forward electoral choice to the voter and is simply just a mark is a box is all that is required to vote for your preferred party. This means the voter are far less likely to be confused or daunted by the prospect of voting. This makes also makes the count easier for a less time consuming.
Any comment about a social, religious or minority group can only be generalised when referring to its voting habits and so the following comments can only be taken as a generalisation. Logic dictates that not all African Americans or women vote Democrat. But the trends indicate that a large proportion of each group does. Another issue which has to be addressed by both parties was the large degree of absenteeism at the voting booths in 1996 and 2000. Is the explanation for 1996 that it was a ‘forgone conclusion’ sufficient to explain why half of all registered voters did not vote?
1). Another reason the condition of the third class was so poor, was because, although they represented almost the entire population, together, they owned only slightly more than half of Frances land (Doc. 2). Finally, in the Estates General, each estate was only given one vote (Doc. 3).
The Corruption of Political Morals Hundreds of thousands of men and women have died throughout the centuries to keep America the freedom-loving country it is today. By being blessed with the basic principles of justice and liberty, Americans are granted an amazing opportunity that citizens of most other countries are not - the ability to have a say in the government. Each citizen is allotted one vote to state their opinion based on what they believe. But how do individuals make their decision as to what is best for the country? Or rather, do desires for their own success even at the expense of others trump what is best for humankind?