Presidential Election in the United States of America

Seminar paper from the year 2005 in the subject American Studies - Culture and Applied Geography, grade: 2,0, Catholic University Eichstätt-Ingolstadt, course: Amerikanische Landeskunde: Government, language: English, abstract: This paper deals with several topics connected with the election President in the United States of America but concentrates on history and the method of electing from the pre-election to the General one. After this theoretical part the weak points of this system are to be analyzed by the election of 2000. The ending of the paper gives a short overview about alternative ideas and a shift that is to be expected in the election system combined with the authors own opinion. The President has a wide range of executive power as it is written in the Constitution, Article II: "The executive power shall be vested in a President of the USA. Such a powerful human being requires to be elected carefully and because of that the founding fathers in 1787 invented a special system for electing politicians, especially the President. "Carefully" means to vote in an intelligent way under consideration of all current circumstances to minimize the risk of electing the wrong man to govern America, the most powerful country on earth. In 1800 people were not able to gather all the necessary pieces of information that were required for such an intelligent vote. The postal infrastructure consisted of letters delivered by postmen using horses who needed several weeks to travel from one city to another. The candidates of course were not able to visit every town to introduce themselves. Additionally, wartime hardened the situation of postal delivery. In the beginning the founding fathers discussed about the mode of election and the length of the executive term as the most important points. After several months of discussing one idea was striking -the electoral college-. A mode of electing that allows state legislatures to choose electors equal in number to the states, representatives and senators combined. These electors than are able to vote for one of the two candidates. - The amount of the number of delegates and electors per state depends on the amount of delegates in the Congress (House of Representative plus the Senate (two Senators per State)). So every state has at least a representation of 3 delegates or electors. [...]