Bill Turini has been a political science instructor in the State Center Community College District since August 1997. He earned Bachelor of Arts degrees in both Political Science and Rhetoric and Communications from the University of California, Davis. He received his Master of Arts degree from California State University, Sacramento, with emphases in American Government and Political Theory. His areas of interest include constitutional interpretation, the presidency, and civil liberties.

Mr. Turini has also written on the question of the electoral college as a valid method of selecting the President of the United States. The following is an abstract of his work.

THE ELECTORAL COLLEGE: “A ... COMBINATION OF PRINCIPLES AND PRECAUTIONS”

This work examines the origins and history of the electoral college system for choosing the president and vice-president. The problem addressed is the issue of whether a method that provides for the selection of a national executive by allowing the states to choose electors is still useful.

Within this text, I reviewed the historical evolution of the electoral college, how it has operated, evaluated the arguments both opposing and supporting its retention, and explored various proposed reforms. Sources of data employed are presidential election returns--both for the popular election and the electoral college--and literature that examines the alleged defects and benefits of the system.

The data herein indicates that most of the concerns surrounding the electoral college are unsupported. Detractors of the system have focused primarily on the theoretical dangers and problems that might occur, and based upon these possibilities, they advocate amending or abolishing the process. Critics form their arguments by extrapolating from historical oddities rather than focusing on the system’s normal behavior. The dangers cited by reformers--among them the faithless elector, the contingency election, the general ticket system, the problems of bias, and the “wrong winner” scenario--are “truly minimal and theoretical.”