The questions in this group are based on the content of a passage. After reading the passage, choose the best answer to each question. Answer all questions following the passage on the basis of what is stated or implied in the passage.
Congressman Hastings has proposed that Congress should abolish the Electoral College system for electing the president and replace it with a system of direct popular election. The Electoral College system is flawed, he argues, because it runs directly counter to the democratic principle that every citizen’s vote should count equally.
Because of the winner-take-all system in which the candidate who receives the most popular votes in a state receives all of that state’s electoral votes, the citizens who voted for the losing candidate are effectively disenfranchised from the national election, even if their candidate lost the state by only a handful of votes. Moreover, because each state’s number of electors is the same as its number of members of Congress, the citizens of small states get a disproportionately larger vote than citizens of more populous states. In the 1988 election, for example, the combined voting-age population of the six least populous states--Alaska, Delaware, North Dakota, South Dakota, Vermont, and Wyoming--was 3,119,000. These six states held 21 electoral votes among them. Florida, with a voting-age population of 9,614,000, also had 21 electoral votes. Because of inequities of this nature, there have been four presidential elections in which the candidate who won the Electoral College actually lost the popular vote: 1824, 1876, 1888, and 2000.
Congressman Markham has argued that Hastings’s proposed changes are unnecessary and even dangerous. First of all, he argues, the Electoral College system, whatever its flaws, has resulted in a stable democratic government for more than 200 years, which shows that it is doing something right. Second, the winner-take-all system helps create decisive majorities in the Electoral College, thereby reducing the problem of disputed elections that we might see in the event of direct popular elections. Third, the current system of allocating electors helps protect the interests of small states, which would be largely neglected in favor of large states if the Electoral College were based entirely on population. Protecting these states’ rights is essential to upholding the principle of federalism (in which the states and the federal government maintain distinct powers).
When the Electoral College system was first formalized by the Twelfth Amendment in 1804, a direct popular vote would have been impossible to implement, and the Electoral College was probably the best way to approximate the will of the people. Advances in technology and communication, however, now mean that a direct popular vote would be as simple, if not simpler, to administer than the current Electoral College system. Alternative ways to reform the system would be to do away with the winner-take-all system of state electors, to base the numbers of electors strictly on state populations, or to have a direct popular election but to weight the votes from different states differently in order to preserve the influence of small states.
Hastings’s response to Markham’s argument that the history of the American government "shows that it [the Electoral College] is doing something right" would most likely be which of the following ？（）
A. Under the current system, each voter in Alaska has proportionately three times as much voting power as each candidate in Florida.
B. We do not know whether or not the American government would have been equally stable had the president been elected by a direct popular election since the beginning.
C. If the candidate who lost the popular election won the presidency four times in 200 years, there is something wrong with the system.
D. Maintaining a p federal system is less important than upholding the principle that each vote should count equally.
E. A process that maintained the Electoral College but removed the winner-take-all system would substantially reduce the disenfranchisement that occurs under the current system.
