Electoral College System Essays (714 words) - Psephology

Electoral College System After the last presidential election, which is still underway apparently, there is much controversy over what should happen to the Electoral College system. There are people who say that the Electoral College is good but should be modified to meet the needs of the modern world. There are those who say that the Electoral College system is too outdated to be modified and should be entirely eliminated. Finally there are those who say that it is has stood the test of time and is still the best system for our country. The original framers of the constitution obviously preferred the electoral system to a direct popular election. The argument that historians give for this is that they preferred this system because travel was difficult and there were no national party organizations. I personally reject this argument. I agree that travel was difficult back then, but wouldnt that have meant that the candidate who lived closest to the most largest states would have an un-fair advantage under the electoral system back then? The historians add that the framers feared that many regional candidates would divide the vote, and that by requiring a candidate to win a majority in the Electoral College was a way of obtaining a national census. There have been many attempts to reform or even scrap the Electoral College election sense its birth. The most recent one being in 1997 when congress debated a constitutional amendment to replace the electoral system with a direct popular vote system. However the Electoral College system to this day remains virtually un-changed from its original form. The only exception is the twelfth amendment, which requires each elector to cast two votes, one for president and one for vice president. Under the current system there are five hundred and thirty eight electors. Each state gets one elector, each representative, and a senator. A presidential candidate needs two hundred and seventy votes to win the election. The electors meet after the November popular election to cast their votes and officially elect the president. Electors may vote for whomever they wish. Each states electoral votes are awarded on a winner take all bases. The arguments to modify or eliminate the Electoral College system are all derived from the notion that it is outdated. Under the current system if a candidate wins a large states like California, then they win twenty percent of the needed votes even though California only accounts for eleven percent of the U.S. population. Whats more is a president can be elected without winning a majority of the popular vote. This has happened 15 times in U.S. history. The constitution allows electors to use their discretion. Seven times in history an elector has not casted his vote for the peoples choice. Fortunately this has not yet had a real affect on the outcome of an election. Under the current system each states electoral votes are awarded on a winner take all basis. This makes it extremely difficult for a third party or independent candidate to win any electoral votes. In fact, by concentrating support in certain states, a candidate can take the presidency with out winning more popular votes than his opponent. According to the 1990 census, a candidate only needs to win eleven of the most heavily populated of the fifty states in order to take the presidency. The arguments to maintain the Electoral College system are all derived from the notion that it has worked fine thus far. There have been many attempts to reform the electoral system but none of them have been successful. This is due to the fact that no election system is perfect, but the current system has stood the test of time. It has never rejected the winner of a popular vote majority. It always produces clear and immediately known winners, so far. Getting rid of the Electoral College system would be profoundly dangerous. Especially with the way modern elections are conducted. This would mean that the totality of our campaigns would be a television advertising tarmac kind of campaign. We would be handing the American presidential campaign to whatever media adviser could out slick the other, and not necessarily to the best candidate for our country. Political Issues

Operations management The WritePass Journal

Operations management Introduction Operations management IntroductionReferencesRelated Introduction Strategic Focus, one amongst the most important step in the design and development of a product, enables companies to discover and explicitly commit themselves to important considerations (Ahoy, 2008). In the current case studies of Ready Materials and Zara, efficient and effective strategic focus assisted in expanding and extending the business into the narrow market or industry segment. More specifically, the super-responsive supply chain developed by Zara permitted the company in designing, producing and delivering new garments for marketing worldwide (Gattorna 1998). Ready Materials, on the other hand, possessed no clear strategic focus and witnessed complexities in meeting the volatile demand pattern. This characteristic absence of strategic focus caused a demand uncertainty, which eventually led to the emergence of buffering mechanisms (forward load, inventory and capacity). Owing to the fluctuating nature of daily demand, most of the purchasers of Ready Materials have aligned their orders with respect to a day per day operation and waited for the dispatch for an average time of 24 hours. Use of capacity buffering system in the form of annualised hours helped in managing Ready Materials at times of demand fluctuations, enabling adjustments to the working day by up to two hours, either way, without any intimation (Gattorna, 2009). Though these buffering mechanisms caused the company to witness low levels of staff morale and retention, in recent years, this has gained immense attention with the work force finishing the task early more often than late. Buffering mechanisms undertake the forms of order backlogs link with a variable extension to lead time. Inventory buffering mechanism, used by Ready Materials, compressed the customer response time by committing capacity in the advance of demand. Reducing the capital or, in other words, operating at the negative working capital helps in aligning with offsetting the investment in additional capacity. Thus, mana ging buffering mechanisms through resource alerts and effective prioritisation of resource attention assists projects in taking an advantage. It minimises the impact of Parkinson’s Law, and prevents unnecessary distraction alongside facilitating recovery planning when required, yet at a time in advance when the project or company is in trouble. Presence of high demand uncertainty necessitates the need of project and strategic management (Lake, 2010). As indicated earlier, the use of buffering and alignment mechanisms, allow the resources and companies to gain a strategic focus of resource attention besides enabling the advantage of good morale and early task finish. Much focus can be levied on time schedule management, and this automatically decreases unnecessary distraction, further enabling for the recovery planning to prevail, when needed. However, this is only necessary whenever the company witnesses extreme difficulty (Ahoy, 2008). Managing of uncertainty remained at the core of improvement of project performance for Ready Materials. Making use of highly sophisticated just in time systems could help in adjusting to the alignment and this automatically offers an efficient strategic focus. At such times, the company is required to get the projects completed both ahead of schedule and with efficient reliability of stock delivery dates that were promised. This specific approach to alignment offers mechanisms which allow a â€Å"complete system† view of projects. The mechanism of alignment recognises and safeguards the uncertainty and thereby avoids the Parkinson’s Law at the task level whilst considering Murphy’s Law at the project stage. All of these implications suggest an intimate interrelationship between strategic focus, buffering and alignment. Effective and efficient management of these three segments of operational management helps each of the companies in driving towards success (Vital e, 2002). It is the duty of project managers to shift their attention from assuring the achievement of strategic focus, task estimates and intermediate milestones. All of these are vital from the date it is required to the final promised due date. But, a grasping of the whole implication of this approach is an immense challenge. Running factories for only a single shift, sending half empty loads to other countries, which were followed by Zara, could help in focusing local efficiency at the expense of international responsiveness. Investing in the overall capital assets can eventually enhance the strategic focus and organisational flexibility (Stratton, 2008). Owing production assets can offer the company a level of control over its schedules and the companies no matter what they intend to do. Besides manufacturing of complicated products, it can enhance strategic focus and thereby minimise the incorporation of buffering mechanisms and alignment patterns. References Ahoy, K. (2008). Customer Driven Operations Management: Aligning Businesses, Processes and Systems, London: Hoffmann Publishers, pp. 90-100. Gattorna, J. (1998). Strategic Supply Chain Alignment: Best Practices in Supply Chain. London: SAGE Publishers, pp. 451-460. Gattorna, V. (2009). Dynamic Supply Chain Alignment. London: Heinemann Publishers, pp. 341-390. Lake, H. (2010). Operational Management and Control. London: Routledge Publishers, pp. 34-90. Stratton, R. (2008). Theory Building: Relating Variation, Uncertainty, Buffering Mechanisms and Trade-offs, Proceedings of the 3rd World Conference on Production and Operations Management. Tokyo: Japan. Vitale, B. (2002). Business to Business Marketing. London: Routledge Publishers, pp. 34-89.