Why do we elect a President of the United States?
Which nations before us voted?
What is a representative democracy?
Using the illustration of a neighborhood of feuding neighbors needing to unite, we learn in this episode about the formation of the Iroquois Confederacy and learn a bit about how Americans choose electors in our Presidential vote.
Materials:
Please have on hand a board on which to write a scoreboard for an election!
This episode is meant to help explain the United States' Presidential Election. Use the concepts discussed to talk with your children about the Electoral College and how the results of this year's presidential election came about. View a map of the United States which shows the electoral votes of each state. You can print this map color-code it!
For older children, read through the Constitution of the United States and find the section that specifies how to choose a president. Here are some interesting topics to note:
1. The founding fathers did not trust a direct democracy; instead they created the Electoral College to try to keep fairness and a balance. Research this idea more!
2. Interestingly, the Constitution calls for states to have electors, but does not mandate that all the people in our nation vote for president - this is not an inherent right of a citizen, according to the Constitution. States were given the responsibility of determining how the electoral votes would be decided. Our state laws do, indeed, today call for all of its citizens to vote and therefore decide for whom the electoral votes will be cast.