Boola-Boola for the Electoral College

Speaking up for the Electoral College is a bit like defending the English system of measurements. Like inches and gallons, electoral votes are supposedly one of those boneheaded legacies of days passed that can't be justified, or fixed. Every four years, there are calls to scrap the whole thing, a phenomenon that understandably peaked eight years ago. In a few days, God forbid, we could hear these cries all over again. But as I sit at my computer, changing states from red to pink to azure to blue to azure to pink to red, I beg to differ. The Electoral College is something from which the United States should never graduate. It's far too much fun.

Imagine life these days without it. Obama leads McCain in the popular vote in virtually every poll. (Or, as NPR put it yesterday with characteristic boldness, Obama leads in 'most' polls. Could it cite a few in which he doesn't?) Were it to disappear, we'd be stuck on election night watching one number, and one number only: the popular vote total. Given time zones and the current point spread, Obama would presumably jump to an early lead, and, at least by percentages, the margin would probably deviate little throughout the evening. And with the West Coast solidly blue, the end would be anticlimactic.

But with the Electoral College, we get to savor the wonderful quest for 270, and the infinite number of combinations producing it. Can Obama win without Florida and Ohio? What happens if McCain can pick off Pennsylvania? Could it come down to Montana, or one of those crazy states that apportion votes by Congressional district? It's all so beautiful to watch: we'll get those mural-sized maps of the United States, usually perched at some dramatic angle, and, as the Aaron Copeland-like music plays in the background, watch them gradually fill up with color. We'll see Chuck Todd and John King playing with their colored blocks. And, as it all unfolds, we'll get to ponder the marvelous vagaries of American geography and politics. Why should Vermont and New Hampshire ever differ from one another? What cultural or ethnic or historic quirks separate North and South Carolina and Dakota? Where does the Confederacy end these days? Why might Virginia, rebellious in 1860, now go blue, while West Virginia, which broke off because of Unionist sentiments, end up red? None of this would matter if the popular vote were paramount. The Electoral College helps celebrate our dwindling regional differences. We're all becoming too much alike: now that Tom Lantos and Howell Heflin are gone, Arnold Schwarzenegger is just about the only American politician left with an accent. The Electoral College is one of the last bulwarks against complete cultural and political homogeneity.

Thanks to it, moreover, millions of us have gotten to play with our own electoral maps these past few months. I don't know about you, but I love the shape of the United States. And now, I have an excuse to savor it several times a day. There's something so accidental and irrational about it: all those tiny states, too small even to accommodate their initials, in the East; how they swell up as you head west; how Florida sticks out like a hitchhiker's thumb; how enormous and wacky Texas looks; how New Mexico, Colorado, Utah and Arizona (quick: can you tell them apart?) all come together geographically, but maybe -- this time -- not chromatically. Without the Electoral College, it would all be one undifferentiated mass, like one of those boring topological maps that show only mountain ranges or North America in the Ice Age. (I love the states, period. Am I the only person who chokes up -- "Mr. Chairman, the great state of New Mexico, Land of Enchantment, home of the next Secretary of State..." - during rolls calls?)

I know, the Electoral College means that every race boils down to a few toss-up states, the ones that are either left blank or sport an ominous shade of gray on realclearpolitics.com or fivethirtyeight.com. But what's wrong with that? It's great fun to see how the candidates apportion their time, and money, and ad buys, especially in the closing days, and how often they bump into one another. I don't mind Missouri and Ohio getting all that attention; they're generally disparaged or flown over, and deserve all the courting. And it's not as if New York and California and Texas are ignored: the candidates still have to come to them to beg. Besides, what would the alternative be? Without electoral votes, aspirants wouldn't have to be anywhere. They could conduct their campaigns by remote control, the way the Iraq War is run from Florida. Only television would matter: entire campaigns would consist entirely of ghastly Obama-like infomercials. But with certain states so crucial, candidates can't just mail it in. They actually have to show up.

Sure, the Electoral College creates problems every once in a while -- like once a century. But to me, this is a bum rap. I've studied Tilden and Hayes but can never seem to remember what actually happened there. But beyond that, the electoral vote has neatly matched the popular will. That even includes the year 2000, when by any stretch of the imagination, more Floridians voted -- or wanted to vote -- for Al Gore than for George Bush. Blame Katherine Harris, or Theresa LePore, or Roger Stone, or Sandra Day O'Connor for the calamity that followed, not Madison and Jefferson. The odds of all that ever happening again are infinitesimal -- hardly enough to kill off America's other, far more harmless peculiar institution, the one that makes presidential races sing.

Comments

[Doofus]

I don't suppose people really understand the pervasive influence
of political parties on how 'the system' works, at state level, at all
levels really. The parties are entrenched & have vested interests,
to put it mildly, in maintaining the system, their system, as it is.

Not being 'legal' entities (i.e., not in the Constitution, as such),
they aren't going away, and really, are so entrenched, the two
of them, after so many decades, they aren't going anywhere
& aren't even subject to much in the way of radical change.

It's not even that one is *really* worse than the other. For the
purposes of self-preservation, they're quite alike. If the system
doesn't change (much), they are the reason why.

[commentator]

While there's a lot to be said for protecting states with fewer inhabitants, something else seems important to consider:

Those states, where votes get "factored up" via the electoral college, are also predominantly republican. This means that the result of national elections will not accurately represent the true opinions of the majority of Americans. Which, to the rest of the world, is not really the spirit of a democratic election.

America could be a lot more progressive and dynamic if instead a direct-vote process was used, and this would help America start catching up with the rest of the world in regard to becoming able to sucessfully navigate rapidly changing social and marketplace dynamics. Only a small percentage of Americans are reactionary in their orientation, but due to the EC election process, these reactionary opinions have a far greater weight in the government of America than more progressive and forward-leaning opinions.

Thus we see that almost 100% of the world that surrounds America is pro-Obama. And regard America as a country that is increasingly becoming a backwards anomaly in the world, on par with other reactionary countries like the fundamentalist muslim or old-fashioned dictator states that still exist.

The electoral college process is noble in its original intent , but has the consequence of both holding back America from succeeding in a changing global world and disenfranchising those citizens who correctly see the need for change.

[amyers]

HuffPost's Pick

For all you direct democracy advocates out there, here's the deal: even with the Electoral College, American voters still have more of a say in deciding its leaders than any other liberal democracy in the world. Why? Because the vast majority of our developed allied nations base their governments on the Westminster system (a.k.a.: the British Parliament). Under the Westminster system, the head of government is simply the leader of the party that holds a majority of the seats in the legislature; other than the MP of their district, voters have no say in who the Prime Minister will be.

The Electoral College has its faults, but it does what the framers of the Constitution intended it to do: provide a good compromise between a national popular vote (which would give too much power to major population centers) and an equal vote between individual states (which would give too much power to smaller or less-populated regions of the country). In my opinion, the ideal solution is for every state to adopt the Maine-Nebraska Method of distributing electoral votes, in which a state allocates the electoral votes representing its individual congressional districts to the candidate who wins each of those districts, while awarding the electoral votes representing its two Senate seats to the statewide winner of the popular vote. This method would eliminate the dilemma of swing states: every individual vote is potentially worth three electoral votes. There is no fairer way.

[mvy]

In Gallup polls since 1944, only about 20% of the public has supported the current system of awarding all of a state’s electoral votes to the presidential candidate who receives the most votes in each separate state (with about 70% opposed and about 10% undecided). The recent Washington Post, Kaiser Family Foundation, and Harvard University poll shows 72% support for direct nationwide election of the President. This national result is similar to recent polls in Vermont (75%), Maine (71%), Arkansas (74%), California (69%), Connecticut (73%), Massachusetts (73%), Michigan (70%), Missouri (70%), North Carolina (62%), and Rhode Island (74%). In short, the public believes that the candidate that receives the most votes should get elected.

[mvy]

Current federal law (Title 3, chapter 1, section 6 of the United States Code) requires the states to report the November popular vote numbers (the "canvas") in what is called a "Certificate of Ascertainm­ent." You can see the Certificates of Ascertainment for all 50 states and the District of Columbia containing the official count of the popular vote at the NARA web site at http://www.archives.gov/federal-register/electoral-college/2004/certificates_of_ascertainment.html

[mvy]

The state-by-state winner-take-all system is not a firewall, but instead causes unnecessary fires.

Under the current system, there are 51 separate vote pools in every presidential election. Thus, our nation’s 55 presidential elections have really been 2,084 separate elections. This is the reason why there have been five seriously disputed counts in the nation’s 55 presidential elections. The 51 separate pools regularly create artificial crises in elections in which the vote is not at all close on a nationwide basis, but close in particular states.

If anyone is genuinely concerned about the possibility of recounts, then a single national pool of votes is the way to drastically reduce the likelihood of recounts and eliminate the artificial crises produced by the current system.

[mvy]

Based on historical evidence, there is far more fragmentation of the vote under the current state-by-state system of electing the President than in elections in which the winner is simply the candidate who receives the most popular votes in the jurisdiction involved.

Under the current state-by-state system of electing the President (in which the candidate who receives a plurality of the popular vote wins all of the state’s electoral votes), minor-party candidates have significantly affected the outcome in six (40%) of the 15 presidential elections in the past 60 years (namely the 1948, 1968, 1980, 1992, 1996, and 2000 presidential elections). The reason that the current system has encouraged so many minor-party candidates and so much fragmentation of the vote is that a presidential candidate with no hope of winning a plurality of the votes nationwide has 51 separate opportunities to shop around for particular states where he can affect electoral votes or where he might win outright. Thus, under the current system, segregationists such as Strom Thurmond (1948) or George Wallace (1968) won electoral votes in numerous Southern states, although they had no chance of receiving the most popular votes nationwide. In addition, candidates such as John Anderson (1980), Ross Perot (1992 and 1996), and Ralph Nader (2000) did not win a plurality of the popular vote in any state, but managed to affect the outcome by switching electoral votes in numerous particular states.

[mvy]

After more than 10,000 statewide elections in the past two hundred years, there is no evidence of any tendency toward a massive proliferation of third-party candidates in elections in which the winner is simply the candidate receiving the most votes throughout the entire jurisdiction served by the office. No such tendency has emerged in other jurisdictions, such as congressional districts or state legislative districts. There is no evidence or reason to expect the emergence of some unique new political dynamic that would promote multiple candidacies if the President were elected in the same manner as every other elected official in the United States.

[mvy]

There is nothing in the U.S. Constitution that needs to be changed in order to have a national popular vote for President. The winner-take-all rule (awarding all of a state's electoral votes to the candidate who gets the most votes inside the state) is not in the U.S. Constitution. It is strictly a matter of state law. The winner-take-all rule was not the choice of the Founding Fathers, as indicated by the fact that the winner-take-all rule was used by only 3 states in the nation's first presidential election in 1789. The fact that Maine and Nebraska currently award electoral votes by congressional district is another reminder that the Constitution left the matter of awarding electoral votes to the states. All the U.S. Constitution says is "Each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors." The U.S. Supreme Court has repeatedly characterized the authority of the states over the manner of awarding their electoral votes as "plenary" and "exclusive­." A federal constitutional amendment is not needed to change state laws.

See http://www.NationalPopularVote.com

[mvy]

The fact that the bonus of two electoral votes is an illusory benefit to the small states has been widely recognized by the small states for some time. In 1966, Delaware led a group of 12 predominantly low-population states (North Dakota, South Dakota, Wyoming, Utah, Arkansas, Kansas, Oklahoma, Iowa, Kentucky, Florida, Pennsylvania) in suing New York in the U.S. Supreme Court, arguing that New York's use of the winner-take-all effectively disenfranchised voters in their states. The Court declined to hear the case (presumably because of the well-established constitutional provision that the manner of awarding electoral votes is exclusively a state decision). Ironically, defendant New York is no longer a battleground state (as it was in the 1960s) and today suffers the very same disenfranchisement as the 12 non-competitive low-population states. A vote in New York is, today, equal to a vote in Wyoming--both are equally worthless and irrelevant in presidential elections.

The concept of a national popular vote for President is far from being politically “radioactive” in small states, because the small states recognize they are the most disadvantaged group of states under the current system.

As of 2008, the National Popular Vote bill has been approved by a total of seven state legislative chambers in small states, including one house in Maine and both houses in Hawaii, Rhode Island, and Vermont. It has been enacted by Hawaii.

[mvy]

The small states are the most disadvantaged of all under the current system of electing the President. Political clout comes from being a closely divided battleground state, not the two-vote bonus.

Small states are almost invariably non-competitive in presidential election. Only 1 of the 13 smallest states are battleground states (and only 5 of the 25 smallest states are battlegrounds).

Of the 13 smallest states, Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, North Dakota, South Dakota, and Alaska regularly vote Republican, and Rhode Island, Delaware, Hawaii, Vermont, Maine, and DC regularly vote Democratic. These 12 states together contain 11 million people. Because of the two electoral-vote bonus that each state receives, the 12 non-competitive small states have 40 electoral votes. However, the two-vote bonus is an entirely illusory advantage to the small states. Ohio has 11 million people and has "only" 20 electoral votes. As we all know, the 11 million people in Ohio are the center of attention in presidential campaigns, while the 11 million people in the 12 non-competitive small states are utterly irrelevant. Nationwide election of the President would make each of the voters in the 12 smallest states as important as an Ohio voter.

[mvy]

Under a national popular vote, a Democratic presidential candidate could no longer write off Kansas (with four congressional districts) because it would matter if he lost Kansas with 37% of the vote, versus 35% or 40%. Similarly, a Republican presidential candidate could no longer take Kansas for granted, because it would matter if he won Kansas by 63% or 65% or 60%. A vote gained or lost in Kansas is just as important as a vote gained or lost anywhere else in the United States.

[mvy]

Moreover, the notion that any candidate could win 100% of the vote in one group of states and 0% in another group of states is far-fetched. Indeed, among the 11 most populous states, the highest levels of popular support were found in the following seven non-battleground states:
● Texas (62% Republican),
● New York (59% Democratic),
● Georgia (58% Republican),
● North Carolina (56% Republican),
● Illinois (55% Democratic),
● California (55% Democratic), and
● New Jersey (53% Democratic).

In addition, the margins generated by the nation’s largest states are hardly overwhelming in relation to the 122,000,000 votes cast nationally. Among the 11 most populous states, the highest margins were the following seven non-battleground states:
● Texas — 1,691,267 Republican
● New York — 1,192,436 Democratic
● Georgia — 544,634 Republican
● North Carolina — 426,778 Republican
● Illinois — 513,342 Democratic
● California — 1,023,560 Democratic
● New Jersey — 211,826 Democratic

To put these numbers in perspective, Oklahoma (7 electoral votes) alone generated a margin of 455,000 votes for Bush in 2004 — larger than the margin generated by the 9th and 10th largest states, namely New Jersey and North Carolina (each with 15 electoral votes). Utah (5 electoral votes) alone generated a margin of 385,000 votes for Bush in 2004.

[mvy]

The political reality is that the 11 largest states rarely act in concert on any political question. In terms of recent presidential elections, the 11 largest states include five “red” states (Texas, Florida, Ohio, North Carolina, and Georgia) and six “blue” states (California, New York, Illinois, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and New Jersey). The fact is that the big states are just about as closely divided as the rest of the country. For example, among the four largest states, the two largest Republican states (Texas and Florida) generated a total margin of 2.1 million votes for Bush, while the two largest Democratic states generated a total margin of 2.1 million votes for Kerry.

[mvy]

Evidence as to how a nationwide presidential campaign would be run can be found by examining the way presidential candidates currently campaign inside battleground states. Inside Ohio or Florida, the big cities do not receive all the attention. And, the cities of Ohio and Florida certainly do not control the outcome in those states. Because every vote is equal inside Ohio or Florida, presidential candidates avidly seek out voters in small, medium, and large towns. The itineraries of presidential candidates in battleground states (and their allocation of other campaign resources in battleground states) reflect the political reality that every gubernatorial or senatorial candidate in Ohio and Florida already knows--namely that when every vote is equal, the campaign must be run in every part of the state.

Further evidence of the way a nationwide presidential campaign would be run comes from national advertisers who seek out customers in small, medium, and large towns of every small, medium, and large state. A national advertiser does not write off Indiana or Illinois merely because a competitor makes more sales in those particular states. Moreover, a national advertiser enjoying an edge over its competitors in Indiana or Illinois does not stop trying to make additional sales in those states. National advertisers go after every single possible customer, regardless of where the customer is located.