The Electoral College doesn’t work. Setting aside its epic failure in the Great Litigators’ Election of 2000,[1] the College’s persistent problems are subtler and more invidious. It taints the American electoral process by effectively removing states and thereby voters from “play.” It drives down voter turnout. And without action, the problem is unsolvable. While Barack Obama may yet remake the electoral map, he’ll only refocus attention on a different group of swing states. As long as the Electoral College continues to work the way it does, no candidate can break the “as go three states, thus goes the nation” paradigm.
Oddly enough, that the College is a problem is entirely uncontroversial. And yet, when someone in a position to change it is asked to take up the cause, the most frequent reaction is to throw up one’s hands in despair. After all, the College is a Constitutional issue, right? What can one Senator, one Governor, one Congressperson do? Obviously the only answer is, give up.
Wrong. This easy way out, most recently taken by Governor Donald Carcieri of Rhode Island, who apparently thinks he’s legally required to take the coward’s route, misreads the law, misapprehends constitutional history, and derelicts the states’ duties to manage the College. Managing the Electoral College is not a federal duty. Our federal Constitution merely states that the election of the president will be governed by “a Number of Electors.” In a pass-through to state law common throughout the Constitution, selection of those electors is committed to the sound discretion of the states.[2] No federal authority holds a gun to the heads of state legislatures and demands that each state give all of its electors to the winner of the state’s popular vote. If the several states have chosen that path, it’s by tradition and laziness. Nothing else.
Which means that it’s up to the states, not the federal government, to fix the Electoral College. And there is a way. We have the technology, and it’s almost elegant in its simplicity. Just have each state, on its own, give its electoral votes to the winner of the national, rather than statewide, popular vote (more detail here). Once states amounting to 270 electoral votes adopt the measure, the job is done. No constitutional convention, not even any federal law. Just state-by-state lobbying.
When governors like Carcieri refuse to enact the NPV solution, and demand that NPV activists turn to federal lobbying, they’re not just taking the coward’s way out of an important political decision. They’re completely misunderstanding the problem. It’s like telling someone with a plane ticket from Manhattan to London to get off the plane and walk. It’s why we need a mandatory constitutional law class for highschoolers. If the people can’t understand the people’s document, where does that leave democracy?
Footnotes below the line.
[1]: If you want to reopen the wounds of that national debacle, I direct your attention to Toobin’s The Nine, but keep your blood pressure pills handy.
[2]: Akhil Reed Amar, “America’s Constitution: A Biography,” p. 150-56.
Moving to the District Method would require neither a constitutional amendment nor an interstate compact (which itself is likely unconstitutional, since interstate compacts require Congressional approval, which this proposed compact does not have). It would eliminate or greatly ameliorate all the weaknesses of the winner-take-all system without any of the weaknesses of a mass popular vote.
Posted by KipEsquire | July 9, 2008, 11:33 pm*sigh*
The EC is there for a reason Ames. It keeps a few states from dominating every election. Under your scenario, rural areas would be completely ignored (17% of the population). Whole states would no longer be important.
Posted by Progressive Conservative | July 9, 2008, 11:44 pmThe electoral college is certainly one of the biggest reasons for the difficulty I have mustering the will to vote. Tying individual states’ votes to the national popular vote is a really interesting way of doing this, and it strikes me as a wonderful way to run things.
I think there’s a little bit of a Prisoner’s Dilemma at work, though. I’d imagine that the current policy of most states arose precisely in order to encourage “as Ohio goes…” politics. Any state with an all-or-nothing system is relatively more worth campaigning in and making promises to than states without, and any state which divides its delegates on the basis of the statewide popular vote is relatively more worth appealing to than a state which ties its delegates to the national vote. For this to really be workable, the reform laws have to include clauses like “provided that the delegates of every other state were also committed in advance to voting for whoever won the popular vote”. Else it’s just way too easy for someone to argue that the reform simply makes their state irrelevant (they’d be right). Ames, can a law actually include phrasing like that, and is that sort of thing at all precedented?
Posted by Gotchaye | July 9, 2008, 11:46 pmGotchaye, you’re 100% right. The NPV provisions would have to have a trigger clause… and they do! I forgot to add that to the post… yeah, each state that has enacted an NPV provision has a clause saying that they only trigger if states totaling 270 votes also enact similar provisions.
Laws with triggers are odd, but they’re not unprecedented… I admit it boggled my mind when I first heard about it. FYI, though, South Dakota has a complete abortion ban with a trigger, “When Roe is overturned.” One track mind, those kids.
And, PC, I don’t think you’re right about the EC being for rural areas. If so, it’s underinclusive. Just what rural areas currently get attention because of the EC? Those in Ohio and Florida? I’ve got other problems with that argument too but I’m sleepy….
And Kip, thanks for the link! I’ll have to read when I’m awake enough to comprehend.
Posted by Ames | July 10, 2008, 12:10 amPC:
A few states already do dominate every election. Furthermore, the electoral college encourages a very calculated approach to campaigning: don’t campaign in states you have no hope of winning (49% of a state’s voters are worthless if you don’t win) and don’t campaign in states you have no chance of losing (49% of of a state’s voters are still worthless because there’s no meaning in winning more than 51% percent of a state’s vote), and focus the majority of your effort on the Three Magic Swing States.
The nature of this system makes it possible to win the electoral college without winning the national popular vote.
So we have a choice: leave in place a system allowing a literal majority of the populace—say, 51%—to be ignored, or improve it to a system that ignores 17% of the populace (which, comparatively, is a 66% improvement in the who-gets-screwed-over ratio).
Posted by Radioactive afikomen | July 10, 2008, 12:12 amAs I recall, the Electoral College was a manifestation of the “we can’t trust the unwashed masses” sentiment. To put it more nicely: it was assumed that, in all likelihood, Mr. Smith, a (potential) voter in the time of the Constitutional Convention, could not/would not be sufficiently informed (mass media not having been invented yet) about the candidates or the issues to make an informed decision about how to vote. So he empowers the respected Mr. Williams, an Elector, to vote for him. That was the original purpose of the electoral college.
Posted by Radioactive afikomen | July 10, 2008, 12:22 amProgressive Conservative, I’ve seen both those statements made before. I’ve never seen an explanation of how/why those are supposed to happen, though. What’s the mechanism whereby removing the electoral college will enable a small number of states to dominate? For that matter, as Radioactive afikoman’s described the mechanism whereby the existing system allows exactly that, what’s the basis for saying that removing the college, though it may for this mystery reason allow a small number of states to dominate, won’t increase that number to where five, or six, instead of two or three, states worth of people determine the outcome of an election. Then, assuming there is a homogeneous national rural bloc (a dubious proposition, but let’s grant it), what’s the reason that establishing a system whereby that bloc’s votes won’t be diluted by geography helps (hey, now that rural voter in Jersey matters!) rather than hurts that bloc? To say nothing of whether or not reducing the influence of rural voters would really be causing them to have too little influence instead of just correcting the excessive influence they have due to over-representation in the Senate and Electoral College.
Posted by Steve | July 10, 2008, 12:54 amFirst, we all know why Dems favored eliminating the EC for the last eight years: because a direct popular vote would have meant a President Gore in 2000. They presumably still favor it for those reasons and also because they continue to run candidates who rely on urban areas as their base.
Throwing out the EC makes the erroneous assumption that states no longer matter. Let’s keep in mind that the idea of a ‘one America’ is relatively new and disregards most of our history. This is, after all, a nation of states, each with their own governments, economies, laws and unique ways of doing things. If you think we should throw out the EC then why not throw out state governments as well, since that is where the logic leads?
We can sub-divide the U.S. population in many different ways. We can choose to do it along racial lines, ethnic, urban, suburban, etc. If we eliminate the EC the candidates will be the ones who choose how to sub-divide the population in that given year. But since they are, after all politicians, they will do what politicans do, they will go after the numbers.
Politicians will have two primary choices as their primary objective: they can either pick whites (81.7% of the population) or could be slightly more fair and go for the suburbs (51% of the population). Who will be neglected? In Scenario A they will neglect minorities who only constitute 18.3% of the population. In Scenario B they will ignore the rurual areas completely and most of the urban areas. In either scenario the groups with the greatest number of poor will be marginalized or shut out completely.
I find it interesting though that libs aren’t clamoring for a reform of Congress, even though the number of senators is aportioned in a similar fashion.
Posted by Progressive Conservative | July 10, 2008, 8:40 amI’d reply – this is a good debate – but I’m super busy. Someone else replying for me would be awesome…
Posted by Ames | July 10, 2008, 10:52 amI have got to side with the EC. A great deal of the rules for governing our country and the way representatives are elected focuses on trying to limit problems of factions. If 51 percent is all that is needed to win you can completely ignore the other 49 percent, or even actively persecute that 49 percent (as long as it makes the 51 percent happy).
The EC works by forcing candidates to win multiple states, and respect minority viewpoints. The current election map means that a few key states are the most important but that is a product of the demographics and voting records of the states. Not the EC. The fact of the matter is that some states are guaranteed to go to the democrat and some to the Republicans. The campaigns can ignore those states as far as active campaigning goes but they certainly can not afford to piss them off. The candidates still have to win those states, even if the current map is such that they do not need to actively campaign in them.
Why not complain about how the candidates are always focusing on the undecided voters? Should we restructure the voting system to make it so they spend less time on those that have not decided and more time on those that know who they are voting for in June?
Posted by Tmtoulouse | July 10, 2008, 11:32 amAh, PC, but liberals would feel too guilty about neglecting non-whites. Also, 51% is not a big enough incentive to only compete for the suburban vote. It is such a narrow margin that candidates would have to campaign elsewhere, as well.
To throw out another argument for abolishing the Electoral College: abolishing the electoral college would make it easier for third parties to run “spoiler candidates”, thus breaking the current political duopoloy and making it easier to influence the presidential election. Surely that is a good thing?
Posted by Radioactive afikomen | July 10, 2008, 11:52 amI think preferential (Instant Runoff) voting is the answer. States could adopt that instead of NPV to determine who gets their electoral votes. It wouldn’t change the nature of the EC – you’d still focus on individual states, esp. swing states – but third parties would all of a sudden be relevant.
BTW, IRV would’ve saved Gore…
Posted by Ames | July 10, 2008, 11:56 amWith the reactionary public policy that we tend to have, I think that if nothing was done after the Gore debacle, I doubt it will happen anytime soon. Which is sad.
We still can’t even get the voting part corrected.
Posted by oneiroi | July 10, 2008, 12:41 pmWell as long as we are throwing out alternatives my personal favorite and the one I could easily get behind is moving all states to district level apportionment. I assume thats what the link in the first vote is about. It still allows for the strengths in the EC method with far fewer problems.
Posted by tmtoulouse | July 10, 2008, 12:44 pmPC, while it’s obvious that a NPV would be better for liberals, and while it’s likely that at least some support it for this reason, the same could as easily be said of a conservative’s support of the EC, and I think it goes too far to automatically assume that someone advocating that the candidate who the most voters choose ought to be president is being strictly pragmatic.
I’m not sure I follow the next part of your post. A president is a single elected official charged with representing the nation as a whole. To say that the nation as a whole ought to elect a president according to a one-man-one-vote system doesn’t seem to imply in the least that there are no decisions which are best made on the state or local level. No one thinks that the governor of Ohio is supposed to represent the interests of the Californian people. Now, a similar sort of argument does at least support the reformation of the US Senate, but it doesn’t do so as strongly, and I don’t know many people who are arguing that there’s absolutely nothing good about giving more rural states more weight in some aspects of national decision-making.
For much of the rest, you seem to be offering implausible harms. Yes, if a candidate could win every white voter, he wouldn’t need to care in the slightest about minorities. However, if both try to do that, and end up splitting the white vote more or less evenly, it’s obvious that the candidate that minorities (in general) prefer is going to win. It’s clear that there’s at least some amount of marginal profit to be gained by appealing to minorities at the expense of some white votes. I do agree, however, that a NPV results in the average minority vote being more ‘expensive’ than the average majority vote, but this seems a reasonable price to pay, and I’m not entirely convinced that the EC forces politicians to court a wide variety of minority groups (minority social groups – that it forces candidates to court automakers and ethanol producers doesn’t strike me as a positive) – could you further explain this? I admit to being very surprised to hear this argument from a conservative; the advantage of the EC that you’re describing here is essentially affirmative action in voting.
Tmt, a lot of those harms are nonunique, I think. As things are, a politician only cares about winning 51% of the vote in particular states. Who cares about 49% of Ohio? If one can’t criticize the EC for encouraging politicians to focus only on those people that they absolutely need in order to get a state’s electoral votes, then I don’t see how one can criticize the NPV for essentially the same thing while acknowledging that it includes more people.
And no one’s saying that it’s the EC’s ‘fault’ that so many states don’t matter, but it’s obvious that almost every state matters much more under a NPV scheme. NPV means that significant minority populations (in the most general sense, liberals in red states and conservatives in blue states, but, more specifically) have some impact on the process. The EC only makes sense if one assumes that the voters in swing states are a representative cross-section of the US, and I don’t think that that’s been at all established.
Posted by Gotchaye | July 10, 2008, 1:45 pm“If one can’t criticize the EC for encouraging politicians to focus only on those people that they absolutely need in order to get a state’s electoral votes, then I don’t see how one can criticize the NPV for essentially the same thing”
Ignoring 49% of Ohio under the Electoral College is different from ignoring, for example, black women under a popular vote.
Posted by Collin | July 10, 2008, 2:19 pmI think the rural vs. urban issue breaks out a little easier when you look at the nature of states instead of the population centers within states. As of 2006, Wyoming has a population of ~515k. North Dakota, ~636k. South Dakota, ~781k. Utah has 2,550k and that’s with a major-ish city in it. New Mexico has ~1,954k.
NYC has ~8.25M people in it. I could’ve kept going with the first bit with a few more states, but I got bored of looking; you get the idea. There’s a whole swath of the COUNTRY you can ignore, urban/rural/black/white/indian/playdoh (Mr. Bill has to live somewhere…) or whatever, and they’ve got some (not all) completely different political priorities out there.
Does anyone remember a few years ago, how the Republicans were threatening to remove the filibuster as a tactic on the Senate floor? They were so cock-sure in their supremacy that they wanted to disrupt the system for a gain in the current situation. Karl Rove and his talk of a permanent majority, and so on…
I’m all for national resources to be spent where the people are, but when it gets to something as fundamental as representation, either a state is stuck in the club no matter what, or it isn’t, and if it isn’t then Abraham Lincoln has a whole lot of ‘splainin’ to do.
~ John
Posted by John | July 10, 2008, 2:56 pmI admit to being remarkably ignorant when it comes to applied anything, and especially politics, but the percentage of Ohio’s population which is black is just about the same as that for the US as a whole. If one can’t ignore that 12% of the vote when campaigning for Ohio specifically, why can one ignore it when campaigning nation-wide?
I think that the important question, John, is how far that goes. Yes, no one wants rural areas to be completely shut out of presidential elections, but it’s clear that even the ideal election would grant NYC alone about four times as much weight as all of New Mexico. It seems obvious that a candidate should care more about what the population of NYC thinks of him than of what the population of Utah thinks of him.
And I think that the way campaigning works is going to guarantee that rural areas aren’t ignored. One can rationally ignore Mississippi or Massachusetts under the current rules. However, under NPV, it makes sense to run ads and so forth in rural areas – media costs are generally proportional to population. What it won’t make sense to do is to promise large tax subsidies from suburban- and city-dwellers to people like ethanol producers because the ethanol producers’ votes are so much more valuable.
Posted by Gotchaye | July 10, 2008, 3:18 pmThe goal of the EC is to break up national factions. Check out Madison’s Federalist Paper no. 10 (you can find many many copies with google). While you can “ignore” the 49 percent in Ohio, it is likely that another states “majority” will be made up of people with like minds as another states minority. This forces you to respect minority opinion since in some states they will be a majority.
Posted by Tmtoulouse | July 10, 2008, 5:00 pm@Gotchaye,
You make a good point. I get really queasy walking the tightrope at these heights, but I still feel (and yes, I know “feeling” something isn’t the same as “knowing”) that the fact that a candidate ought to care more about NYC than about Utah, from a success perspective, is exactly why the EC makes sense.
Now, I’m willing to acknowledge that there may be OTHER ways to offer small states protection in the process, other than the EC. I’ve got no clue what those ways are – that’s why I read blogs like this, rather than make my fortune as a lobbyist. :p
~ John
Posted by John | July 10, 2008, 7:24 pmJohn, I’d say a candidate ought to care more about NYC than the whole of Utah regardless. Candidate always ought to care more about 8 million people than 2 million. Needs of the many outweigh needs of the few (provided sufficiently interchangeable people).
“If you think we should throw out the EC then why not throw out state governments as well, since that is where the logic leads?”
I don’t see why not. Federalism’s a quaint historic artifact. At times (Alaska’s firearms laws) it has positive practical effect. At times (South Dakota’s abortion laws) it leads to execrable outcomes. As best I can tell, it’s the way things are because it’s the way things were, and has a 50-50 chance of being a means to desirable ends or undesirable ends. Doesn’t seem like something that deserves to be enshrined as a principle or high ideal.
“Now, a similar sort of argument does at least support the reformation of the US Senate, but it doesn’t do so as strongly, and I don’t know many people who are arguing that there’s absolutely nothing good about giving more rural states more weight in some aspects of national decision-making.”
Gotcheye, I argue exactly that. Rural states are overrepresented in the Senate. I’d support a policy to have a portion of the Senate seats redistributed every so often according to population. Say, every third census (30 being the LCM of 6 and 10) the least populous tenth of the states get dropped to 1 Senator and the most populous tenth get bumped up to 3 Senators.
Posted by Steve | July 10, 2008, 11:35 pmSince I’ve been out of this discussion for a couple of days i will just piggyback off the last comment.
From Steve:
“John, I’d say a candidate ought to care more about NYC than the whole of Utah regardless. Candidate always ought to care more about 8 million people than 2 million. Needs of the many outweigh needs of the few (provided sufficiently interchangeable people).”
I think that is the exact logic that the framers of the Constitution were trying to mitigate. For them it wasn’t about numbers. It was about understanding that different parts of the country had different ideals, opinions, etc. People in Philadelphia or Boston had different ideals than plantation owners in Virginia or merchants in Charleston. Recognizing that groups who live together tend to be somewhat homogenous in their beliefs, the framers used the EC to allow different regional voices to carry equal weight or at least have a fighting chance of being heard. Granted this is a broad generalization, but the logic is still sound. Now though with a much larger population, those regional voices have perhaps shrunk to the district level. Maybe we all need to take a hard look at the states that have gone to aportioning their EC votes along district lines.
Posted by Progressive Conservative | July 12, 2008, 10:54 am@PC
Would you have reservations about switching to proportional electoral votes?
I feel like that solves many of the problems (except actually getting all states to switch over). I’ve lived in Texas and New York…both times my vote really didn’t do much.
I’d be interested in finding ways to change that while also giving smaller states a chance.
Posted by oneiroi | July 15, 2008, 12:02 pm@PC
This is the argument that is always brought up in favor of the EC, that it gives every state some leverage. I personally cannot comprehend why that is important.
Could you, or someone else, tell me why 515,000 people in a state like Wyoming should get attention equal to 36 million people in (for example) California? Just because you live somewhere less densely populated doesn’t mean you deserve more attention, yet this is exactly what you are saying is some kind of right that the popular vote strips away.
Oh, and just one more thing: under the current system, when oneiroi voted in Texas (or New York) in 2004, his vote was worth roughly one-third the vote of someone living in Wyoming in terms of electoral votes. You can do the math yourself, it’s quite simple.
This is the reason (not close elections like 2000) that everyone should be up in arms about the Electoral College. I don’t care about states’ equality. Make the voters equal to each other.
Posted by M | July 22, 2008, 10:54 pmThis doesn’t make any sense i want to learn the fixes to the electoral college
Posted by Jamie | September 18, 2008, 11:15 pmI never saw those two comments directed towards me, so I’ll be happy to comment now….
Oneiroi, I am cautiously okay with allocating votes along district lines. of course, that pretty much screws me, since I live in a city that tends to vote Democratic, but sees more fair upon initial consideration. As it stands now, for example, vast expanses of rural areas in my state that vote conservative carry us into the red. As a Kentuckian and a Republican that makes me happy. As a Louisvillian, I can see where my liberal fellow-citizens would be unhappy.
M, I’m not sure I follow how you think that the folks in WY get equal attention as the people in CA. Currently they have 3 electoral votes to California’s 55.
Even with the EC, states with large populations are still more powerful than smaller states. One example is AZ and NY. If you look at the top 50 cities in the U.S. Arizona has three of them. NY state has one. But NY holds the edge in EC votes by 31 to 10 because votes are still based on population and obviously NYC has an enormous population.
As I stated earlier, the Founding Fathers were acknowledging that regional voices are distinct from one another. A look at any district-level electoral map will still confirm that. I think that it’s still in the interest of our nation to acknowledge that people’s opinions differ from region to region and that should be factored in to the equation. The EC does not make rural and urban areas equal but it does attempt to give areas of low population a fighting chance to be heard.
Posted by Progressive Conservative | September 19, 2008, 8:35 am