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The Electoral College
is a perennial source of debate and trolling in places like Quora. When people argue against it, they frequently point to its disproportionate leaning in favor of small-population states -- how Wyoming has almost 4 times as many electoral votes per capita as California. Which is unfair and inelegant, yes, but it's really not a big deal. The Senatorial electoral votes are only 19% of all the electoral votes; the other 71% of electoral votes are roughly proportional, so it's not a huge distortion. Furthermore, the distortion isn't strongly partisan: of the fourteen states with 3 or 4 electoral votes (the ones that benefit most from the small-state bonus), 7 are reliably Republican, 5 reliably Democratic, and 2 swingy, so things almost balance out.
I spent a few minutes on 270towin.com looking at the last 200 years' worth of Presidential elections, subtracting Senatorial electoral votes from each candidate's total to see whether the results would have changed. And of those fifty elections, three would have had different results without the Senatorial electoral votes.
One was the election of 1916: without the Senatorial electoral votes, Woodrow Wilson would have been a one-term President. I know very little about that election, except that it took place while Europe was at war and the US was (so far) staying out of it. And apparently it was quite close in the electoral college: Wilson won most of the acres and most of the states, but Republican Charles Hughes won the populous states of the Midwest and the Northeast; without the Senatorial electoral votes, Hughes would have won the Presidency by one vote.
The other two are well-known, consequential elections.
In 1876, Democrat Samuel Tilden indisputably won the popular vote, and had 184 electoral votes, while Republican Rutherford Hayes had 165 electoral votes, with 20 votes in dispute. Eventually Hayes won the court case and got all 20 disputed votes, winning the election by one vote. It's believed that he managed this largely by promising the Democrats that if elected, he would dismantle Reconstruction. Without the Senatorial electoral votes, the20 14 disputed votes wouldn't have been enough to change the outcome, so he wouldn't have bothered making that promise. Reconstruction would still have been dismantled, by a Democratic President, but the Republican Party wouldn't have actively turned their backs on it, and might have continued fighting to preserve some aspects of it.
The other was the Bush-Gore contest of 2000, which many people reading this remember. Gore indisputably won the national popular vote, but the electoral college would go one way or the other depending on Florida, where there was a margin of a few hundred votes (out of 20 million people). Manual recounts dragged on for weeks, under the direction of a Secretary of State who was also Bush's state campaign chair, appointed to office by Bush's brother. Eventually the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Florida wasn't obligated to recount every county, so (since Bush was ahead at the time) the Secretary of State stopped the recount, and G. W. Bush became President. Without the Senatorial electoral votes, Gore wouldn't have needed Florida to win, the election wouldn't have depended on the Florida recount, the Supreme Court wouldn't have gotten involved, and the U.S. would have taken action much sooner on climate change (among other things).
All of which is to say that while the disproportionate electoral college doesn't matter often, it can make a big difference on those rare occasions. But why such a big difference? Because of the other weird feature of the US electoral college, its "winner-take-all by state" nature. Most states elect an entire slate of electors at once, either all sworn to vote for the Republican or all sworn to vote for the Democrat. (There are occasional "faithless electors" who do what electors were supposed to do according to the Constitution: use their own judgment after being elected. I don't think this has ever changed the winner.) In the 1876 and 2000 elections I just described, the real problem was that all the disputed electoral votes would go one way, or all would go the other. If the affected states had awarded their electoral votes proportionally, the dispute would have been over one electoral vote, or three electoral votes, rather than 20 or 25, and the disputed votes would have been much less likely to change the outcome.
On the other hand, the all-or-nothing character does mean there aren't long legal disputes except where the statewide popular vote is extremely close. One can imagine that if every state awarded electoral votes proportionally or by district, there would be a court fight in every state in every election, each side trying to squeeze one more electoral vote out of the state. But on the third hand, since the stakes of each case would be much lower, these court fights might not be hard-fought.
To my mind, the real problem with the all-or-nothing electoral college is that the entire Presidential campaign is waged in about ten "swing states". Public opinion polls, months before the election, tell us which states are close enough that either candidate could win them, and those are the only states to which either candidate pays any attention thereafter. If you're a Republican in California, or a Democrat in Texas, there's not much point voting for President because you know your state's electoral votes won't go your way. For that matter, if you're a Democrat in California, or a Republican in Texas, there's also not much point voting for President because you know your state's electoral votes will go your way. In a winner-take-all system, there's no difference between 1% and 49%, nor between 51% and 99%, so unless your state is closely divided, your vote doesn't matter.
Enough of this; I need to go to bed.
I spent a few minutes on 270towin.com looking at the last 200 years' worth of Presidential elections, subtracting Senatorial electoral votes from each candidate's total to see whether the results would have changed. And of those fifty elections, three would have had different results without the Senatorial electoral votes.
One was the election of 1916: without the Senatorial electoral votes, Woodrow Wilson would have been a one-term President. I know very little about that election, except that it took place while Europe was at war and the US was (so far) staying out of it. And apparently it was quite close in the electoral college: Wilson won most of the acres and most of the states, but Republican Charles Hughes won the populous states of the Midwest and the Northeast; without the Senatorial electoral votes, Hughes would have won the Presidency by one vote.
The other two are well-known, consequential elections.
In 1876, Democrat Samuel Tilden indisputably won the popular vote, and had 184 electoral votes, while Republican Rutherford Hayes had 165 electoral votes, with 20 votes in dispute. Eventually Hayes won the court case and got all 20 disputed votes, winning the election by one vote. It's believed that he managed this largely by promising the Democrats that if elected, he would dismantle Reconstruction. Without the Senatorial electoral votes, the
The other was the Bush-Gore contest of 2000, which many people reading this remember. Gore indisputably won the national popular vote, but the electoral college would go one way or the other depending on Florida, where there was a margin of a few hundred votes (out of 20 million people). Manual recounts dragged on for weeks, under the direction of a Secretary of State who was also Bush's state campaign chair, appointed to office by Bush's brother. Eventually the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Florida wasn't obligated to recount every county, so (since Bush was ahead at the time) the Secretary of State stopped the recount, and G. W. Bush became President. Without the Senatorial electoral votes, Gore wouldn't have needed Florida to win, the election wouldn't have depended on the Florida recount, the Supreme Court wouldn't have gotten involved, and the U.S. would have taken action much sooner on climate change (among other things).
All of which is to say that while the disproportionate electoral college doesn't matter often, it can make a big difference on those rare occasions. But why such a big difference? Because of the other weird feature of the US electoral college, its "winner-take-all by state" nature. Most states elect an entire slate of electors at once, either all sworn to vote for the Republican or all sworn to vote for the Democrat. (There are occasional "faithless electors" who do what electors were supposed to do according to the Constitution: use their own judgment after being elected. I don't think this has ever changed the winner.) In the 1876 and 2000 elections I just described, the real problem was that all the disputed electoral votes would go one way, or all would go the other. If the affected states had awarded their electoral votes proportionally, the dispute would have been over one electoral vote, or three electoral votes, rather than 20 or 25, and the disputed votes would have been much less likely to change the outcome.
On the other hand, the all-or-nothing character does mean there aren't long legal disputes except where the statewide popular vote is extremely close. One can imagine that if every state awarded electoral votes proportionally or by district, there would be a court fight in every state in every election, each side trying to squeeze one more electoral vote out of the state. But on the third hand, since the stakes of each case would be much lower, these court fights might not be hard-fought.
To my mind, the real problem with the all-or-nothing electoral college is that the entire Presidential campaign is waged in about ten "swing states". Public opinion polls, months before the election, tell us which states are close enough that either candidate could win them, and those are the only states to which either candidate pays any attention thereafter. If you're a Republican in California, or a Democrat in Texas, there's not much point voting for President because you know your state's electoral votes won't go your way. For that matter, if you're a Democrat in California, or a Republican in Texas, there's also not much point voting for President because you know your state's electoral votes will go your way. In a winner-take-all system, there's no difference between 1% and 49%, nor between 51% and 99%, so unless your state is closely divided, your vote doesn't matter.
Enough of this; I need to go to bed.
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Ironically, the national popular vote is easier to achieve than either fix alone. The small-state bonus is written into the Constitution, so changing it requires a Constitutional amendment. All-or-nothing isn't written into the Constitution, which says each state can decide how to award electoral votes according to its own state laws... but it's in the self-interest of each state, for two different reasons.
Swing states like to be all-or-nothing because it makes them valuable prizes, encouraging Presidential candidates to promise whatever the state's voters want while ignoring the wishes of the red or blue state next door. Non-swing states would actually benefit from proportional allocation, in that they would get some attention from Presidential candidates. But the decision isn't made by the state as a whole, it's made by the state legislature, and if the state is deep blue (resp. red), so is its legislature, which wants to give its party's candidate all of the state's electoral votes, not just some of them. So for any state to abandon all-or-nothing electoral votes feels like unilateral disarmament; they would all have to do it at once, and that again probably requires a Constitutional amendment.
The national popular vote, OTOH, can be implemented without a Constitutional amendment, by a clever dodge. Remember that the Constitution says each state can decide freely how to allocate its electoral votes. The Constitution doesn't say it has to be based on a popular vote in that state, or any popular vote at all (indeed, in the early years most states had the state legislature choose the electors without asking the populace). So what if a state passed a law saying it would give its electors to the winner of the national popular vote, regardless of who won the popular vote in that state? One or two states doing so again feels like unilateral disarmament, and it wouldn't make much difference. But if states adding up to 270 electoral votes all did it, they would determine the outcome of the next Presidential election, regardless of what the remaining states did, and we would have a national popular vote system in practice, even though it still worked through the electoral college. So the people pushing this idea wrote a model law that any state can pass, committing its electoral votes to the winner of the national popular vote, but only if enough other states have passed similar laws to constitute an electoral majority. See Wikipedia page.
So far 15 states and the District of Columbia, adding up to 195 electoral votes, have passed this model law. But so far it's mostly been "blue" states; "red" states like Texas and Wyoming, which arguably would benefit from a national popular vote because the all-or-nothing property ignores non-swing states, haven't signed on. And they probably won't as long as Democrats keep winning the national popular vote (as in six of the last seven Presidential elections). But if a Republican won the popular vote, especially if a Democrat won in the electoral college, there would suddenly be a lot of interest among Republicans in reforming the system.
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Something like this has sorta happened already: the North Dakota legislature passed a bill saying the state would report the winner of its popular vote for President, but not the exact numbers, until after the Electoral College had voted, which means it couldn't be used to determine a national popular vote that affected the Electoral College.
More realistically, and less "dog-in-the-manger", what if a state passed a law implementing ranked-choice voting for Presidential electors? I'm also all in favor of ranked voting, but it's not clear how to add up one state's ranked ballots with another state's single-vote ballots. Ranked voting is likely to lead to more votes for third parties and fewer for either major-party candidate; does this mean that any state enacting ranked voting has reduced its own impact on the Presidential election?
Of course, in my ideal world, the Presidency would be chosen by a nationwide ranked ballot, using the Borda system rather than instant runoff. But that would almost certainly require a Constitutional amendment, and it's not happening in my lifetime.
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