How Does the Electoral College Help Small States?

Great Debates
1

First, I want to make one thing clear: I do NOT want this thread to degenrate into another argument about the year 2000 elections, the hanging chads, etc. This is to be an argument about a specific aspect of the Electoral College system.

I happen to oppose the whole system, and think the President should be elected directly by the people. The reason this is unlikely ever to happen is that it would require a Constitutional amendment, which would require the support of 38 states… and there are far too many small states that think the Electoral College helps them, or at least bolsters their power and importance.

But really, DOES it?

Let’s look at two states: Wyoming and Hawaii. Both have very small populations. In theory, at least, these are precisely the types of states the Electoral College is supposed to empower. But as a practical matter, the Electoral College marginalizes those states.

Why? Look, Wyoming is almost always a lock for the Republicans and Hawaii is almost always a lock for the Democrats. Both parties know that. Hence, a Presidential candidate either doesn’t bother to campaign in those states at all, or puts in only a token visit (just long enough to pose for photos in a lei or a cowboy hat). The Republican KNOWS he’s going to win Wyoming, he KNOWS he’s going to lose Hawaii, so he figures there’s no point wasting valuable time and money campaigning there (flip the states, and the Democrat follows the same logic)… even if he got VERY lucky, the payoff would be of no great consequence.

So, far from empowering those small states, the Electoral College pretty much insures that Presidential candidates will ignore them.
Why, then, do small states cling to the idea?

2

How does abolishing the electoral college change anything for Wyoming and Hawaii? The same assumptions are still operative: the Republicans will take the majority of votes in Wyoming, the Democrats in Hawaii. In either case, their populations are too small to worry about the smidgen who’ll go the other way, so both states would continue to be ignored in the campaign.

In short, under either scheme, they get ignored–not because of the system, but because they’re not populous.

That said, Wyoming gets to disproportionately support the Elephant, and Hawaii the Donkey because their meagre support isn’t divided. I would say that’s a benefit, at least from their perspective.

3

I think it’s “conventional wisdom” that the small states support the EC because of the alleged leverage it gives them in the choice of the President.

I’d suspect fairly strongly that a direct-election amendment would sail through and be ratified by the requisite number of states.

Particularly after the Bush v. Gore Supreme Court cases – and I agree that election 2000 is not appropriate here, but I get the distinct impression that the limitations the Court read as binding, which were imposed by the need to get slates of electors qualified, were less than satisfactory to partisans on either side – Democrats for obvious reasons, and Republicans because it exposed Bush to allegations that he stole the Presidency and attempted to deprive people of votes, thus ironically undermining the “legitimacy” that the Court hoped to provide for him by their ruling.

Effectively, the law mandating the date by which states could submit unchallengeable returns of electors was what caused the results of that election.

And, of course, there have been a number of cases where the college elected a minority president (see December’s recent posts elsewhere for the last two such occasions) and where a slim plurality became a landslide majority in the EC.

4

A smaller state that has a disproportionately high number of electoral votes vs its percentage of the population where either candidate has a legitmate chance of winning increases the odds that that state will get more candidate attention than if the election were decided by popular vote.

5

astorian, you are confusing politics with the electoral college. Yes, Hawaii and Wyoming are almost always locks for their respective parties, so Presidential candidates don’t pay any attention to them, despite the fact that they get more electoral votes than their population warrants.

But that says nothing about the electoral college. In this last election, neither candidate paid any attention to yet another state, because its electoral votes were considered “locked up.” And that state was … New York.

So, let’s look at a small state that is normally competitive - Delaware. Delaware swings one way or another - Republicans and Democrats tend to swap the governorship and congressman offices, and for decades it had one GOP senator and one Dem senator (right now it has two Dem senators, but that’s largely an accident of fate - GOP Senator Roth had been in for 20-odd years and was roughly 145 years old. :smiley: Unlike in South Carolina, Delawarians considered senility to be a problem.)

Delaware has three electoral votes, or a little over 1% of the number of electoral votes needed to win the presidency. Without the two extra votes provided in the electoral college (but assuming we keep “winner take all”), it would only constitute about .4% of the votes needed to win the Presidency.

Either way, it’s not that important. But a candidate is more likely to spend some time listening to Delaware’s concerns with the electoral college system. Whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing is another story.

Sua

6

You have to look at the whole package at the time the Constitution was ratified.

If you don’t like the Electoral College, you probably don’t like the Senate, either. It was purposefully set up that way, of course. Until 1913, I believe, Senators were also elected by the state legislators. The idea was to prevent the “Folly of the Masses” as it were.

If a direct popular vote for President were the case, then winning New York, LA, Chicago and Pennsylvania say, would be all that was necessary. Don’t know about you, but I’m not keen on that idea.

7

Yeah, we’re kind of having the wrong argument here. The electoral college helps smaller states slightly; it’s the senate that makes a mockery of “representation by population” and ensures that a vote in New York or Texas means a heck of a lot less than a vote in Wyoming or Delaware. While that may hurt geographic representativeness, it would certainly help human representativeness. Rocks don’t vote.

8

The electoral college also is a boon for states without large cities (this is only a slight variation on what we’re already talking about). For example, a politician could easily win the presidency by just dealing with urban issues and ignoring people in rural areas. By giving rural states more voting power we’ve insured that the people living in such areas are not disenfranchised, and also are taking care of agriculture’s interests along the way.

9

I think one of the driving ideas behind the Electoral College to begin with was that this country was founded as a federation of largely independent states under a collective central government that served and answered to the states, and so it was set out in the Constitution that the states would elect a President, and that the people of each state would select the Representatives (and thereby the Senators) that went to Congress to represent a state and the political interests of that state.

Because I’m of that mind, I can’t see how the Electoral College wouldn’t benefit states. Instead of giving each person in the US one vote for a President of the ‘people’, it gives each state votes proportional to the size of the state for the President of the United States.

The US is a huge country in terms of geography, and has quite a large population (although no, not the largest on the planet), and in the expanse of it, there are many many varied cultures and political opinions that sometimes seem to appear in pockets, where one state has one culture and another state another culture. Sometimes, a state is big enough that there are different cultures on each side of the state. So what we see on the red and blue maps is quite often that the costal states go for one color, the midwestern for the other, one state this way, one state that way, etc.

I think that smaller states tend to feel that without the Electoral College, their concerns wouldn’t matter, because the ‘large population centers’ would tend to decide the Presidential election, and if you’ve got a few large cities that account for more votes than a state, then I figure they probably feel overshadowed. Compare say, Los Angeles with an in-city population of 3,694,820 people to Wyoming with a population statewide of 493,782 people. A single state could easily feel overshadowed by a large city in terms of their concerns if votes went purely by popular vote.

When you’ve got a lot of large urban centers and a lot of sparsely populated states, there has to be a way to balance each state’s interest to give each state fair representation. That, for example, if it was known that large ubran centers (L.A.) favor tomatoes, and sparsely populated states (Wyoming) favor potatoes, that the tomato city won’t just drown out the voice of the potato state.

And still we have to ensure that a state with a very large population (California: 33,871,648) has a proportional and fair share of the say compared to a state with a very small population (Wyoming: 493,782), knowing that the two states have very different concerns based on different cultures, and that in a pure popular vote, the concerns of Wyoming could easily be negated by even one CITY in California, let alone the whole state.

Anyway, I can see where the concern comes from, and why smaller states seem to favor the Electoral College.

cites: http://www.losangelesalmanac.com/topics/Population/po27.htm
http://eadiv.state.wy.us/pop/st-01est.htm

10

Why not go by number of votes-not states? Tally up the votes in each state, then add them all together, rather than winner take all in some states. For example, I had friends in Texas who were completely disgusted by the fact that their votes DIDN’T count, because it was already locked up by the Republicans.

(Or am I speaking out of my ass?)

11

[the Delawarean cheers with delight!]

:smiley: I can’t speak for all Delawareans but I voted Roth out of office because I thought, at his age and in his state of health, he should be at home with his family, not because he was senile.

Thus within the electoral system my vote in Delaware counts about three times more than it would in California, where the difference between the ratio of Reps (in the House) and Electors (in the College) is only slightly more than 1.

The other thing to remember is that a state has a minimum of one Representative (and so three electoral votes), no matter how small its population. At present I think one Rep in the House represents a maximum of ~600,000 people – which is about Delaware’s population. A state with far fewer people than 600,000 still has one Rep, so that even that contribution to the electoral college is disproportionate to the population. I could be the only person in Delaware and my vote would be outlandishly powerful on the national scale, relative to my actual importance. Of course, if I were the only Delawarean I’d have to be both senators, the representative in the House, the governor… OK, so say Delaware was inhabited by five people…

I think it’s a good thing, not so much because Delaware’s concerns alone carry more weight, but the system reminds candidates to pay a bit more attention to the less populous states. Delaware alone might never swing an election, but all of the states with, say, 3-5 electoral votes could make a difference.

Whether it’s a good thing to have an electoral system which first breaks up the country into a random assortment of pieces and populations is another question. But the OP was about how the existing system benefits small states.

12

No, it’s definitely not ass-speaking, but there is a balance to be considered.

First of all, you have to consider that your idea is actually what happens (literally) 97.2% of the time. In only two Presidential elections did the popular vote winner not win the Electoral College.

But the real question is, what is a better system - one in which the winner wins a majority of all votes cast, or one in which the winner has a broad base of support? The electoral college system requires a broad base.
YMMV, and I do have problems with the electoral college, at least as it is currently constituted, but it is justifiable.

Sua

13

Yes, I’m quite familiar with the argument from people in small states that “if we didn’t have x number of electoral votes, candidates wouldn’t pay us any mind at all.”

That’s precisely why I point to Wyoming and Hawaii, and ask, “And that would differ from the current reality… how?”
Right NOW, no candidate of either party sees any need to waste time campaigning in states like Wyoming and Hawaii, or to promise the voters in those states anything of value.

If anything, I’m inclined to think candidates would take voters in MANY states more seriously if they knew that individual votes counted for something. George W. Bush KNEW that Hawaii’s few electoral votes were going to go to Al Gore, so he saw no point to addressing Hawaiians’ needs or concerns. Al Gore KNEW he had no chance of winning Wyoming’s few votes, so he never tried to woo Wyoming voters. But if the votes of individual Hawaiians and individual Wyomingites counted for something, Bush and Gore WOULD have had an incentive to make some kind of pitch to them.

What’s more, “minority” voters (e.g. Texas Democrats, New York Republicans, etc.) in ALL states would have an increased incentive to vote. As it now stands, many Texas Democrats stay home on Election Day, knowing that Texas’ electoral votes are going to the GOP no matter what they do. Many conservative voters in New York or California may do the same. But if their individual votes counted for something, they might not stay home.

Again, my argument here is not based on the idea that a direct election would be more just or fair (though, obviously, I DO believe that). My contention is simply that the Electoral College DOESN’T really give small states the clout they think it does.

14

Sua: this presupposes that the greatest divisions between voters are geographic ones. While the beliefs and interests of two people in two different states might differ somewhat, so too may the beliefs and interests of two people who live in the same geographic area. Two white, christian, conservative farmers who are living in different states are probably more similar than a black protestant, an asian buddhist, and a latino catholic all living in Los Angeles.

The former difference is enshrined in the constitution and the latter one is utterly ignored. This can have a direct impact on elections and policy, leading to a focus on geographic interests as opposed to, say, ideological or socio-cultural interests. Why should the interests of the former be priviledged over the interests of the latter? Just because “it’s always been done this way”, or because of a notion of state supremacy that a war has already been fought and lost over?

(This debate extends beyond the United States. Part of the reason why there is such a bitter debate in Canada over a “triple E” Senate. The western provinces want such a Senate because they think their interests would be better served, but Ontario and Quebec both loathe the concept as it supercedes other divisions in society, makes a mockery of Ontarian voters and ignores the French/English division that the country was founded on).

Perhaps its because I come from a different system, but “geography uber alles” seems nothing but a dangerous anachronism.

15

As SuaSponte has already mentioned though, I think you’re mixing apples and oranges. It’s true that politicians can for the most part depend on certain states to come through with either a democrat/republican vote. But, that is because the majority of the people in that state feel they are best represented by that canidate. That’s how politics work. What the electoral college does is give that Wyoming vote more power. The fact that the majority of Wyomingites consistantly feel best represented by a republican doesn’t really factor in. You as an individual may have less voting power, but as a state you have more.

16

Astorian, if 70% of the voters of the state of Wyoming vote GOP in every presidential election, why would you think that the candidate of either party would pay any more attention to that state without an electoral college?

This is why a state’s voting patterns aren’t relevant to a discussion of the validity of the electoral college. Even without an electoral college, if a particular area is locked up by one party, neither candidate will waste resources there.

'Sides which, voting patterns can change. 20-30 years ago, there was little point in either party wasting resources on the Solid Democratic South, was there?

Demo, I wasn’t supporting the argument in favor of the electoral college; I was merely spelling it out for Guin.

Sua

17

http://www.nara.gov/fedreg/elctcoll/faq.html

Just for reference :slight_smile:

The argument about the senate does apply to the electoral college, however, contrary to other opinions expressed.

For those who feel that the large states aren’t represented as well as the smaller ones, then, that’s partly false. The electoral college system simply isn’t a perfectly proportional scale.

18

Tedster:

What a ridiculous statement. If every single person in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Pennsylvania voted for one presidential candidate (which is an absurdity in itself), that’s only 26 million votes. (City and state populations) That’s just over half the total that Bush received last election.

Hyperbole much? :rolleyes:

19

Of course, I mean that the assigment of electoral college votes to states isn’t a strict function of population, but it is strongly influenced by it.

20

I only recently learned that equal suffrage for all the States in the Senate is the only provision of the Constitution that essentially cannot be amended–a state has to consent to losing its equal suffrage in the Senate. Clearly, the smaller states didn’t trust the larger states at all.

As for the OP, I think France’s recent experience offers a good lesson on one downside of direct popular vote. In the first go round, neither Chirac nor Le Pen received more than 20% of the vote. In the runoff, Chirac received 82% of the vote, but mostly because people were horrified at the idea of Le Pen getting into office. FWIW, only France, Finland, and Russia directly elect their presidents.

If we abolished the EC, I think we’d see a gradual increase in the number of splinter groups and single issue candidates on the ballot. As it stands now, those groups tend to moderate their message to be included in the major parties, or they stay on the fringe, devoid of any real political influence. Also, as Sua pointed out, the EC requires the parties and candidates to develop broad bases of support–as much as you might loathe one party or the other, for the most part, they are pretty moderate, although, of course, both parties have a lunatic fringe.