How Does the Electoral College Help Small States?

Great Debates
21

Okay, so I exaggerate-- how about this then,

Florida, California, New York, Ohio, and Pennsylvania? You get the idea, and the idea is still perfectly sound.

No fucking way are the rural states going to let a few states, and indirectly, a few large cities decide who the next President is going to be. Personally, I think a poll tax or limiting voters to only property holders, taxpayers, veterans of military service and similar restriction makes good sense. An illiterate white trash crank head on welfare who thinks he may have just voted for Buchanan by mistake just doesn’t strike me as an informed electorate, but that’s me.

22

Okay, so I exaggerate-- how about this then,

Florida, California, New York, Ohio, and Pennsylvania? You get the idea, and the idea is still perfectly sound.

No fucking way are the rural states going to let a few states, and indirectly, a few large cities decide who the next President is going to be. Personally, I think a poll tax or limiting voters to only property holders, taxpayers, veterans of military service and similar restriction makes good sense. An illiterate white trash crank head on welfare who thinks he may have just voted for Buchanan by mistake just doesn’t strike me as an informed electorate, but hey.

23

KSO: Clearly, the smaller states didn’t trust the larger states at all. How is this clear? The larger the population the more representatives in the house and the more electoral college votes (by extension) one has. California has 54 electoral college votes. Wyoming has 3.

Forgive me if I don’t see how this amounts to the little guys having all the power.

24

—No fucking way are the rural states going to let a few states, and indirectly, a few large cities decide who the next President is going to be.—

Why, when hypothetically imagining what it would be like if we had a truly popular vote (i.e., no breakdown by states) do people insist on breaking things down by states. It wouldn’t be “rural states” that would lose a election, but the minority in general, whoever that included, from any state.

If you think the electoral college is screwed up: what about the Senate? 16% of the population controls half the Senators!

25

So, Tedster, now you get to decide who’s smart enough to vote and who isn’t? Sheesh :rolleyes:

26

FWIW I think the EC has more influence on who runs rather than who wins (atleast in modern times).

Lets take former Pres. Clinton as an example. Lets put aside party affiliation for a minute. The Gov. of Arkansas wants to run for Pres. with a Senator from Tennessee. The opposing party looks at this and picks a presidentail nominee from California with a running mate from New York. Do you think any party would risk nominating a candidate from from a very small state with hardly any “base” support to run against a candidate that can hit the ground running? Or considering the nomination process even make it that far?

I look at it this way. Most people know who the governor of California, New York, Texas, or Florida is. Even if they can’t recall the name instantly these governors are in the media more often and have much more name recognition than say a governor (or most any politition) from Arkansas, Louisiana, New Mexico, etc. The “little guy/gal” may not get a chance to shine.

27

I can’t see any problem with this at all. Every single vote counts, large states can’t “bully” smaller states or vice versa, and it eliminates the possibility of a candidate with the most votes losing, which is–or at least should be–shameful.

Is there any equivalent in any other democratic country to the EC, where receiving the most votes cast in a country (state, district, canton, etc) can be essentially irrelevant?

28

eris, I took KSO’s remarks as a general statement about the structure of the Senate. No matter how you look at it, the Constitution clearly regards each state as a separate but equal political entity. Further, it
structures Congress around two separate concepts of representation by population and representation by state. If in fact the latter aspect is very difficult or near-impossible to amend in practice, that would seem to indicate that the original “small states” wanted a guarantee or protection against losing this kind of representation – since, IIRC, it was primarily the less-populous states who insisted on representation by state in the first place.

But no, it does not amount to the little guys having all the power. Just a louder voice.

29

I agree that the basis of the original question is an erroneous assumption. The Electoral College system wasn’t originally intended to try to equalize power between large and small states. Rather it was designed to overcome the transportation difficulties of the time which it was thought would make a national popular election too cumbersome, and to prevent the stampeding of “the masses” by demagoguery. Many of the “founding fathers” had a Platonic view of pure democracy - they didn’t like it.

This from Britannica: “As originally planned by the framers of the Constitution, the electors actually choose the president. The framers preferred this to a direct popular election because, at a time when travel was difficult and there were no national party organizations, they feared that many regional candidates would divide the vote. Requiring a candidate to win a majority in the electoral college was a way of obtaining a national consensus.”

This paper from The Federalist(no. 68) gives the reasons for and the defense of the Electoral College. http://lcweb2.loc.gov/const/fed/fed_68.html
Nowhere in the paper is there any mention a small states an advantage being a plus (or minus if that is your bent) for the Electoral College system.

The aspect of the constitution that won over the small states was the so-called “Connecticut compromise” that gave equal representation in the senate to all states.

30

You’re still completely wrong, Tedster. Using the voter turnout numbers from one of the websites I linked above, it takes about thirty seconds to see that if every single voter in those five states voted for one candidate–something which is, as I said, completely impossible anyway–then it would still only yield around 31.5 million votes. And the winner in 2000 had 50 million.

C’mon, man–do a little research first, so your argument here isn’t so obviously complete crap.

31

Oh, Jerevan, I see that KSO was talking about the Senate, but that’s like saying that McDonalds has all the fast food restaraunts by looking down one street in America. There are several areas where the small states are overpowered considerably by the larger states, but for some reason you never hear representatives from Delaware saying that the big states are conspiring to hold it down. Probably because they aren’t, but whatever.

A state like California has a huge amount of land, and a ton of representatives, and a great portion of the population. Only when viewed through a tunnel is it overpowered by Delaware or Rhode Island.

For instance, look at Apos’s post:

California has 54 electoral college votes. It, like all states, has two senators, leaving 52 members of the House(!). One state controls ~10% of the house.

How are the little guys all powerful again? Oh, right, only marginally more powerful (and only when viewed from the perspective of population) in the senate, where majoritarianism stops. And hail Eris for that.

32

Correct. But at the time of the Constitutional convention? Maybe it was a concern then. And even though this concern from long-ago which isn’t borne out in the present, we’re still stuck with the solution. That’s all I’m saying. I’m certainly not trying to argue that California does conspire to hold Delaware down but the structure of the Senate prevents that from happening!

And hey, a lot of people (in the USA, mind you) don’t even know that Delaware is a state, let alone where it is or what kind of threat we pose. Of course I’m preaching to the choir; you must be familiar with this phenomonenon yourself.
:wink:

Well, not to belabor the point, but please note that I did not say that the “little guys” are all-powerful by any stretch of the imagination – only that the influence of the “little guys” is disproportionate to their populations.

33

Would you mind dropping by this thread, please?

34

Eris, I’m really confused. I don’t see anyone arguing that the small states are “all-powerful,” but you keep arguing against that (non-existent) position.

I believe the contention here is that small states, in both the Senate and the Electoral College, have more power than their populations warrant.

Sua

35

I thought that was the intention. No one’s arguing that the small states are somewhat disproportionately powerful, considered against their populations; we agree that they are. Thus, the senate, and to a lesser extent the electoral college, to balance that out and prevent populous cities and states from implementing a tyranny of the majority.

The issue in the OP is whether or not the electoral college is effective, from the perspective of the small states, in addressing that intention.

36

My gift for hyperbole is a curse in this forum. Of course no one is arguing that the small states are EC or Congressional Gods.

The small states, from the perspective of population, do have a slight advantage. This is because the number of representatives for all states begins at 3: two Senators and one Representative in the House. From then on, it is all population.

Overall, the more population a state has, the more representatives it has, and the more EC votes it has.

37

Maybe small state do have influence disproportionate to their populations, but I think the atmosphere at the Constitutional Convention should be considered.

There might very well not have been a constitution like the present one without the compromise that allowed small states equal representation in the Senate. The convention was deadlocked and acrimony was rife over the question of how to apportion power. Admittedly that is a “what if” analysis, but the evidence seems clear that the small states of the convention were not going to agree to anything coming out of the convention without some sort of assurance that they wouldn’t be overwhelmed by the big ones.

Again, the disproportionate power is in the senate and not in the electoral college.

38

Again, the power is only disproportionate from the perspective of population in the Senate. The Senate is simply a place where all states have equal power. Why is this a bad thing?

Not all concerns of the Federal government have to do with population, or are even viewed with the perspective of population.

39

In national politics in the US, why is so much attention paid to small states vs. large states? When it comes to the decision as to who will be the next President, surely what matters are the issues, not what state one is in, and not the size of one’s state.

Repeat: it’s the issues that matter, not states. The issues: abortion, guns, welfare for the poor, corporate welfare, the death penalty, taxes, foreign policy, the state of the public schools, the future of social security, the high cost of prescription drugs, govt promotion of religion, etc. People decide who to vote for on the basis of the candidates’ stands on whichever issues matter most to them.

To win a Presidential election, a candidate needs to have the correct mix of stands on the issues. If you examine any state, large or small, you will find people with an incredible variety of opinions about the issues.

Suppose a candidate did think in terms of states. Suppose he decided, “I must win California. I want to appeal to CA voters. There for I will (blank).” How do we fill in the blank? What would the candidate need to do or say to win California? Something that wins over rightwing Californians will also win over rightwingers in other states. Something that wins over rightwingers in CA will also hurt him with leftwingers in CA. And so on. He can’t tayor much of anything to any one state. For that matter, what would he need to do or say to appeal specifically to voters in small states as opposed to large states, or vice versa?

I often get the impression that people are equating small states with rural interests and large states with urban interests. As in, if a candidate appeals to rural interests, he’ll carry the small states; if he appeals to urban interests, he’ll carry the large states. But this does not make sence to me, either. Big states are not all-urban. Small states contain urban and suburban areas.

Parenthetically, to me, it isn’t just rural vs. urban. If you count a city plus its suburbs as “urban” you’re ignoring the very different and often opposing interests of city vs. suburb.