If there’s one ‘redeeming’ quality of the electoral college, it’s that smaller states can have exaggerated importance. This is ‘good’ in the sense that a state like New Hampshire has to be taken seriously if the race is close. Without an EC, would candidates be spending so much time in places like Cleveland or Toledo, Ohio? Probably not. They’d visit New York, LA, Chicago, Dallas, Atlanta, Seattle, and Miami. The big cities only, but no love for flyover country. It’s different in Australia because nobody lives in the center of the great landmass, but many people live in the heartland of the United States. So there’s that.
But the remaining philosophical premises for the continued existence of the EC are simply extinct. The Framers of the Constitution deliberately created this institution because they feared the great masses of voters were too stupid to be trusted with the responsibility of electing a president – which as we can see is a fear with substance. However, it is inconsistent with prevailing sentiment. Like it or not, we have become a more democratic society. We’ve expanded the vote, not the other way around. Rightly or wrongly, for better or worse, the EC is out of step with our current political identity and view of our collective political self.
Ultimately, there is no evidence that an electoral college produces better outcomes than a one person, one vote system, or a parliamentary system in which we nominate a prime minister through majority party rule.
Yes really. If Trump has 155 electoral votes, that’s 28.8% of the total. So Hillary’s 50.1% of the popular vote translates to 71.2% of the electoral vote.
We saw what happens if one state has a clusterfuck election and it goes through the courts. Do we really want a repeat on the national scale if one candidate beats another by a few thousand votes? Do we want the election decided on states tipping the scale by being more lax in allowing one party’s voters to vote while disenfranchising another’s? Right now deep red states do what they can to suppress minority votes, imagine what they would do if it meant more than running up the score in that one state?
I don’t see why the electoral system should care about this. Who cares where a candidate visits? We live in a modern, technological, national society. And it’s not like it’s possible for a candidate to visit every place anyway.
What we have seen is that the electoral college doesn’t prevent clusterfucks and indeed can be a cause of clusterfucks. The electoral college is fundamentally undemocratic and as we have become a more and more democratic society over this, at this point the electoral college exists only to be gamed.
What we should also do is nationalize national elections, so that individual states don’t have differing procedures and standards.
I’m not thrilled with the electoral system but the reality is that the population of this country is concentrated in a few areas. If the electors were purely population based I don’t think the winner-takes-all on a state by state basis would be as problematic as the current system, but still imperfect, as would be a purely popular vote system. I don’t think we can have a perfect system the way the population is distributed in the country currently. I don’t think it matters either, politics will prevent any change to the system for now.
That would be a pretty tall order, to be sure. But toss even another four or five ultra-red states into the mix, and it could still be a landslide for that Dem.
If Hillary beats Trump by 12 percentage points in the popular vote, she likely still wouldn’t be at 400 EVs. If she beats him by 16 percentage points, she’d end up with 471 to his 67 (Trump taking 10 states plus 2/3 of NE)
If every state adopted the method used by NB and ME of electing one elector in each heavily gerrymandered congressional district plus two at large, the Dems could not win at all. Since the Repubs have done everything else to game the system, I expect to see that next. In fact, I cannot imagine why they haven’t.
For example, PA could vote solidly Dem and still see 13 of its 20 electors go to the Repugs. I think the EC stinks.
Michigan’s Republican-dominated (and gerrymandered) state legislature has floated the idea of changing how the state awards electoral votes, to absolutely no public (or Republican gubernatorial) support. I just don’t think this type of reform would fly.