Rather than states rewarding their electoral votes in a winner take all fashion would it be more fair to be able to divy them up by result percentages?
So for a state like Florida that gave Obama 50% of the vote and Romney 49.1% they would give Obama 15 and Romney 14.
A few states with an even amount of electoral votes and a close election would split them up evenly like Ohio (50.1% to 48.2%) each guy gets 9,
and places like D.C. (91.4% to 7.1%) would give all 3 to Obama.
California 33 Obama / 22 Romney, Texas 16 Obama / 22 Romney, etc.
I ran the race using this method and it still gives Obama the win 274 to Romney’s 264 but it seems a more accurate method to represent each state.
This method is arguably more fair than the winner take all method, but it also introduces some really random bias by introducing the possibility of rounding making a different in a close election. Instead of winning the state because a candidate won the popular vote, the state gets written off because nobody won by enough. Seriously, just get rid of the stupid electors.
That’s much more representative of the popular vote than the real electoral college score (332-206), but here’s another problem: because nobody else got enough votes to earn an EV, Romney is getting a handful of free electoral votes: when they’re done counting all the ballots it looks like Obama will have around 51 percent of the vote (he’s at 50.6% right now and most of the remaining votes should go his way), and Romney will probably have a little under 48 percent (47.9% at the moment). 51 percent of 538 electoral votes gives Obama 274, so that seems fair. But 48 percent of 538 is 258, which means Romney gets 6 extra EVs for just showing up. I can imagine this being a problem.
States ARE able to split their votes. Two of them already do (albeit by different means than you have proposed).
States can divy up their electoral votes any way they want. They don’t even have to allow a popular vote for president at all. Or base their electoral votes on popular votes. They could just let the legislature choose electors, or let the governor choose electors. Or, a state could say “we are just going to give our electors to whoever wears the snappiest tie on election day.”
If congressional districts were drawn without bias, it might be nice to give one EV to the winner of each district and two to the statewide winner, to mirror the Congressional representation that electoral votes… mirror.
As soon as someone figures out a way to do that, we’re golden. But if we’re going that far into speculative territory we might as well eliminate the EC and stop skewing our electoral process toward very specific states and segments of the population.
I love how when the EC process favored a certain candidate even though he did not win the popular vote, it was okay. Now they want to abolish the EC.
Can’t have it both ways.
Not exactly, as I understand it the electoral votes are given district-by-district, with the popular vote winner getting 2 extra, rather than the total being divided by popular vote.
Pretty much. Alphabetically, or by which candidate could stand on his/her head the longest, or whatever.
Which is the basis of the likely legitimacy of the National Popular Vote ‘compact’: if a state wants to give all of its electors to the popular vote winner and passes a law making it so, there’s nothing stopping it from doing so. Nor is there anything preventing its conditioning the implementation of that method on whether a group of other states with certain properties (i.e. the sum of their electoral votes being 270 or more) have passed equivalent laws.
This is pretty much what was done on a precinct (or was it by county?) basis for the 2008 Democratic primary, and the fact that Obama’s team understood it from the get-go and Clinton’s team was very slow on the uptake made a huge difference.
Delegates were awarded “proportionally”…BUT: Say they had two delegates to award…each candidate got one each unless there was a huge difference in votes…like say 2:1 (don’t know the exact formula.
Team Obama focused on areas where there was an odd delegate up for grabs, and where there were enough delegates that a small percentage difference in vote could yield extra delegates. So Clinton could win the popular vote in a state and even most of the precincts (or counties or whatever), yet still come up short on delegates.
Basically as long as you have discreet increments of electoral college votes, there is going to be a lot of sampling noise. It is to state’s advantage to put all it’s voting power to one candidate, in the extreme, if it evenly split it’s votes, then it would be effectively nullifying it’s vote.
I think there’s an argument for requiring candidates to draw support across a wide swath of territory, if the swath can be fairly quantized.
As for a way to do that, I don’t think that’s really very hard at all. The problem is that it would be resisted by most incumbents, because it would put far more of them into competitive districts.
I like that idea, really, because it actually does what a lot of people say the electoral college is good for (i.e., requiring that the President be popular in lots of states, pace Marley)
Yes, they could, but what state wants to be the first to do this? Say California thinks it is a fair system, so it is proposed. Well, the Dems will all oppose it because it would only give Obama a plus 11 instead of a plus 55. A 41 point swing that would have made this election too close for comfort.
Also, California would then have the same power as Wisconsin (11 EVs to 10, and even less when a GOP candidate does better). Why would a state want to cut its own throat by diminishing it’s own power? And a swing state like Ohio? Today it is crucial. If it adopts your policy, it all but ensures that 0 or possibly 1 EV will change hands. Better to campaign in New Hampshire than Ohio.
It would require a compact before this even got off of the ground and the one mentioned above achieves pretty much the same thing without the mathematical juggling.
The democrats won about a million more votes for the house than the republicans (50% vs 49% or something) but the GOP has 230 seats because of redistricting. That plan would soon run into tons of problems due to gerrymandering.
This. As it is, the two states where this has been proposed recently, Ohio and Pennsylvania, are severely gerrymandered, and it’s basically a bare-faced attempt by Republican elections officials to give most of the state’s electors to the Republican candidate regardless of whether or not s/he’s the candidate the people of the state vote for.
