There are a few ways to do proportional voting. Maine and Nebraska give each congressional district 1 EV and the overall winner gets 2 EV which to me seems a little unfair. Suppose the vote percentage is split 49.5-49. Shouldn’t those two EVs be split.
So lets look at California with its 55 Electoral Votes. Going by straight percentage of the vote and using Hamilton’s Method (the simplest one I think), California would have split its votes:
Obama (D) - 33 Votes
Romney ® - 21 Votes
Johnson (L) - 1 Vote
This would have made the nationwide vote (assuming winner take all in the other 47 states and DC):
Obama - 281 Votes
Romney - 227 Votes
Johnson - 1 Vote
With Florida still to be decided.
OK I guess there’s a few directions this thread could take.
If similar methods were used in other states would it change the outcome of the election?
What is the proper way to handle the two extra EV (representing the Senators) if you want a state to be truly proportional?
Is proportional apportionment in whatever form a good idea in determining electors?
Is proportional apportionment more appropriate for the large states and winner-take-all appropriate for small states?
So I’ll just throw all of this out there and see where the thread goes.
That seems fair to me. The number of Electors each state gets is equal to its representation in Congress. Maine has 2 Representatives and 2 Senators. So they give 1 EV to whichever candidate wins each of it’s 2 Congressional Districts, and the 2 EVs that ‘represent’ their Senators go to whichever candidate ‘wins the State’.
To do it properly, you’d need to know the outcome of the election in each of California’s 53 Congressional districts, which I’m not able to find online. If we just take the percentages of the total popular vote and divide them into 53, we get
Obaba - 31.32
Romney - 20.46
Johnson - 0.53
Rounding gives us a 31/20/1 split, which leaves us one Elector short dues to rounding. But I doubt that Johnson actually won the vote in any single district, so he shouldn’t get an Elector anyway.
And since Obama won the statewide popular vote, he should get the 2 EVs from the Senate seats.
So let’s call it
Obama - 33
Romney - 22
But that still may not be correct. If you look at county-by-county numbers, Romney won 30 of 58 counties. So it’s quite possible that he could have won more Districts than Obama as well. If County voting were proportional to Congressional district voting (which may or may not be the case), you could have had Romney winning 27 EVs and Obama 28 (after giving the 2 ‘extra’ EVs to Obama).
The ‘problem’ is that we don’t have a National Election in November; we have a whole bunch of State Elections. So each State is free to decide how they want to select Electors. As we can see, different methods of counting the same votes in California can range from a 55-0 EV split down to a 28-27 split. And the only way that there will ever be a chance for a viable Third party candidate (if that’s of any importance to you) is if you allot EVs strictly on the basis of percentage of total popular vote.
I think that proportional allotment across the board would absolutely change the numbers in the election, though I’m not sure if it would necessarily change the outcome.
The actual EV count (awarding Florida to Obama at this point) is:
Obama - 332 (61.7%)
Romney - 206 (38.3%)
If you split all of the electors by the popular vote in each state, you get:
Obama - 282 (52.4%)
Romney - 256 (47.6%)
And if you split each state’s ‘Congressional’ EVs by popular vote and award the ‘Senatorial’ EVs to the overall winner of the state, you get:
Obama - 290 (53.9%)
Romney - 248 (46.1%)
I suspect that if you awarded the ‘Congressional’ EVs to the candidate that won each of the Congressional Districts, the numbers would still be similar, but it would be an interesting experiment if someone has the actual numbers.
The Nationwide popular vote breaks down as:
Obama - 50.6%
Romney - 48.3%
Johnson - 1.3%
Personally, I think that if you’re going to make a change to the process, you might as well simply do away with the Electoral college altogether and decide the President by popular vote.
And I don’t think you’re going to - Contra Costa County (in the eastern San Francisco Bay area) contains parts of four Congressional districts, but the only totals they report are county-wide. Even if you knew which precincts were in which districts, they’re not broken down by precinct.
Is it even fair to apportion by congressional district? They are gerrymandered to give predetermined Dem/Pub outcomes in congressional races so I think that would skew the EV breakdown as opposed to a straight percentage apprtionment (Webster, Hamilton-Hill, etc.)
Which means Obama still wins regardless of Florida.
Yes, I saw it pointed out on Twitter that if Pennsylvania had adopted the Congressional district method supported by state Republicans, Romney would have received 12 electoral votes from Pennsylvania and Obama would have received 7. Obama won Pennsylvania by a margin of about 52% to 47%.