One disadvantage of the Electoral College system is that candidates essentially write off entire states. Admittedly it can be a mixed blessing; my home state of New York for example didn’t get inundated with campaign ads before the 2000 Presidential election. Both the Democrats and the Republicans knew that Gore was going to carry the majority of the state, so both spend their money elsewhere. But NY Republicans might resent the fact that they were essentially told they didn’t matter (especially as party following is very geographically divided in New York state). I’m sure the same scenario occurred in many other states where one party or the other saw it had a clear majority and the race was conceded before Election Day. But if popular votes determined the outcome, no candidate could afford to ignore his supporters in any state. Even if he knew the majority of voters in a state were going to vote for his opponent, he’d still have a stake in campaigning for each vote.
What do you mean the president doesn’t make policy that affect single states?
Where should we build this new military base?
Where should we close one?
What company is going to build these new tanks?
Where do we build a new highway?
Should we fund Amtrak? (affects a small number of states)
To me the strange thing about the EC is that the number of Electors a state gets is the number of it represententives PLUS 2 (or the number of senators).
Adding two to New York doesn’t raise it’s number nearly as much as adding two to say CT or OK or KS. The fact that the number of Electors a state gets is not based entirely on how much population it has gives smaller states more power than the larger ones.
You see to me the real division in America is rual vs. urban.
Reagen played this card in his infamous ‘Welfare Mom’ talk. You see it everywhere. Really the gay marriage thing is rural vs. urban. I would guess that most supporters of GM live in urban areas. Just as a generalization.
I’ve serched but I can’t find on line any more a chart of giver vs taker states. The idea is how much federal taxes collected in a state vs. how much federal money was spent in each state. Of course you would expect a state like Alaska to be a taker state because it costs a lot to say build and maintain a hwy up there. But the results were very suprising. Mainly those stated that usually go Republican, you know the anit-big government, anit-gov handouts, we’re so independent and damn proud of it, those guys were big takers.
I’m not saying that each state should get back dollar for dollar what it puts into the federal government. I’m just saying that the President makes decisions that affect single states.
I recently browsed some of the literature on this subject that I could find online, and I’m not entirely sure that conclusion is considered to be a “fact”; i.e., there seems to be some debate on the subject. (Though, I have a reference below that notes Natapoff’s theorem proving that districting increases voting power; my first link below seems to suggest otherwise on the basis of coalitions.) From what I’ve read on “voting power,” the search term you want to use if you go googling, most models assume random voting and then apply some formula or algorithm to calculate permutations and get a probability that a single vote will tip the election. There is some debate as to whether the empirical outcome of elections matches the model predictions, or whether such a match is even relevant.
For an example of whether the match is relevant, consider one’s options if one is going to set up a voting system for one’s commune, let’s say. One might choose a voting system where any individual’s voting power is maximized under the assumption of random voting, even though one has full knowledge that personality, cliques, and coalitions will make the model predictions moot. The reason for this could be that over the long haul no one has even the most remote idea who will come to the commune, who will have the leadership skills to create coalitions, or how internal politics will distribute the cliques. (The otherwise horrible movie Anarchist Cookbook illustrates just such a failure to think ahead on such matters.) In light of this ignorance, it at least arguably makes sense to choose a system that maximizes any given individual’s expected voting power, even though we know that expectations often turn out to be wildly off from the actual outcome.
Two good papers I found on this are The Mathematics and Statistics of Voting Power and A Priori Voting Power: What Is It All About?. I’d recommend reading the second one first. YMMV: I only read a handfull of papers on the subject, most of them being working papers (though the two I linked to have been or have been accepted for publication in peer reviewed journals).
Commenting more directly on the OP, if one is going to advocate abandoning the Electoral College (EC) for being undemocratic, then one should also abandon the Senate and score the World Series based on total runs scored and not by number of games won. Political Numeracy by Michael Meyerson, a book that starts out well but gets a little spacey as the math gets more abstract, discusses the EC and mentions some (unintended) benefits that I find compelling. (Pages 54-60.) First, it requires candidates to spread out their efforts across the country. Natapoff likens it to the World Series where a blowout in one game does not give the Series to that team; they must win a few other games to take the trophy home. Similarly, presidential candidates must campaign in more states than just California and New York to score a win, something they might not have to do with direct presidential voting.
Second is Natapoff’s proof that districting improves voting power, so that direct elections would decrease my say in the presidential elections, which wouldn’t be cool at all.
Third, he discusses the notion that the EC forces candidates to campaign in contested states rather than in states that are homogeneously for them. To win in contested states, the candidate must be more moderate; but to win in homogeneous states, the candidate must be more extreme. (Think of the positions candidates take when seeking nomination as opposed to when they’re trying to get the general election.) With direct elections, BushCo. could simply stitch together a Pan-American support base of right-wing nut jobs, only going as far left as he has to to secure a victory. With the EC, he has to win states like Michigan, where we have a Democratic Govenor and a Republican legislature, and doing so is going to force him to put together a more moderate platform. In other words, America has seen much less extremism than it otherwise would have simply because the EC forces candidates to embrace moderation.
Lastly, let me note that voting works by preventing abuse, not because it creates good governance. In an election with three or more candidates, it is more likely that the way you score the votes has more to do with the outcome that obtains than the actual votes do. And, it must be noted, most of these scoring methods are perfectly legitimate. Should the candidate who scores the most votes win? Or the candidate who beats all others in head-to-head ranking? Or should dislike be taken into account as well? E.g. is it fair to elect a candidate whom 51% of the population mildly prefers but 49% truly hates with a passion? How we handle these questions has more to do with who wins than the votes we actually cast. For a much better discussion of this, please read Saari’s Bad Decisions; Experimental Error or Faulty Decision Procedures?.
I hope I can count on your vote this November.
Why all these baseball, etc. analogies, my friend? There are plenty of direct comparisons out there. Elections where direct vote does determine the winner. Mayors, governors, heads of state in other countries and more. There are also many methods of tallying the votes to look at. The world series is, IMO, a pretty poor analogy for a presidential election. To begin with, you have the same team (voters) playing the same game (election) over and over at least four times to determine the winner. Do you want to go to the polls a minimum of four times? In fact, I’d more closely relate baseball to the EC to direct voting, with regular season games being the voters and the world series games being the electors.
And the one thing that our political history has surely taught us is that statistics need not apply. I mean, look at the polls for a good belly laugh. 
And Zebra, the president can only wish he* were as powerful on those matters as you suggest he is.
I’ll start doing the “he/she” thing after Hillary takes it in '08… 
With all due respect, that was incoherent.
As mangeorge alludes to, baseball isn’t a democracy. I’m not a fan but a firm believer in majority rule can enjoy the game as it stands without contradiction. As for the Senate, hell yes I think it should go but there is no inherent contradiction between keeping it and getting rid of the EC. If you favor federalism and believe the president represents the people of America and a senator represents the people of his or her state then there is no contradiction in requiring both be elected directly by the people they represent.
No it doesn’t. As has already been mentioned in this thread it requires candidates to pay attention to the battleground states. That’s where the election occurs and this tends to distort our democracy in ways people rarely grasp. In The Vanishing Voter ( based on the Harvard project of the same name ) Dr Thomas Patterson notes that, “The Electoral College creates a two-tiered electorate whenever an election is close, and sometimes when it’s not.” People living in the battleground states are more likely to think about the campaign, more likely to be knowledgable about it, and more likely to vote.
( That’s a 5% difference in voting for Election 2000, Otto, and since I’m here and both an Electoral College Geek and a Constitutional History Dork I’ll also take a stab at citing mangeorge’s entirely correct assertion that a belief in popular ignorance was one of the reasons behind the Electoral College. In a while though, let me consult a few of my books on the federal convention and do some stuff IRL. )
I don’t pretend the competence to criticize Natapoff’s math but the assumptions he bases it on are dubious. He defines voting power as the chance an individual vote will turn the entire election and then claims that a districted election increases than chance. Whoopie! Instead of a .0000000000000001% chance of turning the election I now have a .00000000000000002% chance! You may wish to roll the dice but for me that’s hardly something I would trade for the certainty of an equal vote.
Nor does he seem to understand what makes an election powerful. The power of an election is not determined by the amount of influence over the outcome by all voters but rather the magnitude of the position being filled. I could be one of only 3 voters in an election for assistant dogcatcher and according to him that would make me powerful. :rolleyes:
And here I thought the purpose of an election was to find out how the voters felt. Well, now I know that moderate outcomes are desirable and we should pervert our electoral process to bring them about. Why bother holding a vote at all if we don’t care what people think? Natapoff knows best. Why not just make him king?
Nonsense. Sure differing scoring mechanisms might produce different outcomes but only if the race is close. If not then it can’t happen so the votes matter more.
Since reading your, uh, comment I’ve re-read and re-read my post which you refer to. I find nothing incoherebt in it, but if you can point to any specific statement you find unconnected with the whole, I’ll see if I can fit it in there for you.
Or is the term “incoherent” simply a (pseudo) intellectual code word for something else? I do lack the advantage of a higher education.
BTW, I’d like, for clarity, to establish one understanding for this thread;
Ignorance does not equal stupidity. I know that’s obvious, but some folks do get confused.
If you are getting rid of the EC because it doesn’t represent the people proportionally enough, and since the Senate is in contradiction with the principle of direct representation, then you do indeed have a contradiction to your Great Belief if you don’t want to ditch the Senate on the same grounds. If you don’t want to ditch the Senate on the same grounds, then you need more than a Great Belief to nix the EC.
If you are going to prosletyze a Great Belief, then you are obligated to explain why you would allow a violation of the Great Belief.
And these are mutually exclusive? That fact is not obvious.
So you agree with the premise of Meyerson’s third contention. That’s good. Now is it safe to say that fighting for contested states doesn’t cause candidates to eschew extremism? In light of how often we hear about candidates needing to moderate their positions to get swing voters, it seems hard to believe that the key to winning a fight in a constested state would be to embrace extreme positions. If you don’t have good reason to conclude that battle-ground campaigning is as prone to extremism as campaining in locked states would be, then you are obligated to admit Meyerson’s third point. In which case, I would be flabbergasted if you actually suggested that it is worse to have a candidate neglect a state that isn’t going to vote for him anyway than it is to have an electoral system that pays dividends to endemic extremism.
So? Are you seriously suggesting that a constitutional instution should be abandoned simply because people in uncontested states don’t take the time to learn the issues and go vote? To equate that with disenfranchisement or egregious misrepresentation is bordering on offensive. When people voluntarily choose to not vote and not educate themselves, we do not have grounds to claim that we have a “two-tiered system” as a result.
If that gain in voting power from the EC is small enough to ridicule, then you’re going to have quite a time establishing that the gain in representation from going to direct elections is meaningful. But you chose to make that point, so please explain why the gain in representation from going to direct elections wouldn’t be comically small.
You have completely failed to grasp the notion of voting power. There are a couple of papers above that should help you understand.
You are the one who wishes to distort the electoral process by advocating a change of the status quo. And you wish to do so because a system that encourages moderation, and therefore greater representation, because it offends you more than a system that systematically encourages extremism. Unless you have a better argument to make, it may be that you mocked before really taking the time to think your position through.
Prove it. Seriously. Go to Saari’s paper, take his reference to the original publication of his theorem, and demostrate that he is wrong.
Only one analogy and it was for illustration purposes, not proof.
We only have one electoral college, and AFAIK no real equivalents elsewhere.
Moot. I’ve already mentioned that and Saari shows how different tallying methods can yield wildly different results.
Each game is analogous to a state. If team A wins with a fifty point lead in game one, but team B wins with a one point lead in each of the four following games, then team B wins in spite of the fact that A has scored a huge advantage overall. Is it fair to say that team B deserves to win even though they scored 36 fewer runs than team A? Do you see the analogy now?
That’s been done already.
The electoral college is a given, there is no contest once it has gone to the EC. In your analogy, your plan to ditch the EC would be analogous to ditching the World Series and declare a season victor on the basis of regular-season games. That completely fails to address the question raised by the analogy in the first place: whether it is more fair to give the trophy to the one who scores the most runs or the one who scores the most wins.
IIRC, the polls were predicting a close election, indeed within the margin of error in many cases, in the last presidential election. Sounds like they were doing pretty good that time.
You seem to have misunderstood. Notice the term “federalism” in my post. The people of the states ARE directly represented in the Senate. To support federalism in this context means favoring the idea of state representation in Congress. Personally I don’t think we need it but plenty do. For them there is nothing contradictory about prefering direct election for all of their representatives. Proportionality need not come into it.
It’s not obvious only because you have obscured the distinction. I was replying not to “spread their efforts” but to “spread out their efforts across the country”. When we place “the country” next to “the battleground states” it is easy to see the difference. Right?
You seem to have misunderstood. No, I don’t agree with that premise. Yes, the EC channels the campaign into the battleground states but it makes no sense to contrast campaigning there with campaigning in “homogenous states” because what we are comparing is the EC to a direct election or popular vote ( PV ). Since a PV isn’t a vote of states but a vote of the entire nation there is no need for a candidate to shape their message to fit any state, homogenous or not.
- You seem to have misunderstood. I brought up Dr Patterson’s work because it seemed a convenient place to provide one of the cites Otto had requested. What I believe the facts I mentioned suggest is there are measurable effects from dividing people into haves and have-nots.
Blame the victim much? There are plenty of people in every state who don’t pay attention. It is hardly surprising to find less interest in places where people know months and years in advance their vote won’t affect the outcome.
You seem to have misunderstood. I made no such claim. I don’t care how much voting power, however calculated, any voter has. My concern is equality. If you know of another way to ensure that every vote for a representative is equal then tell us. So far as I know only direct election can provide that.
Have I really? Because you just quoted me giving Natapoff’s definition of voting power without quibbling. Did I get it wrong? If not, don’t I have at least some grasp of the concept?
And you seem to have misunderstood. I’m not talking about voting power in that paragraph you quoted but about the power of elections.
You seem to have misunderstood. I haven’t advocated a change of the status quo here. Yes, I believe it should change. But you can have no idea what I think it should change into from reading this thread because I haven’t told you.
You seem to have misunderstood. When I said “now I know that moderate outcomes are desirable and we should pervert our electoral process to bring them about” I was being sarcastic. I don’t think an electoral system should encourage anything. It should merely reflect the choices of the electorate as accurately as possible. If they are moderate, then so be it. If not, not. I was mocking the hubris of Natapoff for presuming to substitute his judgement for that of the people and believing it is a good idea to skew elections one way or the other.
I doubt I can. I’m not good with numbers. I’m much better with words and I notice that your words don’t contradict mine. Let me ask you a question. Do you honestly believe that I am wrong? Do you honestly believe that outcomes will change even when a race isn’t close? If you say yes I will back up my assertion or withdraw it.
You are kidding? :rolleyes: [sup]Ask not what the country can do for you, but why is the Lydon Johnson Space Center in Houston, TX.[/sup]
Yeah. I should have put a winky.
Now, lets talk about the accelerator. I almost got into a fight in Dallas some years ago for bringing that up.
Touchy, touchy.
BTW; did LBJ actially put that thing in Houston? I’ve heard no, it was what’s-her-name (Jordan?). My memory’s pretty foggy.
Collider. Y’all called it a collider, didn’t you. Super Collider, yet. Sorry.
OK, I went through my bookshelf and here is what the best account I have of the federal convention has to say:
For myself I think the Colliers’ give Wilson too much credit as a democrat. It’s true that Wilson did purport to support direct popular election but he did so in an oblique manner and then quickly offered the first outline of the system we have come to call the Electoral College as a compromise. His fear that the idea might appear “chimerical” gives an indication of how he expected it to be received. Since Madison would also claim to support popular election in suspicious ways ( at one point he proclaims that the South can enfranchise their slaves to balance the votes of white immigrants to the North ) and since Madison and Wilson were the floor leaders for the nationalists I would be certain that a direct popular vote was never more than a stalking horse even if their call for popular election hadn’t been echoed by their ally, the notoriously undemocratic Gouverneur Morris. ( He of the infamous quote, “The mob begin to think and to reason. Poor reptiles! it is with them a vernal morning; they are struggling to cast off their winter’s slough, they bask in the sunshine, and ere noon they will bite, depend upon it.” )
There was a long and convoluted argument over how the president would be selected and naturally people tend to assume the choice was between direct election and a system of electors since that is how the argument is generally framed today but at the time popular election was never a real option. The choice was between selection by the central government itself ( via Congress somehow ) or selection somehow independent of it. Madison records only 2 others as speaking in favor of election by the people. Rufus King ( another nationalist leader ) says he is for it “election mediately or immediately by the people”. IOW- he offers the same choices as the other nationalists: direct elections or by electors. And George Mason who was the first to respond to Wilson’s call for popular election by claiming to favor the idea but finding it impractical. Mason wasn’t a nationalist and seems to have favored the idea of removing the selection of the president from the central government but not entrusting it to the populace ( see his unmistakable quote below ).
From the Colliers’ book and some others I found some dates when methods of election were debated so we can check a primary source for ourselves. Madison’s notes from the convention are available online and I will cite from them. But first a cautionary note: the federal convention was a secret meeting and what records we have from it are fragmentary and sometimes deliberately misleading. Madison’s notes are the best of the bunch but they are no exception. Madison did alter them later in life in an effort to enhance his reputation as a Founder but I have no reason to believe that the parts were are interested in would have been affected. Anyways, here are the words Madison records to various members of the convention:
May 31, 1787
Roger Sherman - The people he said, immediately should have as little to do as may be about the Government. They want information and are constantly liable to be misled.
Elbridge Gerry - The evils we experience flow from the excess of democracy. The people do not want virtue, but are the dupes of pretended patriots. In Massts. it had been fully confirmed by experience that they are daily misled into the most baneful measures and opinions by the false reports circulated by designing men, and which no one on the spot can refute.
Pierce Butler - thought an election by the people an impracticable mode.
July 17, 1787
Charles Pinckney - did not expect this question would again have been brought forward; An Election by the people being liable to the most obvious & striking objections. They will be led by a few active & designing men.
George Mason - He conceived it would be as unnatural to refer the choice of a proper character for chief Magistrate to the people, as it would, to refer a trial of colours to a blind man. The extent of the Country renders it impossible that the people can have the requisite capacity to judge of the respective pretensions of the Candidates.
Hugh Williamson - conceived that there was the same difference between an election in this case, by the people and by the legislature, as between an appt. by lot, and by choice.
( In case that’s unclear he’s equating popular election to a lottery. )
I think that should satisfy all but the most hardened filiopietist that the Framers ( with the possible exception of Wilson ) believed the populace was ignorant and didn’t trust them to elect the president. Those of you familiar with my posts know I am not one to shy away from calling these men a bunch of arrogant bastards when I think they deserve it and there is no doubt they were elitist but I have to say I am inclined to cut them a bit of slack here. I can see how even a nonelitist might hold this view. There had never been a national election so they were in uncharted territory. More importantly, information wasn’t easy to come by in those days.
It is difficult for modern Americans to remember how slow news traveled in the 1780s and how isolated the backcountry really was. Pennsylvania was the first state to elect a ratification convention just seven weeks after the federal convention adjourned. In Luzerne County voters went to the polls without being aware that opposition to the new plan even existed. ( Of course, the reason the vote was held so quickly was because the Federalists, arrogant bastards that they were, were deliberately acting before opposition could organize. ) The Luzerne County reference is from Jackson Turner Main’s The Antifederalists.
So, what do you think of these citations, Otto? Are you convinced?
Nice post, **2sense **. You have captured the atmosphere of the old guys much as I remenber reading and talking about it. Factually, they sure enough had a point. But I think the country would have suffered through nobly had they allowed popular vote, and would have wound up no worse off than it has.
But things have changed a lot since those days. We now have the media which can (and does) whip information around the world instantly. And if we use some common sense and a grain of salt we can weed reliable information out of the chatter. We can use our branes.
I, for one, am ready to feel that when I put the “X” in the box next to my candidate’s name, I’m actually choosing the president of the US. I call it participating in the democratic process.