Well I don’t know much about the Electoral College, so I did a quick search on the net. I found out it was orginally created (around 1787) because they didn’t trust the average citizen to understand the issues, or know the political leaders of the new nation well enough to make informed choices.
That may have been true back then because of lack of education and no efficent means of informing the people. But alot has changed since then. So whats so bad about direct popular voting for presidents? Do we still really need the Electoral College?
Good question – with the ability to now count the # of votes in one night instead of several weeks, I don’t believe we need an electoral college. Actually I’d like to see a total democracy come out of our government, but I don’t believe that will happen any time soon.
The electoral college allows you to have more power in an election. If our voting process was merely “one man, one vote”, you would not have the leverage that the electoral college provides. It makes it so that you have more power to sway the way that your state will vote in the electoral college. This stops your vote from becoming diluted in a national vote count.
Ivars Peterson wrote a superb numerical analysis of how the electoral college protects the power of your vote in the magazine Science News. Sadly, a search of their archives did not turn up a link. For more information, go to this site.
Zenster Even before I go reading the sites, etc. Do you mean to imply that the electoral college protectseveryone’s vote, and keeps it from becoming diluted.
How could anything be simpler than adding up the votes at the end of an election, and whoever gets the most, wins?
Actually, we don’t need the electoral college, but I will tell you why it helps. It aids the candidates(for president) to campaign strategically, recognizing the bigger states, like California or Texas are far more crucial than smaller ones, like Wyoming. I know this sounds a little silly, but our nation is too big to campaign for the whole thing as one and it helps to break it down into chunks.
Oh, and every modern candidate in history prefers this method also.
Mahaloth encapsulated it pretty well. If you live in an important state (like I do [i.e., CA]), you would like your own vote to tip the scales in how your own state’s electoral votes are delegated.
In a “one man, one vote” system, my vote would be so diluted as to be almost insignificant in an election’s outcome. Compare this to the far better odds that my vote might tip the scales in a significantly smaller state wide pool and you can see that I have much better leverage.
As per Mahaloth, imagine if every candidate had to campaign in Podunk and Bumfuck, [insert state name here]. Election costs would skyrocket, even beyond their current obscene levels of spending and disallow someone like Nader from even considering a run at the oval office.
I just wish I was able to post a link to Peterson’s article. It was the first I have ever seen to cogently address the electoral college with mathematical proof.
So, the Electoral College is an elitist institution, designed to help circumvent the will of the majority.
How else can one interpret it?
I read an article about the electoral college a few years back, in what I think was Discover Magazine. It went through what looked like to me to be a pretty good case that the electoral college actually give the individual voter an advantage, based on arguments similar to the ones Zenster outlined.
I did a search in Discover’s on-line archive and found a link to this article:
http://208.245.156.153/archive/output.cfm?ID=907
Oddly, I don’t think this is the article I remember. But it seems to be similar, and goes through the logic of keeping the electoral college.
Ugly
What am I missing???
Admittedly, I haven’t read the links.
But does anyone else except me think that we are being offered a perpetual motion machine here?
If something gives an individual voter an advantage, then it would have to deny another person/voter an advantage.
Except that it isn’t possible for the E. C. to give more power to all voters. There’s only so much power to go around. What it does is give more power to those voters in a given state who are voting for the more popular candidate. For example, if Ohio were to be split 55-45 Republican-Democrat, then the GOP gets all of Ohio’s votes (more power), and all the Ohio democrat votes get flushed down the toilet (less power). On the other hand, if it were a direct popular vote, then those 45% of Ohio democrats might be able to make a significant impact on the outcome, when added with other states.
As to campaigning strategies, the candidates would still do essentially the same thing that they do now: Campaign where the population is. Even if California didn’t get a block of votes as a state, L. A. is still a lot of voters. They probably wouldn’t even bother with Podunk, since there aren’t nearly as many Podoinkians as the are Angelenos.
Boy, has this question been beat to death. 
Anyway, the EC doesn’t wait for the popular vote before electing the prez. So how can they possibly reflect the desires of the voters? Precognition?
Look folks, don’t cry because you live in a little town. You can leave your doors unlocked and breathe that clean, fresh air. Insignificant voting is a small price to pay, I would think. Besides, you guts get all the cool Walmarts.
Peace,
mangeorge
As the Discover Magazine article points out (and I strongly urge everyone to read it – it completely changed my thinking when I read itfour years ago. But a good baseball analogy will always do that…), the Electoral College forces candidates to appeal not only to a simple majority of voters, but to a wide cross-section as well. Candidates must do more than win voters, they must win entire states. It’s fairly easy to come up with a devisive campaign strategy that pits 51% of the voters against the other 49%. But, because voters ofany category are unequally distributed, it’s a lot harder for that strategy to win enough states to lead to victory.
And if you follow the admittedly somewhat complicated math, you find that the Electoral College does indeed increase the power of ALL voters. Like relativity, it’s one of those scientific facts that doesn’t make a lot of logical sense, but there you have it.
mangeorge said
OK! I missed it again. Are you saying that the EC votes before election night?
Is this a defective thread, or am I just in a parallel universe?
Beruang said
Well, here I go again. I still haven’t read the articles. And, if posters responses are any indication of why I should, then I think I won’t.
Perhaps relativity doesn’t make a lot of logical sense to you, but it might to someone else. Scientific facts make a lot of sense to me. Sorry about you.
There ain’t NO FREAKIN" WAY that every voter gets an advantage out of the EC… BULL-FUCKING-SHIT!!!
Unlike our friend samclem, I will refrain from the profanity, but I must agree to him at least a little.
As a Democrat in Texas, I don’t feel that the EC system empowers me at all. I will go to the polls and vote for the candidate whom I feel will do the best job (Gore). I will do this knowing full well that my vote will not mean anything to anyone but myself. It is a foregone conclusion that all of Texas’ electoral votes will go to Governor Bush. That way, he can do for the country what he has done for Texas. (By the way, that may not be such a good thing, but oh well. That’s a different topic.)
Anyway, because of the EC system, my vote simply won’t count. On the upside, we here in Texas don’t have to endure all of the endless political ads that other states have. I have not seen one Bush or Gore ad anywhere, ever. Only when they are being discussed in a TV news program.
You are missing the linked articles. People are posting links in this thread as support for their arguments. Read the links if you want or don’t bother, but don’t refuse to read the links and then say that the other posters are just plain wrong. That is the same as putting your hands over your ears and saying, “La, la, la…” at the top of your lungs when someone is trying to argue their point.
Paradoxically, the EC has advantages for third party voters. In those states where Republicrat is leading the Demublican by a wide margin, or vice versa, a Green voter, for instance, can cast his vote Nader without having to worry about any misplaced crisis of conscience for the fact that he’s taking votes away from Gore/electing Bush, as his vote really won’t matter given the Greens’ poll numbers. In the battleground states, however, the Greens really do have the power to tip the election to Bush. Of course, i live in Ohio, and I’m voting Nader anyway, so fuck it…
Drum God I apolgize to the general public for my profanity. I don’t usually do that. Could be the frustration(but probably the beer).
Lance No, I don’t think that not reading the links is the same as putting my hands over my ears…etc.
Posters here have posted illogical statements, and I reacted to them. I will read them at this time, though. You are correct in asserting that I should do that.
Lance After reading the links, do you have an opinion on whether the EC gives every voter an advantage?
Samclem –
The difference between you and I, sir, is that I am willing to admit those areas in which I am ignorant. If you would read the links instead of spewing invective… ah, but that is apparently too much to ask. Here, I’ll make it easy for you:
Excerpts from the Discover article:
(snip)
These insights came quickly, but it was many years before Natapoff devised his formal mathematical proof. His starting point was the concept of voting power. In a fair election, he saw, each voter’s power boils down to this: What is the probability that one person’s vote will be able to turn a national election? The higher the probability, the more power each voter commands. To figure out these probabilities, Natapoff devised his own model of a national electorate–a more realistic model, he thought, than the ones the quoted experts were always using. Almost always, he found, individual voting power is higher when funneled through districts–such as states–than when pooled in one large, direct election. It is more likely, in other words, that your one vote will determine the outcome in your state and your state will then turn the outcome of the electoral college, than that your vote will turn the outcome of a direct national election. A voter therefore, Natapoff found, has more power under the current electoral system.
Why worry how easily one vote can turn an election, so long as each voter has equal power? One person, one vote–that’s all the math anyone needs to know in a simple, direct election. Natapoff agrees that voters should have equal power. “The idea,” he says, “is to give every voter the largest equal share of national voting power possible.” Here’s a classic example of equal voting power: under a tyranny, everyone’s power is equal to zero. Clearly, equality alone is not enough. In a democracy, individuals become less vulnerable to tyranny as their voting power increases.
(snip)
A well-designed electoral system might include obstacles to thwart an overbearing majority. But direct, national voting has none. Under raw voting, a candidate has every incentive to woo only the largest bloc-- say, Serbs in Yugoslavia. If a Serb party wins national power, minorities have no prospect of throwing them out; 49 percent will never beat 51 percent. Knowing this, the majority can do as it pleases (lacking other effective checks and balances). But in a districted election, no one becomes president without winning a large number of districts, or “states”- -say, two of the following three: Serbia, Bosnia, and Croatia.
[further redacted by manhattan]
(snip)
We no longer need human bodies to cast electoral ballots, Natapoff says. That part of the system is indeed archaic. But it has worked beautifully, he insists, as a formula for converting one large national contest into 51 smaller elections in which individual voters have more clout. The Madisonian system, by requiring candidates to win states on the way to winning the nation, has forced majorities to win the consent of minorities, checked the violence of factions, and held the country together.
(snip)
Two variables, Natapoff realized, profoundly affect each citizen’s voting power. One is the size of the electorate, a factor that political scientists already recognized. The other is the closeness of the contest, which most experts hadn’t taken into account.
[further redacted by manhattan]
(snip)
In a nation of 135 citizens, says Natapoff, one person’s probability of turning an election is 6.9 percent in a dead-even contest. But if voter preference for candidate A jumps to, say, 55 percent, the probability of deadlock, and of your one vote turning the election, falls below .4 percent, a huge drop. If candidate A goes out in front by 61 percent, the probability that one vote will matter whooshes down to .024 percent. And it keeps on dropping, faster and faster, as candidate A keeps pulling ahead.
The next step is the kicker. The effect of lopsided preferences, Natapoff discovered, is far more important than the size effect. … “And if you’re voting in an uneven election, you had better keep the electorate’s size as small as possible. “If the law of averages has got an edge,” Natapoff says, “it’s going to tell in the long run. And so the idea is not to allow any very large elections if you are a voter. Unless the contest is perfectly even, you want to keep the size of elections small.” The founding fathers unwittingly did this when they divided the national election into smaller, state-size contests.
So even though districting doesn’t help in an ideal, dead-even contest, with voters acting the same all over the country, it does help, Natapoff saw, in a realistic, uneven contest.
[further redacted by manhattan]
The degree to which districting helps, Natapoff found, depends on just how close a contest is. Take as an illustration our model nation of 135, divided into, say, three states of 45 citizens each. When the race is dead even, of course, no districting scheme helps: voting power starts off at 6.9 percent in a direct election versus 6.0 percent in a districted election. But when candidate A jumps ahead with a lead of 54.5 percent, individual voting power is roughly the same whether the nation uses districts or not. And as the contest becomes more lopsided, voting power shrinks faster in the direct-voting nation than it does in the districted nation. If candidate A grabs a 61.1 percent share of voter preference, voters in the districted nation have twice as much power as those in the direct-voting nation. If A’s share reaches 64.8 percent, voters in the districted nation have four times as much power, and so on. The advantage of districting over direct voting keeps growing quickly as the contest becomes more lopsided.
For a nation with millions of voters, the gap between candidates must be razor-thin for districting not to help. In the real world of large nations and uneven contests, voters get more bang for their ballot when they set up a districted, Madisonian electoral system–usually a lot more.
“The theorem,” he sums up, “essentially says that you’re better off districted in any large election, unless every voter in the country is alike and very closely balanced between candidates A and B. In that very extraordinary case, which rarely if ever occurs in our elections, it would be better to have a simple national election.”
Natapoff concedes that the Madisonian system does contain within it one small, unavoidable paradox. Every once in a while, if we use districting to jack up individual voting power, we’ll have an electoral “anomaly”–a loser like Harrison will nudge out a slightly more popular Cleveland. He sees those anomalies, as well as the more frequent close calls, not as defects but as signs that the system is working. It is protecting individual voting power by preserving the threat that small numbers of votes in this or that district can turn the election. “We were blinded by its minor vices,” he says. “All that happens is someone with fewer votes gets elected,” temporarily. What doesn’t happen may be far more important. In 1888, victorious Republicans didn’t celebrate by jailing or killing Democrats, and Democrats didn’t find Harrison so intolerable that they took up arms. Cleveland came back to win four years later, beating Harrison under the same rules as before. The republic survived.
(end excerpts)
Sorry about the lengthy post.
[moderator’s note: This excerpt was a little long for “fair use” purposes. In shortening it, I made every effort to retain the point that the poster and the article were trying to make, but I would encourage the curious to read the entire article, linked above. -manhattan]
[Edited by manhattan on 10-23-2000 at 08:50 AM]
I thought that the candidates actually are not spending much effort in the big states. My understanding was that since N.Y., California and Texas are pretty much locked up, the candidates are spending their time and money in the swing states, with lower population, like Ohio, Michigan, Florida, and Pennsylvania. Admittedly these aren’t tiny states, but doesn’t this suggest that the campaigning practices might change in a system of direct voting - the candidates would still be spending time in California, Texas and New York, because the absolute number of voters there would make it worth their while?
But what do I know? I’m just a Canuck.