After George W. Bush became President despite getting fewer votes than Al Gore nationwide, I heard a number of calls for abolition or at least reform of the electoral college.
But that died down in less than three months. Why?
Do we want another President who loses the popular vote yet gets elected?
TV
Because the American public, collectively, has about a 15-minute attention span…
Because the American public, collectively, has about a 15-minute attention span…
That is surly part of it, not the whole picture though. I think the Electoral College is one of the real features that acts to distinguish American democracy from other democracy in the world. We do not like people criticizing our democracy—it’s American and the best in the world. As Americans we think people with proportional reprehensive systems in democracy are foolish.
Democrats in America just want to be a little different, it makes us feel better than everyone else. If I had it my way the constitution would be re-written with every generation, in fact I think its about time to blow the whole thing up and start over right now.
Short of nuclear war, nothing would scare me more than the US Constitution being periodically torn up and rewritten. The likelihood of the Bill of Rights surviving such rewrites in anything approaching decent shape is minimal, IMHO. But that’s really for another thread.
Getting back to this one, the party that occupies the White House and controls both houses of Congress has become emotionally committed to the current EC structure as a result of 2000; it is now an article of faith for them, and will undoubtedly continue to be so for awhile. It’s also a tactical advantage for them in a close election that they’d be reluctant to part with: the low-pop states that have more electors per voter under the present system are mostly GOP states.
So there’s no near-term hope of going to either direct elections or a more sensible EC system, and the Dems know it and aren’t going to waste their energy there.
The electoral college concept still serves its original purpose, in that its gives citizens of every state some say in who becomes President. Without it, just going by the popular vote, it would be at least theoretically possible for a candidate to campaign solely in a few population centers, like Southern California, New York, Texas and Florida, and win the White House without any support anywhere else.
One reform/improvement that would not require a Constitutional amendment would be to eliminate the “winner take all” aspect of the Presidential election process. Nothing in the Constitution says that a state must award all of its electoral votes to the one candidate with the majority or plurality of the votes cast, and in fact some states choose to divide the votes among the leading candidates in proportion to the popular vote. If this had been applied in Florida in 2000, there would have been no Constitutional crisis. Bush and Gore would each have gotten 12.5 electoral votes, or maybe they could have been split 12 and 12, with Nader getting 1. Under these circumstances Gore would have been elected President with a majority of the electoral votes. On the other hand, if all states applied the same rule in the same way, Bush might still have won the White House, because he would have picked up electoral votes in several states where he lost the popular vote very narrowly.
The point is that the states could change their procedures by state legislation. No federal amendment would be required. A change along these lines would bring the electoral college vote totals more closely in line with the popular vote and would make a Florida-style crisis much less likely, yet would preserve the basic intention of making every state valuable to the candidate.
With it, that’s even more so: 51% of the population in the 11 largest states gets you 271 electoral votes and the Presidency.
That won’t happen as long as CA and TX see the world differently. But it’s quite plausible that if John Edwards wins the Dem nomination, he could win the Presidency on the basis of a majority in just 13 states: CA, WA, FL, GA, NC, MA, NY, NJ, MD, PA, OH, MI, IL. (Since urban America is ‘Blue America’, it’s really more likely for the Dems to be the beneficiary of such an event than for it to favor the GOP.)
There’s a strong disincentive for an individual state to enact this change on its own, and here’s why.
Say you have two states, both with 10 electoral votes, and both more or less in play in an election. One is winner-take-all, and the other’s proportional. The winner-take-all state has 10 electoral votes at stake, while the proportional state has perhaps 2, which is what a swing from between 55 and 65% for Candidate A to 55-65% for Candidate B would gain the lucky candidate. The winner-take-all state will see a lot more of the candidates (and their ads) than the nonproportional state will.
Hell, the proportional state will see less of the candidates and their time than an in-play, winner-take-all state with 3 electoral votes, which is what the smallest states have.
There’s also a strong disincentive for the majority party in a state to enact this reform: if your state has 10 electoral votes, and consistently votes for party X, then the state legislature is probably controlled by Party X. The Xers will want the entire 10 electoral votes to go to the X candidate, rather than 6 out of 10: why would they stab their own candidate in the back?
It’s a great idea intellectually, but politically as unfeasible as amending the Constitution to change or get rid of the EC.
The electoral college will never change, no matter how outdated it is because it benifits the majority of the states that, together, have a majority of the House of Representatives (the group that would need a 2/3 vote to alter the status of the electoral college).
At least thats how I read it from the Constitution… correct me if I’m wrong.
Different parties have been in control at different times, but without any effort being made to change the EC. The smaller states have never had a reason to give up their disproportionate power, for one thing. For another, there’s never been a consensus, or even solid majority opinion, about what to change it to.
When Susan B. Anthony and other early feminists started agitating for women’s suffrage, one could have said, on quite similar grounds, “Women will never get the vote in this country, because the decision to give it to them would have to be made by male politicians who were elected by, and are answerable to, an all-male electorate.” Somehow – after several decades of campaigning – they got it anyway. Never dismiss a proposed reform just because it appears to be politically impossible.
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The electoral college concept still serves its original purpose, in that its gives citizens of every state some say in who becomes President. Without it, just going by the popular vote, it would be at least theoretically possible for a candidate to campaign solely in a few population centers, like Southern California, New York, Texas and Florida, and win the White House without any support anywhere else.
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And what, exactly, would be wrong with that?
And what, exactly, would be wrong with that?
You and RTFirefly may be missing the way the EC forces parties and candidates for president to appeal to more national politics. The idea, as I understand it, is that politicians do not need to win more than 51% of the vote in these large states. That is, winning more does not do them any good. Therefore, they do not need to propose radical policies which appeal only to the large states. The are free to propose policies which are favorable to smaller states even if they are marginally objectionable to the larger ones.
I agree that a party or presidential candidate could theoretically win national ellections by campaining only in the top 13 states. But that is true of a popular elections as well. The top 13 states have more electoral votes because they have more population. The point I’m making is that politicians don’t have to fight for complete control of these states, because they can gain a similar amount of power by advocating policies which benifit all the states and thus get them electoral votes in more places. That is, they can surrender a couple of the top 13 states if by doing so, they can pick up several of the others.
I might be wrong… but the current system does exactly what you are saying it doesn’t. Since only the swing states matter both candidates campaign, not only, but mostly in the swing states ! So even though they do have support elsewhere they barely give heavily balanced states any attention at all.
I don’t see that they do. Instead I would go along with RTF that this issue isn’t front and center because of the perceived unlikelyhood of success given the current climate in Washington DC. Constitutional amendments to abolish the EC passed the House in both 1969 and 1979 only to die in the Senate. Given that our national politics have since moved to the right it seems unlikely today that reform would even get that far.
*I certainly have no problem criticizing our democracy or lack thereof. I complain all the time and every poll I have seen on the matter, going back to 1950, shows a majority of Americans in favor of abolishing the Electoral College.
It gives some citizens in every state some say. Without it, just going by the popular vote, all citizens, in every state or elsewhere, would have the same vote.
The EC biases the presidential elections in basically three ways. Between the states the votes are unequal because individuals are voting with varying numbers of people for varying piles of electoral votes. Within each state political power is uneven because only those voting in the majority have any say in who wins due to the fact that all of a state’s electoral votes fall to a single candidate. The wishes of those in the minority have no effect on the vote that counts in the electoral college. Outside the states there is no vote at all. Not even the sham of casting a ballot that won’t count. Those citizens without residency in a state ( or the federal district ) are disenfranchised completely.
I think the actions of the House in '69 and '79 belie this conclusion. Nor is it necessary to amend the Constitution to do away with the Electoral College. As I have explained a few times already in this forum all that is needed is just a regular congressional statute directing the Federal Election Commission to produce an accurate tally of the presidential votes of all qualified American citizens everywhere and the District of Columbia to assign its electors based upon all the votes. The states would be encouraged to do the same and if the 11 “biggest” states go along that’s all she wrote. As RTF points out they control a majority of the electoral votes. If they, or any other combination of states with an electoral majority, agree beforehand to assign those votes to the most popular candidate nationwide then effectively we will have a popular vote. Whoever gets the most individual votes will win no matter where they might be cast.
Both situations are possible but not equally likely. You are overlooking the degree of difficulty in achieving huge margins of victory. In a direct election in order to control an absolute majority only within the most populous states a candidate would need to win, what? 90%, 95% of the vote in each state. Has any presidential candidate ever done that well within a single state? With the EC all a candidate needs is a plurality in those states. More of the votes than anyone else is a lot easier to achieve than practically all the votes. Someone always gets more of the votes.
I have never understood this argument of yours. You are saying that the only votes which count are the ones in the majority. How would this be different if the election were national?
No, this difficulty is precisely my point. The difficulty involved would require parties or national candidates to propose radical policies which would benifit only those 13 (or a couple more) states. Such radical policies would almost have to be to the detriment of the other States. Under our current system parties do not dare such policies. If they misjudge and only get a plurality in the large states, the other party will still have the power to stymie such radical policies. Remove the checks and balances on such geographical majorities and you remove the incentive to make policies which appeal to more broadly based geographic (and to some extent demographic) regions.
I’m not going to link to the Discover article, (google for Alan Natapoff if you are interested), but I would like to reserect the World Series analogy.
There is a good analogy between the World Series and the Electoral College. Specifically that a presidential candidate does not win a single large election. He has to win several smaller ones. It does not matter that he wins by grotesque margins in one or 2 of these small elections if he looses by similar amounts in all the others. What this means is that a presidential candidate has to appeal to larger areas of the country than he might in a straight popular vote. It does mean that it is possible for a president to win without winning the popular vote. Just like the 1960s Yankees could score 55 runs to Pittsburgh’s 27 in the world series, and still not win the championship because they lost 4 games to 3.
The EC produces a 2 stage vote. In the first stage delegates are elected who then go on to vote in the 2nd. Since the minority in a state doesn’t elect any delegates they don’t have any say in who wins the deciding vote. Perhaps it will be easier to understand by imagining that a direct national vote had 2 stages. In the imaginary first stage the voters each elect themselves as delegates and then in the 2nd actually cast their ballots. See the difference? The power of the voters in the final tally is exactly proportional and thus everyone is represented equally. Every vote counts.
I lost you. It seems to me that you agree that under a direct vote it is much much much more difficult for a candidate to achieve enough support in populous states to safely ignore voters elsewhere yet paradoxically you claim this makes it more likely to happen. What gives?
Also note that the EC doesn’t promote broadly geographic or demographic policy. The EC divides the nation up into districts and thus its influence is similarly atomized. The prototypical EC inspired policy are the infamous steel tariffs. Bush proposed them in 2000 to gain support in Ohio, West Virginia, and Pennsylvania. Nevermind that they were a violation of our international agreements. When the WTO agreed they were illegal and authorized retalitory tariffs by our competators knew how to get Bush’s attention. They went after industries in other battleground states like Michigan where the President couldn’t afford to ignore them. There is no political consideration for the good of the whole because we don’t vote as a whole nation. The national interest is put aside in favor of the local interest of the state a candidate needs to win.
I’m not sure what you think is so good about that analogy though your simplified version at least has the benefit of being an accurate representation which Natapoff’s original did not. I can just as easily describe a direct election as a football game where it doesn’t matter if you outscore your opponent in the first, 2nd, and third quarters; you only win if you have the most points at the end of the game. So what? All that shows is that it’s not tough to find a sports analogy to fit your position. ( Or for shills like Natapoff that you can shoehorn your policy preference into an analogy even though it doesn’t. ) Your analogy certainly doesn’t show that a candidate has to appeal to “larger areas of the country”. On the contrary, you yourself have just agreed that the EC makes it easier for candidates to gain enough support in certain states to safely ignore others.
OK, but the minority still has no say in who is the president. They did not vote for him, so they were not represented by him. You are claiming that the electors from a state are only representing the majority. Why then do you say a president elected by a majority still represents the whole nation?
No, you are confusing likely and difficult. The point is that the added difficulty is not rewarded in our current system. In a national election it could be.
No, it is not. Presidential candidates maintain policies which garner support in states which are “not in play” as you say. They most certainly do not ignore them.
Yes. But that is because the policies advocated by the 2 parties have already decided (to some degree) the elections in the other states. What exactly would change in a national election? Well, I contend that both parties would become even more regional. IF the democrats think they had won California by a hadfull of percentage points, why should they try to win the rest of the state? In a national election there is every reason to do so. In the current system, they do not have to.
The point of the analogy is that there is a principle involved with contests wherein simple addition of score may not be suficient to demonstrate the “best” or winning team. The idea is that a good presidential candidate should have to spread his support around the country. And that this spread can be measured by having many small elections instead of one big one.
Think of it this way. If a national elections were held in 2 stages where the first stage elected the winning voters to an electoral college. Everyone’s vote would count, butthe final decision would only be made by the people who voted for the winner of the first stage. 
Part of the reason there has not been much active support in changing or eliminating the electoral college, is that it is only used once every four years, almost no one thinks much about it inbetween and we rarely have election results where it’s use appear “unseemly” or unfair. So few voters remember a prior bad effect.
Also, the side that benefits from winning with the fewer votes is then in power and has little interest in a change that confirms they won thru an inferior system.
It’s main function to Joe Six-Pack, is that it allows him to know the winner before bedtime(usually).
Abolish it in favor of strict majority voting? Or will we adopt some other voting system?
Because the president was elected by the whole nation. The objection isn’t that the minority lost. The objection is that the minority didn’t get to vote. On the ballot that mattered, the final one, they had no say because all of the political power of their state, including theirs, was given to a candidate they opposed. There are some issues I am skirting here to avoid my tendency to digress into incoherency but I should note that I reject the notion of an elector as a representative in the sense laid out by Hamilton. The job of an elector is to be faithful to the candidates they are pledged to vote for and not rely on their own judgement.
C’mon now, did you honestly suppose I couldn’t tell the difference between “likely” and “difficult”? Really?
I have to admit that I’m not sure at all what you are trying to say. My position here is that the EC makes it easier for a candidate to be elected while completely ignoring the wishes of certain voters. That’s why I objected to your unqualified statement that both a popular vote and the electoral college vote could be won by campaigning in only the 13 most populous states.
Both political parties have a national base and no, it can’t be ignored. A candidate can’t come out in favor of death by torture to appease Texans, for instance. The base of the party wouldn’t go along. But regional issues are a different story. Bush couldn’t ignore the tariff threat to the auto industry because Michigan is in play but there wasn’t the same pressure on him to become involved in the California energy crisis at the begining of his term because he wasn’t going to win Cali in 2004 anyway.
The EC creates differences between voters. Some are more desirable based upon where they live than others. In a national election every vote is equal so politicians aren’t encouraged to pander to the wants of a select group and ignore the desires of others. Why would you think this would make politics more regional? Presidential candidates would be encouraged to reach out to everyone since now every vote would help them no matter where it was cast.
Is this directed at me? If so my plan only allows us to move to a majority vote. The difficulty is that each state controls the selection of their own electors so the Congress can’t just pass a law requiring some form of IRV. A regular runoff election is possible though. The law can state that if no candidate has a majority then the winner shall be the one of the 2 most popular candidates in the general election that receives the most votes in the runoff in those states and territories which choose to hold one.