Not so much a question about the current elections, but about the make-up of the Electoral College.
Currently, there are 538 electoral votes (derived from 435 members of the House of Representatives, 100 Senators, and 3 from the District of Columbia).
This leads to the possibility of a tie vote in the Electoral College, which Nate Silver is discussing as at least possible in some of his simulations: New Polls Raise Chance of Electoral College Tie.
The number of electors based on the Senate will always be an even number, and the number of electors for D.C. is essentially fixed at 3 by the Twenty-Third Amendment, since it can never have more electoral votes than the least populous state (looking at you, Wyoming).
So why not add one more seat to the House of Representatives, making it 436? That small addition shouldn’t affect the balance in the House very much, nor the balance in the Electoral College, but it would raise the total number of Electors to 539. That would prevent a tie vote in the College, barring highly unusual situations like a viable third party candidate or a faithless elector.
It also could be done prospectively, not to take effect until after the redistribution of seats following the 2020 census. That far out, it’s hard to predict exactly which state would get the new seat, which may reduce the political objections to the new seat at this stage.
Also, keep in mind that it wouldn’t really solve the problem if there were a 3rd party candidate who captured some of the votes and the two main parties didn’t reach a majority. Unlike most other elections in the US that use a first past the post model, the electoral college requires an outright majority. So adding 1 to the House is not going to fix any and all problems that might arise where the house has to decide on president.
Much better to just switch to a national vote for president and do direct democracy.
Then you just write off most of the middle of the country.* Better to switch every state to the model Maine or Nebraska uses, if you are going to change anything at all.
Los Angeles County alone has more people than 40 states. Why bother with Nebraska when you just have to win California, New York and Florida?
But a lack of direct popular vote screws those people in Los Angeles county. In what sense can a state be screwed, while the people living in are being treated justly - by having their vote count as much as anyone else’s?
Actually, almost none of those states are competitive in the electoral college, so in reality a national popular vote would make their votes relevant for the first time in many years. Democrats would need votes from people in Wyoming and Utah and Texas, and Republicans would need votes from people in California and Maryland and Vermont.
Agreed. If everybody in New York, California, Texas and a couple of other states vote for one guy, and those votes total more than half the country’s population, who cares? What’s the evil?
I don’t see why that’s a problem. We needed this compromise between little states and big states back when the country was created. If more people vote for president and live in 3 states, so what? We’re doing the will of the people. Why should it matter if they are geographically spread out?
I think its time to get rid of the electoral college. It was a nice idea at the time, but like all good ideas, its time to reevaluate it based on today’s reality
Going to a direct vote system would have the opposite effect. The middle of the country would count more. Under the current system, candidates write off any state where they don’t have a reasonable shot at getting 51% of the votes. It doesn’t matter if you got 10% or 20% or 30% or 40% - you lost the entire state.
But with a direct election, the difference between getting 10% and 20% could be what decides the outcome of the election. So candidates would have to work on every state, not just their party strongholds.
The advantage of the Electoral College system is that it’s clear and definitive.
Barack Obama beat John McCain by exactly 365 -173 in 2008. Nobody disputes that count. If there’s ever a dispute over an election, it’s going to be over the general election. That’s where the challenges occur.
The Electoral College system mutes these disputes. Nobody is going to worry if a few hundred votes were stolen if Hicksville County if they lost the state by ten thousand votes overall - the issue of whether you got 200 votes or 700 votes in Hicksville isn’t an issue that would change the outcome of the election. The only time people worry about fraud is when the results for the state were close enough that the fraud might have tipped the balance.
If there was no Electoral College and every vote in the country counted towards the total, you’d see the number of challenges explode. There would be hundreds or even thousands of challenges in every Presidential election because each vote would be worth fighting for. You’d never settle all these cases between November and January. And think of the political fallout if every election was being fought by months of court battles.
Couldn’t the electoral college also cause issues where none would have existed? I’d think that a 500,000 vote lead nationwide would be much harder to challenge than a 537 vote lead in Florida.
IIRC, one of the reasons that the number of Reps is set as it is is to avoid an apportionment paradox. Mathematically, it’s impossible to apportion discrete items by size and not have some sort of unfairness or paradox at certain numbers of the item. So the number is always set such that it doesn’t run into those problems. I don’t know if 436 is a bad number, but it could be.
I’ve heard this before but I don’t believe it will happen. Essentially, every state and local election works on a popular vote basis, and with bigger states like CA, senators are decided by millions of votes in dozens of counties and hundreds of cities. No serious challenges have come in recent memory. What does get challenged are close races separated by something like 1%, which I believe is the standard in many states across the country.
I think the fear of challenges may be real if one party, such as the GOP, decided to obstruct and delay and throw doubt into the results. I have absolutely no faith that the GOP would just let it go, though why they aren’t doing it already in blue states with blue senators is a question. So I don’t think it would happen at a national level either.
Another point is that the electoral system would create opportunities to challenge where none would exist in a popular vote system. If, nationally, one side loses by a million votes, that would be pretty daunting to try to overcome through court challenges and recounts. However, if they only had to win a few counties and a few states, they may hedge their bets and go for it knowing that they may not win the popular vote, they can win the electoral vote.
Ultimately, I think this is a math issue. There’s around 100-120 million voters who will vote in a presidential election. There are 538 electoral votes. Which one is easier to manipulate to make things closer?