So is suggesting that the effect of the Electoral College is too minor to be worth concerning ourselves over when it enabled two of the last three Presidents to take power.
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It would change the percentages slightly. We don’t need to change things that much. For instance with an extra 200 reps would have swung the election to Gore.
No, it is based on the tenet of decision theory that to influence a system one should identify the variables with greatest impact and work on those. Obsessing over the Electoral College – which will be nearly impossible to change – is not as good a use of one’s energy as working on the main cause of the problem.
We can do two things.
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I would agree with you if there were only two things one had to do.
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We’re talking about a difference of 2.9 million votes, which is over 2%. I guess we will have to disagree on what constitutes a “very slight distortion.” But you also aren’t addressing the very real differences in how campaigns are run and what political and policy promises are extracted as a result of candidates focusing on getting electoral votes from states that are strategic and “in play,” rather than focusing on helping he largest number of citizens possible. For example, there are probably more republicans living in California than any state other than Texas, and they have unique needs and concerns as valid as any other Americans, yet no candidates are working hard to try to win their votes since the electoral college has CA “locked up” by the Democrats. People on both sides are hurt by this stupid system.
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First, I want to caution against framing this as big states vs. sparsely populated states, as the article summary does. This could lead to a lot of confusion. Big is ambiguous, but generally used to mean geographically large states – which tend to be interior and westward, have less urban environs, and be more sparsely populated. Small generally means geographically small states – which tend to be eastward and coastal, and densely populated.
These two non-proportional systems are actually one non-proportional system, since the number of electors in each state is equal to the number of Representatives + Senators. Every state gets two bonus electors, which is significant for Rhode Island (though not enough to make a practical difference), and not at all significant for California (with 38 times more people).
And let’s not forget that the Senate itself has only been popularly elected for about 104 years; before that, Senators were elected by state legislatures directly, as agents of the state’s agendas in Washington.
Ultimately, that difference comes from the limits on the granularity (and thus proportionality) of House seats, which are limited to a barley-workable* 435 for 50 states with a spread in population proportionality of 1x to 65x. There needs to be some upper limit on the number of people whose job is not merely voting on bills, but also working together to write bills, and that means even the House is not truly proportional, despite the attempt.
There’s no indication that the college makes sense for a democracy. Nor is there any indication that the U.S. is a democracy. Democracy is just a slightly easier to understand concept than Republicanism, and a much easier concept to understand than Federalism.
The college exists because the nation was born as a republic layered on top of a confederation of newly created (but mostly autonomous) states, which also had the logistical mistfortune of spanning half a continent. No one in any state was expected to have clue who all was running for President or how they compare. That level of horse-trading was left to the electors. In practice, most elections ended up being two-party, but even in the 1860 election, only half of the four candidates made it on to any one state’s ballot. And for added measure, back then the second-place for the Presidency became the Vice President, even if he had opposite policy goals.
In short (too late), the college is an artifact of an age when getting a universal ballot was optimistic, and a true popular vote very unlikely.
Getting rid of the electoral college and going to a direct vote would not favor less populous states (who like that they at least get 10-60% more vote than they otherwise would) nor more populous states. It would benefit cities and parties. It would benefit cities because they have many people and many votes, so the combined voices of several cities would be decisive. It would beenfit parties because they are densely packed (so that it’s really easy to advertise/campaign to them all with less money). It would harm all states, because the distinction between states becomes irrelevant: parties just have to appease the ~40% of the country that represents their base by avoiding anything internally controversial, then close in on enough big cities anywhere convenient to get another 11%. They can campaign and promise heavily to a few people while paying just enough lip service to the rest of the country that they aren’t hated. The states regardless of population would have no power.
But even so… would it be better? Not necessarily, and for the same reasons that cut right to the heart of Federalism: any person is a lot more like his neighbors than not – even neighbors they disagree with on high-profile issues. Heavily-interdependent city-dwellers of any part like social services. Rural-dwellers with fewer options vote vote against a higher tax burden. Bigger/sparsely populated/rural states and Smaller/densely populated/urbanized states have very different needs and very different priorities. And that’s why we have a Federalist system that lets them manage their own damned affairs as much as possible, and duke out the rest in a bicameral system that tries to strike a rough balance between equal citizens and equal states.
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Give. Examples. I gave you one of the democratic leadership in some states trying to sneak in popular vote by the back door. This innuendo is tiresome.
If you wanna turn a partisan issue into But Both Sides then at least give an example.
Far less than the combined votes of Stein and Johnson.
no candidates are working hard to try to win their votes since the electoral college has CA “locked up” by the Democrats.
This could be easily changed at the state level by making the CA electoral college representation proportional.
Nicely put.
If EVERY state changed to allocate their electoral votes proportionally it might help, but not as long as most strategic states remain “winner take all.” What’s the incentive for a presidential candidate to spend valuable campaign time in California trying to get one or two extra electoral votes (at most) if they can focus on swing states like Ohio and win a whole bunch at once?
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Exactly, just like no Presidential candidate has any incentive to win over rural Californians or Iowan urbanites. All kinds of voters get left behind by the current system.
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The effect is marginal but over time is has been accumulating strength as populations shift.
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Well, ironically there’s the losing candidate in the last election, who promised all the way back in 2000 that she’d introduce a Constitutional amendment to abolish the Electoral College – which would have been more impressive had she 1) promoted the idea in the decades before and 2) followed through on that promise during her term in the Senate. It makes a fine point to pay lip service to, especially in the immediate wake of a conflict with the popular vote, but where was the DNC’s heir apparent taking real leadership on the issue during the intervening 16 years?
Then there are the machine-style Dem politicians at the state level, where a lot of this action has to happen whatever goes on in Congress. I’m most familiar with NY and recall what happened when the Democratic-controlled Assembly were presented with an opportunity to reform things there, when a few powerful party stalwarts with the connivance of Sheldon Silver (no model of virtue) managed to shut down the vote.
There. Examples.
It is not “innuendo” to claim that the current Electoral College system helps preserve the two-party duopoly, and it is not controversial to point out that the DNC and state Dem organisations in stronghold states might be reluctant to endanger that duopoly.
This is not to turn it into a “But Both Sides” discussion, since the GOP obviously stands to benefit more from keeping the Electoral College as-is due to the country’s demographic makeup. But the DNC establishment has had 16 years of being on the short end of that stick (including a couple of Congressional majorities) and hasn’t accomplished all that much in terms of changing things to their own benefit (and making things more fair and small-d democratic in the process).
Even if winning elections is one’s only goal as a Democrat, letting the corrupt, complacent and reactionary elements of the party establishment go uncriticised is counter-productive.
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They still won’t in a purely popular system. Not enough votes.
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There are MILLIONS of rural Californians. But no Presidential candidate currently has any particular reason to court them because they don’t make up the majority of the state.
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What interests does a state have? Is there some evidence of sentience or sapience for arbitrarily-drawn geographical regions that I missed? I mean sure, you can make an argument that we got lazy around the Mississippi river and drew states that were too large, but the will of the state is indistinguishable from the will of it’s people.
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It’s not simply the EC though, the Senate itself does quite a bit of damage for the sake of having a version of the House of Lords. Britain had the sense to neuter their House of Lords multiple times over the course of the 20th century, but we’re pretty much locked out of such changes until the constitution is amended.
Around 1/8 of the state population. But they are spread across a vast geographical area, so bringing the campaign to them will be ridiculously expensive even by modern spending standards. Far more cost effective to concentrate campaigning in the urban areas.
Yeah, that pesky US Senate with its irrationality and abuse of power. The House has proved itself so much better an institution of legislative authority. /s
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Or they could have just counted all the votes and discovered that Gore won Florida. 
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