Your Thoughts Exactly

Derek, this just wouldn't fit in a comment, so here you go. While there are definitely some flaws in the Electoral College system, scrapping in favor of a direct popular vote could destroy the nation more rapidly than our current president’s efforts. And while I was a Gore supporter, and even worked on his campaign, I do not support a change to direct popular vote.

You say that the electoral system, due to the constant 2 votes for each state regardless of population, grants more power to voters in the least populous states. While a true assessment of individual-to-electoral vote value, this ignores the value of states as a whole. To get a better sense of voting power, you must look at both the likelihood of an individual’s vote determining the outcome of a state (more likely in less populous states), as well as the likelihood of that states bloc of electors determining the outcome of the electoral college vote – which, obviously more likely in the most populous states, grants those big states a power that more than counters the small-state bias. In The Electoral College Primer 2000, Lawrence D. Longley and Neal R. Peirce developed a system to measure state biases based on these factors. They determined that in only 6 states do voters have more than the average voting power – the 6 most populous states. Here is a sample of their results, where the lowest voting power is set at 1.0 (sorry Montanans. Montanaoans? Montanaites?):

	Electoral Votes	Relative Voting Power	% Deviation from Average
California	54	2.663	72.0
Texas	32	1.891	22.1
New York	33	1.888	22.0
Montana	3	1.0	-35.4
Wyoming	3	1.327	-14.3
New Jersey	15	1.315	-15.1
Kansas	6	1.013	-34.6
Arkansas	6	1.040	-32.8
Louisiana	9	1.119	-27.7
Alabama	9	1.143	-26.2
Mississippi	7	1.150	-25.7

The size of the electoral bloc delivered by California and friends vastly outweighs the effects of the “constant 2” advantage of small states. The states hurt the most by the College seem to be mid to small sized states, while the smallest gain the +2 advantage – notice voters in Wyoming and New Jersey have nearly identical voting power. Montana and Wyoming citizens have such vastly different voting power despite equal Electoral votes because Montana has nearly twice as many inhabitants as Wyoming.

This power can also be divided by region: the far west, as a region, has voting power nearly 50% greater than average, mostly due to California. The east coast has the next greatest power. Also, ethnic biases emerge from this data – Hispanic voters have 26.3% greater power than average, due mostly to large Hispanic populations in California and Florida, and voting largely as a bloc. Meanwhile, as 55% of African Americans live in the South, and many southern states fall into the small to medium size category, black voters tend to have diminished voting power – though not by a large degree, as the large African American populations in New York, California, Florida, and Texas help balance this out. This is, however, one book’s system, and should be approached with a degree of skepticism. They are not alone, however, in promoting the notion of a big-state bias. Political Scientists Steven J. Brams and Morton D. Davis developed, based on the Electoral College system, the “3/2 rule” in allocating campaign resources, which says that funds should be allocated according to states “roughly in proportion to the 3/2’s power of the electoral votes of each state,” then showed that campaigns do in fact tend to stick close to this rule, which shows the importance of the larger states.

While I agree that there are problems and biases in the Electoral College system, I do not agree that it should be tossed into the dustbin of history in favor of a direct popular vote. The results of such a switch could be catastrophic.

A popular vote would result, as you say, in empowering third parties; however, it would not stop there. Fifth, 8th, and 12th parties would crop up. Parties that exist to advocate an interest on a single issue would gain tangible levels of support. The winner of each election would never garner enough support to come close to a majority. Though we have had 17 elections won by a plurality or minority of the popular vote, 11 of those winners have had at least 47%. A common threshold suggested by direct vote supporters is 40%; if no candidate won 40%, there would be a runoff between the top two candidates. While prudent to not let a candidate step into office with support of only thirtysomething percent of the country, this method invites further complications.

Runoffs are not effective because they tend to have even less turnout than a normal election – which would be especially significant in a country like ours in which voter turnout is roughly 50% to start with. Thus we would have many instances in which our president is decided by markedly fewer than 50% of the voting population, and is a choice between two candidates who together earned possibly less than 70% of the total vote.

The other option is an instant runoff, where voters signify a preference among the candidates in case no one reaches the threshold. Aside from probably confusing many voters, leading to questionable and unreliable results, these results would be indistinguishable from legitimate ones because preferential voting leads to many irrational outcomes. The ripple effect of the consequences of a popular vote could potentially lead to succession by various coalitions of states. This is a great stretch of conclusions, but not impossible.

The Electoral College, while not requiring even a plurality of votes, requires winning candidates to have a large degree of popular support (no one is winning the electoral college vote with a percentage of the popular vote in the 30’s. Well, Lincoln did with 39%, but that’s it), and have that support distributed across the nation. No single region has a large enough bloc to send a candidate to the Oval Office without support from elsewhere in the country. There is a third party paradox to the Electoral College; to have any measurable success in the Electoral vote, minority party candidates must have strong localized support (as Strom Thurmond did in 1948, winning 39 electoral votes with 2.4% of the popular vote, while Henry A. Wallace won 0 electoral votes with his 2.4%, distributed nationwide, that same year) to win any state and effect the outcome of the election, possibly preventing a major candidate from receiving the necessary 270 votes, throwing the election to the floor of the House of Representatives.

The Electoral College system has its flaws. There are large and small-state biases – the large-state bias, though, is not by the design of the system but rather population tendencies and each state’s own method for selecting electors; Nebraska and Maine have chosen to not grant their states electors as a winner-take-all bloc. I would do away with the structural flaw of the constant two electors granted to each state. This was developed at a time when the power of the states was a major concern, as they were wary of a strong Federal government. This is not so much of a problem now, and the President’s job is to serve the people, not the states. But the nature of a Federal system is to grant a certain level of power to the states, and the Electoral College does so – and would continue to do so without the two-vote bump. In a popular vote, states could simply lower the voting age in their state to produce more voters, increasing their states power to influence the election.

The two-party system has curtailed the voices of many minority parties, but has also forced the two major parties to incorporate issues brought to the fore by such parties. The Electoral College fosters coalition-building within the parties, rather than within fractured governments. Though this tends to lead both parties to the middle of the political spectrum, and provides the stability that has seen our country through two+ centuries, many wars, economic depressions, and political scandals. I agree that minority parties and views should get more recognition and response from the government. I would like to see something crazy, like a cabinet position granted to any third party candidate that gets a certain threshold of the popular vote – maybe 10% - as an advisor to the president. Of course, this would be a weird position, and defy the nature of a President-appointed cabinet, but hey, why not? The position could be called the Secretary of the Obscure. Write me in this fall!

Anywho, my point is this: the Electoral College, while old, is not antiquated. Yes, there are some flaws, but it is simply amazing how the framers could develop a system that guided the nation through its rough early years, balanced delicately the power of the Executive, Legislative, and the states, and still serves us properly today. Our election process could use some minor tweaking, but a complete overhaul to a less stable system could cause disastrous outcomes and quickly dissolve a large powerful nation into a fractured coalition of splintered states.