Again on the electoral college
I’m not letting this go. Because it’s a critically important issue. Period.
It’s a broken system that needs to be abolished. Luckily, there is already a movement going around the country that will de-facto destroy the electoral college called the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact (NPVIC) where states will just award all of their electors to whoever wins the national popular vote.
That’s a good thing, but that’s no reason to stop addressing the problem head on.
Problems with the Electoral College
It encourages our broken two-party system, entrenching moneyed interests and political elites/professionals in a “lesser evil” dynamic.
It codifies smaller, third parties into uselessness at the national (and hence also the local) level and stifles genuine competition for votes, as national and local elections become negative with little impetus to actually be good, but just be better than the other guy.
It utilizes an outdated model of the country where differences in state lines were far more significant.
Similar to how voting on a Tuesday made sense hundreds of years ago, states being wholly independent places with unique and independent cultures and values is outdated. Ease of transit and technological innovations reduced us from 50 distinct cultures to 11, so the modeling just needs updating if nothing else.
It depresses voter turnout, delegitimizing the presidential election and disenfranchising millions of Americans.
America’s miserable voting rates are not new. Less than 55% of voters voted in the 2016 election, which is dismal. This is because (in part) of how pointless it is to vote a lot of the time. Republicans have no reason to vote for President in New York or the West Coast. Democrats have no reason to vote for President in the South or Midwest (with a couple exceptions).
Currently there are 12 swing states (Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, New Hampshire, Minnesota, Ohio, Iowa, Virginia, Florida, Michigan, Nevada, Colorado, and North Carolina) that matter in a national election. The total population of these is 86.3 million. Everyone else’s individual vote doesn’t count for presidential election because, at the individual level, there is no reason to think NY would go red, or Georgia to go blue..
To do the math for you, 86.3 million is 27% of the U.S. Which translates to 73% of votes not mattering with the current system.
If you want to say that it’s only 60% of 73%, because at the end of the day someone has to vote in the safe states, okay. That’s still 43.8% of people who for all intents and purposes don’t matter in the Presidential election.
It instills legal privilege to people based on their geography and fundamentally violates the democratic principles this country was founded on.
The votes of people in smaller states matter more than the votes of people in larger states. It is a basic violation of the fundamental American promise of “one-person-one-vote”. There is no getting around this. To demonstrate this point, this is a map of smaller states that have the same power as California in the electoral college.
You can easily be forgiven for thinking “California has so much power”, but look at the numbers.
22.4 million people have the same fundamental power as 37.2 million people. That’s more than a x1.65 multiplier. There are specific state interactions that are even more drastic.
Rhode Island has 1 electoral vote for every 263,500 people. Texas has 1 vote for every 709,474 people. translating to a RI vote being worth 2.7 Texas votes.
To go to extremes, California has 1 vote for every 711,636 votes. North Dakota has 1 vote for every 241,131 people. That’s a 3:1 margin. One person in North Dakota has as much power in the presidential election as literally everyone I know in California (I don’t know many people there).
“But this will just let big states and big cities control the election.”
Wrong. Do the math on it. Or, better yet, I did the math already.
To get 50%+1 of the population from cities alone, you would need about 70% of every city in the U.S. to vote for the candidate to counteract the rural vote. Even NYC doesn’t barely had this in 2016, and its arguably the most liberal city in the country, which is solely because of the discrepancy in Manhattan.
Even if the top 4 populous states (California (39M), Texas(27M), Florida(20M), and New York(20M) in order) got together and voted for one party (good luck) with 100% of their vote it still wouldn’t be a majority(108M vs the 160.7M+1 to form a majority). Even if you focused on just the top 10 states by population you’d need to win those states by 30-40 points to get a majority from as few states as possible. And that still would leave the Senate and the Court, a full half of the federal government, “on the side” of less-populous states.
What are the top 10 populous states, by the way? California, Texas, Florida, New York, Illinois, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Georgia, Michigan, North Carolina. Seems fairly representative to me.
By the way, that’s 256 Electoral votes in the current system. Meaning that beating someone who managed to do that in the electoral college system would be practically impossible anyway, as whoever wins Texas, Georgia, and Florida is almost definitely going to win the rest of the South, if nothing else.
Switching from an electoral system to a popular vote system actually reduces the power of this entirely theoretical situation, since you’re go from 257/270 in our current system to 108/161.
The world is amazing when you do the math for yourself. Honestly, this goes to show that nobody, absolutely nobody espousing this talking point actually looked at a calendar and double-checked their claims.
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