Dinhternet

If you and I have talked about pol­i­tics before, you prob­a­bly know that I really despise the elec­toral col­lege. I think it’s an anti­quated sys­tem for a bygone era, when mass com­mu­ni­ca­tions were too slow and inef­fi­cient to really inform vot­ers. It’s a sys­tem that was designed to take the power away from the “unwashed masses” and into the hands of a pow­er­ful “edu­cated” few (the state legislators).

(As a very brief refresher, the Pres­i­den­tial elec­tion is not deter­mined by the pop­u­lar vote, as many peo­ple can’t get their heads around. Rather, it is decided by 538 elec­toral del­e­gates. Each state gets a num­ber of del­e­gates equal to the num­ber of Sen­a­tors and Rep­re­sen­ta­tives they have, and an extra three for the Dis­trict of Colum­bia. All the del­e­gates from each state vote for who­ever won the pop­u­lar vote in their state. A sim­ple major­ity, or 270 votes, will deter­mine the President.)

The biggest prob­lem I have with the sys­tem is that the elec­toral col­lege makes the voice of each voter unequal. A voter in a smaller state gets more say in who becomes Pres­i­dent than an equally impor­tant voter in a large state. Also, the winner-take-all sys­tem basi­cally silences the voices of any vot­ers who are not part of the two “main” par­ties. And then there’s the issue of play­ing the swing states so that a can­di­date could poten­tially lose the pop­u­lar vote but still win the elec­toral col­lege. Democ­rats have been cry­ing about that for eight years now. It is a big deal that keeps peo­ple up at night.

But how to address this issue? Some peo­ple (myself included), would like to see the elec­toral col­lege thrown out entirely, and let the vot­ers speak directly through the pop­u­lar vote. That’s not going to hap­pen any­time soon, though. Too much resis­tance from smaller states with noth­ing to gain.

Jimmy told me that some states are con­sid­er­ing a sys­tem where they have their elec­toral del­e­gates vote for who­ever wins the national pop­u­lar vote, regard­less of what hap­pens in their own state. He didn’t remem­ber the states that were think­ing about this, though, and as far as I know, this hasn’t hap­pened any­where and prob­a­bly won’t hap­pen any time soon. At least not in any states that matter.

In POL 162 today, the pro­fes­sor talked about the Nebraska-Maine method, wherein two del­e­gates’ votes (the “Sen­a­tors’ votes”) would go to the can­di­date who won the state pop­u­lar vote. Each “Representative’s vote” would go to whichever can­di­date won each Con­gres­sional dis­trict. This sys­tem still gives unfair weight to vot­ers in smaller states, but get­ting rid of the “winner-take-all” aspect does level the play­ing field quite a bit, espe­cially for third-party can­di­dates. What’s the prob­lem with this sys­tem, though? To make it truly fair, all states would have to simul­ta­ne­ously decide to switch to this sys­tem. If, for instance, Cal­i­for­nia decided to switch pre­emp­tively (as some Repub­li­cans are try­ing to do right now), the block of fifty-five votes which tra­di­tion­ally go to the Democ­rats would sud­denly split, and Repub­li­cans basi­cally get twenty free votes. Also, because third-party can­di­dates are able to “steal” elec­toral votes away from the big two, there’s a chance no can­di­date will win a major­ity of elec­toral votes.

Oh, and the most con­vinc­ing argu­ment I’ve heard to keep the sys­tem as is this — in 1860, Abra­ham Lin­coln won the major­ity of elec­toral votes to take the Pres­i­dency, even though he didn’t have a major­ity of the pop­u­lar vote. (Although to be fair to Pres­i­dent Lin­coln, there were four can­di­dates and he did win a plurality.)