Electoral college shapes foreign policy
This would not be taking place if it were not likely to win votes in Florida. Without carrying Florida the president has precious little chance to win re-election. But for an important segment of Florida voters both Cuba and Venezuela are seen as enemy states. Hostility and intervention there wins votes, whereas these same voters may support, or at least not mind, the president’s withdrawal from Syria or his amicable attitude toward North Korea.
Spanish-speaking voters in Texas or California are far more likely to react negatively to Donald Trump’s policies toward Mexico and Central America, from where they’ve come. But they are relatively indifferent to his Cuba or Venezuela policies, since most do not trace their origins from those areas. However, these voters are taken for granted or ignored in presidential politics because of the anti-democratic electoral college system.
This is another in a litany of bad aspects of the selection system.
Our Election System Makes us Vulnerable to Foreign Hackers
When we talk about the Electoral College and the national popular vote, we usually think about issues of fairness, democracy, history, and policy. But there is another problem with the way that the Electoral College currently operates—with one candidate getting all the electoral votes from a state whether he or she wins that state by one vote or one million votes—that counsels strongly in favor of reform: election security.
As national popular vote activist Bunnie Keen writes, our current system makes it much too easy for a malevolent foreign power to hack an election:
The Mueller report documents that, in 2016, at least one county computer system in Florida was successfully hacked by Russian operatives. The vote margin for Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton was just over 100,000 votes in that state. That was approximately .07% of the total votes cast nationwide (136 million) in our last presidential election.
It’s not known at this time which Florida county suffered the intrusion, but if the results were sufficient to flip the state’s total electoral votes from one candidate to the other, does it matter at this point?
The critically urgent question that must be addressed before 2020 is: Who do we want to have the greatest influence on our next presidential election: the American people, or a foreign government?
When elections can turn on just a few hundred votes in one state, as it did in 2000 and easily could again, even a small or relatively contained hack could make a universe of difference. If all votes counted equally, the system would be much more difficult if not impossible to hack.
The Electoral College Distorts the Primary Process
The Electoral College system has a tremendous impact on candidates’ campaigns and policies. But it also dictates who the candidates are in the first place.
The 2020 Democratic primary is in full swing, and voters have a staggering number of candidates to evaluate. According to a HuffPost/YouGov poll, 49% of Democratic voters think it’s more important that a candidate is more likely to win compared to only 35% who think it’s more important that a candidate’s position on the issues is closest to their own. A focus on electability in itself is not terribly surprising—any primary voter should be concerned about a candidate’s appeal to the broader electorate. But under the Electoral College, primary voters can’t just evaluate which candidate they think will do the best across the nation as a whole. Instead, they think about electability in terms of a fraction of a fraction of voters—that is, swing voters in swing states. As Ed Kilgore explains:
“Without question, the most popular contestants for key swing voters next year are the Rust Belt white working-class voters — many of whom voted for Barack Obama in 2008 and/or 2012 — who helped Trump win Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, and thus, the presidency in 2016.”
The problem is, voters tend not to be very good at determining electability. So the primary system forces voters to make a decision based on the perceived preferences of just a tiny sliver of the population, a double distortion that leads candidates even further away from the policies that most Americans actually want.
Mark Bohnhorst on the History and Future of the Electoral College
Four arguments in defense of the Electoral College--And Why They're Wrong
This article tackles four common defenses of the Electoral College: 1) it filter the passions of the people; 2) it forces candidates to campaign in rural areas; 3) it prohibits a couple of states or cities from picking the winner; and 4) it prevents the chaos of a contested election—and explains why each of them is factually incorrect.
More democracy means more money
According to this study, democracy improved GDP per capita by 10%. As everyone knows, the United States does not choose the president through a democratic process—or more precisely, it is democratic voting separately in a handful of states that determine who becomes president. If the candidates had to win a national democratic vote, each person getting equal weight in the voting regardless of state of residence, then we can guess that the American GDP would be nearly $2 trillion higher.
The causation would run through many pathways, including more efficient advertising of policy positions, more efficient delivery of government services, more responsiveness to felt needs of most people, and more confidence in the future of the country.
Both Candidates Will Continue to Fight for the Same Few States—While Ignoring Most of the Country
The manager of President Trump’s 2020 campaign said that Trump thinks he can win a few states that Hilary Clinton carried in 2016, while repeating his victories in the key states of Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin. The Democratic candidate will, of course, have to win some of the states that Clinton lost in order to win in 2020.
The problem is that both parties are continuing to fight for the same handful of states, with hardly a thought for the rest of the nation. While the states that are up for grabs may slowly change over time, the overall number of competitive states has decreased. This means that more and more of the country is left out of the presidential election conversation entirely. Presidential candidates rarely or never visit most states. Worse, they tailor their policy positions to the needs of swing states alone—with serious consequences.
Until every vote matters equally, the system will force candidates to spend almost all of their time and money on winning the votes of the small percentage of the country that live in big swing states like Florida and Pennsylvania, ignoring most of the small states. That is not the system that our founders envisioned, and is not one that is working today.
Interviewed by an Educated Martian About our Country's Presidential Selection System
The Maine legislature is deliberating over a bill to become the 16th state to enter the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact and the fourth state to do so in the past few months. Under that bill, once states with a majority of electoral college votes (270) adopt the Compact legislation, they will direct their electors to cast their ballots for the presidential candidate who earns the most votes, nationwide. At that point, every vote in the country, including in those states that have not joined the Compact, will count equally. Accordingly, Maine’s consideration of this legislation has attracted national, international, and now even Solar System attention.
A Martian visitor here in our small town outside of Augusta, Maine, the state capital, who conscientiously studied American government from the red planet before coming here, sought me out to inquire how our government works in practice in order to complement his research back at the University of Mars. This is an edited transcript of our conversation.
EM: So let’s start at the top, because how you select your national leader is almost impossible to figure out from the documents available to us on Mars. You consider your country a democracy but the people don’t vote for the President.
Me: They do vote for the president. Officially they vote for the electors in their states. But the electors are pledged to a specific presidential candidate, and then the electors vote for that candidate. It is that second step in the process that determines who becomes president. In other words, the people elect the president indirectly through the electors.
EM: Well, that answer is somewhat helpful. But a state’s voters are voting only for their state’s electors. There is nothing national in that first step of the election process. Moreover, we Martians know that, in the second step the votes of each state’s electors in 48 out of 50 states are aggregated on a winner-take-all basis. As a result up to 49% of the votes in that state have no relevance or weight in the actual election of the President.
Me: I can’t argue with that, but the reality is that almost every American voter thinks he or she is voting for the president.
EM: Back on Mars, we researched the litigation that Harvard Professor Lessig has brought in several states challenging, under the equal protection provision of the Constitution, how they allocate their electoral college votes. In one of those cases, the State of Texas defended its winner-take-all system on the grounds that the so-called presidential election is, as a legal matter, an election among competing slates of electors, not among presidential candidates.
Me: Well, put that way, the legal processes does seem to be inconsistent with the view of nearly every American that he or she is voting for the president.
EM: Even more difficult to understand is that Texas, like many other states we researched, has a law forbidding the state from identifying the names of electors on their ballots. How do you justify that?
Me: I can’t. All I can say is that our country’s founders were very smart men, and what was good enough for them is good enough for me and for most Americans.
EM: Now I am really concerned. We Martians also admire your founders, but our research shows that the system of state electors that the founders had in mind bears no resemblance to the election system that your country has in place now. The founders expected that electors would be venerable “wise men” from each state who would join with their counterparts from other states in Washington DC to deliberate over who should be elected president. When a state’s electors were selected in the early years of the country (and the states used several different ways to select electors), they were not pledged to any particular candidate – as they are today. Under your current system, electors are virtually unknown to the public and serve as passive message-carriers like the U.S. mail or an ISP. Many states have even enacted faithless elector laws that prohibit them from voting for anybody other than the candidate to whom they pledged their votes. To make my point, have you ever knowingly met an elector?
Me: No. It never seemed to matter.
EM (interrupting): See. That’s what I mean. When we Martians study the American Constitution, we admire the fact that the founders gave to the states the authority and responsibility to change how they allocate their electoral college votes as they gained experience with the process and determined what changes were needed. One of your most famous judges, also from New England, wrote an important book explaining that American law is distinctively based not on abstract logic, but on experience. And yet your states adhere to a system that experience has shown to be unfair, undemocratic, as a practical matter disenfranchises 80% of American voters and is causing rapidly escalating damage to your country.
Me: Instead of my explaining how our presidential election system works to you, I am embarrassed to confess you have explained it to me. But you have also explained to me that the states have the right under the Constitution to allocate their electoral college votes in the manner they choose. Maine is considering a bill to direct its electors to cast their votes for the winner of the national popular vote through the Compact, and I will support that bill.
EM: Now you sound like the kind of American Martians admire, one who when he or she sees a problem goes about the business of fixing it.
Impact Estimated
According to one estimate the decision to ask about citizenship may cause nearly 6 million people not to be counted, and thus not to be represented in the House and Electoral College.
The current Electoral College system makes irrelevant campaigning in the general election in 40 states. This lowers turn-out by between 17 and 77 million.
What 2020 will be like
The map below, from NationalPopularVote.com, totals general election campaign events by the nominees of the two major parties in 2016.
This is by no means the most useful measuring stick for how the Electoral College skews the importance of voters toward only those in a few states. A candidate goes to a state in order to obtain local media coverage and to bolster enthusiasm among loyalists. But there's no particular reason for a candidate to go to a critical state every day for a week, even if the state were absolutely critical, like Florida. A much better measurement of a state's electoral importance is advertising spending and a secondary measurement is money spent on the ground building field offices and installing the many mechanisms to drive turn-out. Nevertheless, the map of visits reveals what everyone in presidential politics know: the vast majority of American voters are taken for granted in the presidential election
The National Popular Vote Explained
The Electoral College and Women
The Electoral College and Immigrants
National Popular Vote Explained by Jamie Raskin (D-MD)
The National Popular Vote and Workers
Wait — Some Votes Don’t Count?
National Popular Vote Not a Partisan Question
In a very thoughtful piece, Maine Republican Lance Dutson explains that the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, currently under consideration in Maine, should not be a Republican vs. Democrat issue.
Dutson explains that the Compact would not significantly diminish the electoral importance of Maine and other small states because, unless they are also swing states, small states are ignored in political campaigns anyway:
One of the main arguments Republican opponents make about the NPV is that densely-populated areas would see their political influence drown out that of smaller, more rural areas, like Maine. This is a noble concern, however, it’s kind of too late. Maine and other sparsely populated areas are already a minor concern in the grand scheme of our presidential elections.
Jacob Posik of The Maine Heritage Policy Center wrote a good piece recently laying out the argument against NPV. In the piece, Posik noted that, under NPV, Maine’s total share of the national vote total would only be 0.55 percent, and therefore politicians wouldn’t bother paying attention to our state. However, Posik failed to note that, under the current Electoral College system, Maine’s four electoral votes make up only 0.74 percent of the 538 total Electoral College votes nationwide. Under both systems, Maine is merely a blip on the screen of the broader electorate.
The fact is, candidates pay attention to states because they’re competitive, not because of the density of their population. Maine’s 2nd Congressional District got attention during the 2016 presidential election because polling showed the Republican could potentially win the district’s one electoral vote. It didn’t matter that one electoral vote represents only 0.18 percent of the total Electoral College; it only mattered that the electoral vote was up for grabs.
Dutson also explained how the winner-take-all Electoral College effectively disenfranchises many voters, Democrats and Republicans alike:
…The Electoral College doesn’t grant any notable proportional advantage for Republicans in small, rural states, but it does severely marginalize the votes of Republicans in states that are not competitive.
For instance, a Republican hasn’t won New York’s electoral votes since 1984. However, there are more than 2.6 million registered Republicans in New York. Regardless, those Republican votes have not had any impact on the electoral college tabulations in more than 35 years.
The same is true for Democrats in deeply Republican states. There are nearly 50,000 Democrats in Wyoming whose votes are inconsequential to the electoral tabulation in presidential contests because their state hasn’t supported a Democratic candidate since 1964.
Under the NPV system, though, every one of these votes would be tabulated. A Republican in Manhattan or Los Angeles would have their votes added to the national vote total, and voters behind the partisan curtain of the opposing party would no longer be inconsequential to the overall outcome.
The debate over NPV really comes down to the question of a state’s impact on an election versus an individual voter’s impact. When a Democrat moves to Wyoming, is it fair for them to lose their influence over the next presidential election because of their geographic location?
The Electoral College Exposes Businesses Outside Swing States to Punishment
This is from Bill Bishop whose newsletter requires a subscription:
“It’s also worth noting that talk is going around DC that the US and China may keep the original $50B in tariffs, but that the Trump Administration has asked the Chinese to move theirs away from targeting the GOP base to less politically sensitive sectors, even proposing alternative industries to the Chinese side.”
What makes a business sector “politically sensitive”?
Campaign donations is one answer, but since Citizens United individual donations by the mega-wealthy have become far more important than corporate donations. Businesses generally balance donations between both parties and want to avoid alienating customers or hurting their brand by being labelled to the left or right on the political dial.
What matters is location. A business with many employees that is headquartered in a swing state is “politically sensitive” because its managers and employees matter to the close-run pluralities that define a state as a battleground.
Or did you think it was just an accident that Chrysler was twice bailed out by the United States government?
The Electoral College system exposes businesses headquartered on the Pacific or Atlantic coasts to the alleged conduct described by Bishop.
It’s in the interest of all businesses to have the presidency determined by national campaigns, with the winner always being the person who gets the most votes. Only under these circumstances will presidents seeking their second term have to regard all businesses with many employees as “politically sensitive.”
The History of the Electoral College and the Modern Case for Reform
In an excellent piece published in the Minnesota Star Tribune, Mark Bohnhorst, chair of the State Presidential Elections Team at Minnesota Citizens for Clean Elections, combats some of the most pervasive myths about how the Electoral College was designed to work and how it actually works, as well as examining the likely implications of a national popular vote:
The Electoral College was clearly an unholy if necessary compromise with slavery. Even following the Civil War, the Electoral College crisis of 1876 helped perpetuate racial injustice by ending Reconstruction, which led to another century of racial subjugation.
…
[Under the national popular vote], candidates will seek votes wherever the voters are. They will not ignore 100 million voters — urban or rural. They will use technology to reach as many voters as possible as efficiently as possible. That feels like democracy — the kind of democratic republic James Madison would have approved.