"One would think that having candidates be incentivized to do things that drastically harm millions of people to benefit 150 people in Pennsylvania would not be ideal for causing optimal policy."
You didn't present any of the strongest arguments for the electoral college. The only arguments you presented are a couple of strawmen. Why bother criticizing something if you're not aware of, or willing or able to formulate, the best arguments in its favor?
The strongest arguments for the electoral college are basically the same as the strongest arguments for having a bicameral legislature. If you advocate for abolishing the electoral college, then you should also be advocating for abolishing the Senate. We have the Senate and the electoral college because they prevent highly populous and culturally homogenous enclaves in the country from deciding everything for everyone. It's a stability measure. Yes, it's "anti-democratic" if you define democracy as one person one vote, but the founders didn't think very highly of democracy in that sense. They thought it'd be too unstable.
I suspect the reason sometimes it sounds like the proponents of the electoral college are just reciting its definition or its history is that they're trying to point out that this was intended. Your arguments against it sound like something you just discovered. But the founders considered these, and they thought there should be an electoral college because of these effects, not in spite of them. You might disagree with the intention, of course, but it's important that these effects were intended. Again, the founders believed a system like the one you're proposing would be too unstable. Alexis de Tocqueville also believed that democracies that get too big (with coastal people deciding everything for the midland) would be too unstable.
The Electoral College is not functioning as intended. If you had actually read some history about what our founders cared about then you might have understood that.
I live in a state that massively benefits from this arrangement. My vote counts way more than most of the gullible chumps defending this malfunctioning Electoral College.
I wonder if they will ever actually understand why I find them vaguely funny...bless their hearts.
Intead we have sparsely populated and even more culturally homogenous regions deciding everything for everybody. "Enclaves" as a word resonates with the assumption of homogeneity but if that's what it's meant to do it's not an apt description.
Not really. We have both sides having their way, going back and forth every four to eight years. This gives everyone a sense that they have a say in the system and relieves societal stress. If it weren't for the electoral college, the coastal enclaves would get their way 100% of the time as the midland populations grow more and more resentful and disenfranchised, until one day things inevitably blow up.
Who won elections would still go back and forth with a national popular vote, as they do in all countries with a popular vote. It's just the political spectrum would shift to the left, and as the parties reoriented around the new median elector.
“We have both sides having their way, going back and forth every four to eight years.”
But that’s a poor descriptor of what happens. If you have to set this up as being a system where sometimes the coasts win and sometimes the Midwest wins, you should at least acknowledge that even when the the coasts win, the win is achieved by creating policies that appeal to the swing states, who are unrepresentative of the interests of the coasts (and not especially lined up with the interests of the Midwest either)
“If it weren't for the electoral college, the coastal enclaves would get their way 100% of the time as the midland populations grow more and more resentful and disenfranchised, until one day things inevitably blow up.”
But what is happening today is that the coasts are becoming more and more resentful and disenfranchised, and that is worse because it affects more people. The policies that the less populous Midwest likes are being forced on the more populous coasts. That’s clearly worse than the policies of more populous places being forced on less populous places. And there’s no reason to think this is any more tenable for long term stability than if the situation were reversed.
You use that word "enclaves" again in the way you did before. There are multitudes of people in non "swing" states who are disenfranchised by the electoral college because their votes don't count. Are they part of an "enclave"? Were all the votes to count in all areas we would have a lot less polarization and a far more open dialogue. Whether it's your enclaves (where I have lived) or currently homogenous other enclaves(not so homogenous as you think. I live in one) the current polarization becomes entrenched because of this.
I use "enclave" to mean a densely populated, largely isolated (from the rest of the culture) group of people.
So first of all, everyone's vote counts, just not with equal weight. Secondly, the phenomenon you're referring is not due to the electoral college per se; it's because votes are aggregated at the state level before being aggregated at the national level, and the fact that those states never swing. Imagine a system were each state gets electoral votes proportional to its population. It'd still be true that if you live in a non-swing state, and you vote for the winner, your vote "doesn't count" because at the end of the day, all of that state's votes go to the winner of that state. To change that, we'd have to get rid of the entire system of aggregating at the state level before aggregating at the national level.
But that's part of having a federal system. Basically, you're arguing for getting rid of the federal system altogether and just treating the entire US as one state. That's certainly the kind of thing that the founders wanted to avoid because they believed democracy works better if it's decentralized. The most important election for you should be your municipal election, then state elections, and only then federal elections. The president is just supposed to be presiding over the states and making sure they get along. All the major policies are supposed to be left to the states to decide. So part of this discussion is about whether power should be centralized or decentralized.
I didn't follow your argument that with nationalized elections, there would be less polarization and more open dialogue. It seems to me like what would happen is politicians would start only pandering to the coastal cultures and completely ignore the midland.
Only at this historical moment. The remedy is for the parties to compete in all states, which implies both moderate and widely acceptable stances and acceptance of the need for state-level agency. This is conspicuously what we do not have today and eliminating the firewall would turn mere dysfunction to active tyranny.
Really? That’s why you think the Electoral College was founded?
Then why is it that none of the Founders pushed for a similar system in their individual states, where rural voters received more votes than urban voters?
The fundamental sovereign units in this system are supposed to be the states. The federal government is just a union among the states to keep them from fighting with each other and to make sure they can trade smoothly. It's not a fractal where you do the same thing at every level. The states can set their own rules for how their leaders are elected, and they often do have the same bicameral structure for their legislature. Not sure about the governor.
Do you see how that is a completely different argument from “populous enclaves would govern the election”? [paraphrased]
The problem wasn’t cultural homogeneity. It was that states were understood as sovereigns and that sovereignty should be respected.
The question is whether that remains the understanding of the states today. I’m of the opinion that it isn’t, but that the EC is pretty low on the list of structural issues with the US government. But it isn’t about populous enclaves as an actual problem. It’s purely a question of sovereignty, in the same sense that each nation in the UN gets one vote.
You are completely wrong. The electoral was a shitty compromise. They wanted to avoid populist demagogues becoming president but they couldn't agree on a reasonable way to do that. It never served its intended purpose and was already clearly a mistake by 1800. Its initial intention is now illegal. If you really want to advocate for the electoral college, then you need to advocate for faithless electors who can ignore the popular vote and just choose who they want. That was the founders' intention after all.
The argument didn't reference any US states. It's a general historical and sociological argument. I think you're insinuating that I have some kind of bias towards conservative states, which is a bad-faith argument and not worthy of responding to.
There are no "highly populous and culturally homogenous enclaves" in the US. The most populous jurisdictions are also the most culturally diverse.
But regardless, relating that whole argument about populations and culture to "the founders" intentions (actually the Framers, for this context) misses the fact that the Constitution does not provide for citizens of any state or description to popularly vote for the president *at all.* The Framers intended for the electoral college to be a deliberative body in its own right, merely appointed for each state "in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct."
I guess people have issues with the word "enclave". Whatever word you want to use is fine. I think my meaning is clear regardless of word choice.
Sure, "culturally diverse" as in they have their own languages and cuisines, but they all live in the same city, have similar daily experiences, and vote for the same set of policies.
Regarding the electoral college being its own deliberative body: There are two issues here. There is the mathematical design of the electoral votes, which gives less populous states an advantage, and then there is the extra layer of deliberation that you're referring to, which has since been removed. I was addressing the first point, not the second.
People who live in large diverse cities do not all have similar daily experiences, by a long shot. While there are some experiences that aren’t available, the range of those that are is wider than in less populous, less diverse places. I know this from personal experience, having lived much of the possible range from rural to urban, but there is still more in the cities that I’ve only glimpsed.
If we sliced the electorate into constituencies by any characteristic other than geography, large diverse cities would have greater representation.
A lot of discussions of this issue proceed on the premise that the US is a unitary polity. In fact, of course, it is essentially an agreement among otherwise sovereign States, delegating certain limited authority to a national government. When you look at it from that perspective, recognizing that the States are the original and principal political entities and that the national government is just a repository for certain specifically delegated roles, a “national popular vote” really doesn’t make a lot of conceptual sense. The presidency isn’t decided by a “popular vote” of the States plus France (to make up an example). That isn’t a violation of one-man-one-vote because France isn’t a relevant polity in US elections. It’s really a similar point about some undifferentiated “national popular vote.”
Well, yes and no. What it should be isn’t entirely divorced from what it was set up to do and its universally understood purpose. You’re right that one could argue, e.g., that French votes should be included so French people aren’t disenfranchised from US elections and vice versa, but understanding why that would never be viewed as consistent with the systems as they exist is relevant to assessing the desirability of a proposal like that.
While I agree with this, the country has changed so entirely that this understanding of the states is dead letter, certainly since the Civil War, perhaps as far back as Andrew Jackson.
The US is a massive, multi-ethnic country with huge variation in regional cultures and economies. Our most contentious political issues are a result of insisting on ‘unity’ where a significant chunk of the polity doesn’t want it, then using a federal bureaucracy far larger than was ever intended to coerce people into ‘unity’.
Your arguments are a good overview of the topic. I would add some historical specificity around the ECs creation. It represents the principle of federalism - dividing power between states. The idea was that states had these strong identities and cared about their own power - they would not admit totally superfluous states to the union because that would dilute the existing state's power. This was a perfectly rational calculus at the time, after all.
The issue is that national parties started forming, and once strong party identities were created - we started admitting states purely for the purpose of federal power at the expense of state power. This is why we have 2 dakotas for example, even though there is no rational basis for not having just admitted Dakota as a single state.
In Federalist paper #10, Madison says "The influence of factious leaders may kindle a flame within their particular States but will be unable to spread a general conflagration through the other States." They clearly viewed the states as being a countervailing force against national interests.
Sometimes people say that Hamilton defended the electoral college, as he does here, but what he's describing is nothing like what we have today, so I don't take his rationale for it as a defense of the current structure:
"It was equally desirable, that the immediate election should be made by men most capable of analyzing the qualities adapted to the station, and acting under circumstances favorable to deliberation, and to a judicious combination of all the reasons and inducements which were proper to govern their choice."
He is describing a literal election college, where a few people come together and elect the president. What happens now is what you describe, every election comes down to who the dumbest 20 thousand pennsylvanians think would pass better policy for them. Based on the above, I think both Madison and Hamilton would reject the EC as it exists today because it stokes regional factionalism.
The only way to advocate for the electoral college existing is to advocate for restoring the original intention. If you want it to work, legalize faithless electors and allow them to override the popular vote. Obviously that is insane and never going to happen, but unless it does the electoral just makes no sense.
The problem with arguments like these is that they ignore the good reasons why we have a separation of powers and a strongly federalist government.
One of the main reasons why representative democracy is good is because it results in a ruling class (the representatives) that is pitted against those they rule (the demos). The representatives have the power to create the rules, but the demos have the power to give those representatives their power. This separation of powers limits the ability of either the representatives or the demos to impose rules that the other side rejects: the demos can't impose rules that the representatives will not agree on, and the representatives will lose their power to create the rules if the demos use their power to elect a different representative. As a result, typically only policy that both the demos and their representatives can agree on will get passed, which tends to be a much more limited than what we would see if either the demos or the representatives had full reign.
Why does this matter for the electoral college? Separation of powers is also one of the main reasons why the electoral college is good. Compare the bicameral Congress we have today, with the Senate having two representatives of each state and the House of Representatives having a number of representatives of each state proportional to that state's population. The above argument Bentham's Bulldog provides would also undermine the bicameral Congress, since people in smaller states would be overrepresented in the Senate, and so their votes would be counted unequally rather than giving each voter an equal say (i.e. one vote) in policy passed by the Senate. So, I must conclude, Bentham's Bulldog is also in favor of abolishing the Senate and instead leaving all legislative acts to the House.
However, if you asked most Americans if we should have a system (like we do) where you need both the Senate and the House to pass legislation, well, most Americans should have learned the answer in school: separation of powers. The Senate gives overrepresentation to the states as a way of pitting the power of the states against the power of the federal government. If you think that is a bad idea, then you should agree with Bentham's Bulldog that we should abolish both the Electoral College and the Senate. This separation of powers limits the ability of either the Senators or the House Representatives to impose rules that the other side rejects, since the other side can simply vote not to pass those rules. As a result, only policy that both the purely-democratic House Representatives and the state-boosted (but still democratically elected) Senators can agree on gets passed.
Why should we separate the powers of the state governments and the powers of the federal government, pitting them against each other? As I said, only rules that both the House Representatives and the Senate can agree on get passed, but that truth is limited to the federal level. So, this system specifically creates an impediment for the national demos and their national representatives to overrule the rules created at the state level. In other words, the argument for separating powers this way just is the argument for strong federalism, the view that states should be primarily ruled by their own state demos and representatives rather than the demos or representatives of the nation as a whole.
Strong federalism is good because if gives people (the demos and the representatives) within the state more power than people outside it to create the rules for that state, allowing them to tailor those rules to their specific needs and preventing people outside the state from sacrificing the needs of the people within the state for slight advantages to the majority or what have you. (The same argument also applies to limiting the state's power to create rules for locals, so there should be a bicameral legislature in each state, too.) This is why Bentham's Bulldog's analogies with just giving random ethnicities more votes does not work: there is a good reason why people in the states should be primarily ruled by themselves, but there is no (non-racist) reason why Black people should be be primarily ruled by other Black people (such a system would presuppose that Black people have similar interests or needs in virtue of being Black).
So, as Bentham's Bulldog's is committed to rejecting the bicameral Congress, and that bicameral Congress is an important part of a strong federalist government because it separates the powers of the federal government in order to limit their ability to impose rules on states, then it seems like Bentham's Bulldog is committed to rejecting strong federalism. Just as state-boosted (but still democratic) elections for Senators limit the power of the federal legislature to impose rules on states, so too do state-boosted (but still democratic) elections for the President of the United States, and so it seems like if you reject the latter then you should also reject the former. Yet, as I said above, the separation of powers is one of the key reasons why representative democracy is any good in the first place.
Throwing away this separation of powers between the state and the federal government (via state-boosted democratic elections on the federal level) would, yes, give the national demos more power, but in doing so would be disempowering the state demos, and as we've seen there is a good reason (the same reason to have a strong federalist government in the first place) why the state demos and their representatives should primarily rule the people in their states, not the national demos or their national representatives. So, there are actually pretty-straightforward good reasons to have the Electoral College (or something like it), even if most people couldn't recite those reasons on the spot.
We can discuss what the best mechanism is for this balance of powers (e.g. should Senators be elected by the state demos as we currently have it, or selected by the state representatives as we used to have it?) or what the best balance actually is (e.g. should Senators always number exactly two, or should we make Senators also semi-proportionate to the state's populations, by making them number their proportion plus two?), but I think any argument that suggests throwing out this balance of powers entirely is simply missing the point of the entire U.S. federalist system, and that system is superior to most others in terms of separation of powers, meaning that it is superior to others in respect to one of the main reasons to even have a democracy in the first place.
My main concern with "Abolish the Electoral College" is that having an independent, non-legislative mirror of the legislature, who if all goes well will not be noticed but which is nonetheless final arbiter of electoral legitimacy in the event of constitution crisis is *actually a great idea*. If structured well it prevents the question of legitimacy of the a presiding executive moving to far less legible levels like an ambiguously corrupt county executive's enforcement of voting statutes.
What is really desired is an EC that elects the popular vote winner automatically, the plurality winner if there is no such thing in the cases of minor third parties, and deliberates in the case of major third parties creating no clear victor. Note that, with many states now entertaining RCV, it is not at all clear *what "popular vote" even means*. Does a Maine voter's RCV presidential ballot count towards his top vote, his top vote among the two most voted for candidates, his top vote after instant runoff elimination in his state alone? What if states vary by their RCV method? Who gets my "national popular vote" if I'm filling out a condorcet ballot? What if states experiment with Approval or STAR? Reforming rather than abolishing the EC such that they can stand as final authority on interpreting this information input makes electoral reform safer and more sensible.
Also, I've always found it amusing that an institution scholars of constitutional political economy tend to love, Parliamentary Democracy, is functionally an electoral college that never even bothers with the perfunctory popular vote. To that end, much of the institutional critiques of it are really just critiques of congressional apportionment, fixing which does not require a constitutional amendment. No need to bother with abolishing the EC if you just pass something like cube-root House size.
Now if the USA adopted STAR or RCV/IRV at the federal level for presidential elections, and at the same time multi-member STV for all elected bodies, that would be a real improvement.
There are multiple aspects to the electoral college some don't have many good arguments for them in the current system. For instance, the fact that electors aren't choosen in direct proportion to population is -- given SCOTUS's imo undefendable for originalists deciscion that states can bind their electoral -- kinda suspect (tho see end).
OTOH moving to a national popular vote rather than a system where each state allocates their electors is supremely important because different states have substantial influence over how elections happen in their state. Right now when a deep red state acts to suppress democratic turn out or vice versa it really doesn't matter. Only the states whose political makeup is balanced enough to deter politicians from implementing laws obviously designed to reduce the minority turn out have electoral votes which could be affected by such shenanigans. We want an election decided by the ability of canidates to persuade voters not by the fact that California passes a law giving everyone who votes the day off work or gives out candy at the polls to run up the democratic vote share.
A national popular vote in the US is one in which the election is decided by the deep red and blue states doing as much as they can to turn out their voters and discourage the other voters. Even with complete unconstitutional federalization of everything even sorta kinda near voting the huge size of the country means weather in some states easily decides the election.
Finally, there is the benefit of needing to at least draw some support from many different states making it harder to just win by offering pork to maximize turnout in a few places.
+1. We have to think about the electoral college like politicians do — implicitly using game theory. Just looking at it with a semi-moral value revolving around representativeness misses all of its worth as an institution.
It’s an inheritance from a country that was more of a union of states rather than a single nation. The rational behind its existence is abundantly clear, in that slaveholding Georgia and abolitionist Massachusetts were much closer to separate nations in the past, whereas now most major cities share a much more similar culture whether you’re in Boston or Atlanta.
The issue with “abolish the electoral college” is that it benefits many millions of people. Our system is set up in such a way that in order to abolish it via the normal channels, you’d have to get permission from more than one state that is the beneficiary of that system, which hardly seems likely. To do so otherwise would involve subverting the systems we have in place that were specifically designed to allow for this change, which is hardly practicable or a good idea. Even if the paths to abolishing the electoral college are not feasible, subverting them would lead to an erosion of the rules based system that we presumably want to improve, not degrade, by changing to a more democratic form of election.
The obvious way forward is for states, individually, to switch to a split electoral system like Maine or Nebraska. You’d think more democratic states would be pushing for this, but obviously they’re not doing that, I presume since it would harm their interests. It’s hard to maintain the moral high ground when arguing for a more democratic national system that would benefit your party, when it’s completely within their power to implement a more democratic local system that would not benefit their party, that isn’t being implemented.
In short; So long as Democrats are more likely to win the popular vote, but lose the electoral college, they will argue against it. So long as they don’t argue for a split electoral vote within safe blue states, I see the “it’ll be a more democratic system” argument as a pretense for a convenient power grab.
Pointing out the hypocrisy of a refusal to unilaterally disarm doesn’t strike me as terribly convincing in real life, high stakes situations. One can oppose war and militaries in the abstract while maintaining one because other states do.
The analogy doesn’t carry over when you look at swing states. Surely democrats in these states (when they gain power) should advocate for a split electoral college? After all, it’s not like they’ll significantly harm their parties presidential prospects, while increasing the 1 person 1 vote nature of democracy. In theory they’re likely to win as much as lose those states in a subsequent election.
Nebraska did it in 1992 and they are/were overwhelmingly Red. Essentially they’ve given up an electoral college vote to democrats that Republicans could have kept safely under the previous system. It’s not a stretch then to imagine other states doing so, especially those swing states that are won by party that consistently suggests the electoral college is unfair.
Such a thing does exist, it's called the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, and it goes into force when it comprises 270 votes in the electoral college. It is currently at 209, all traditionally blue states, with 50 more pending.
That’s definitely not the sort of thing I was referencing. It’s in democratic state’s interests to abolish the electoral college, yes, and them attempting to do that through creative means isn’t any different than trying to do so through a constitutional amendment.
My point was that it’s in every states power to make presidential elections more “democratic” by proportioning out their electors by their states popular vote, rather than winner take all. This doesn’t happen though, which suggests that maybe, this talk about abolishing the electoral college is less about caring for democracy, and more about giving more power to the party that has won the popular vote but lost the election multiple times in the past few decades.
Things like the NPVIC are how you advocate practically for a split electoral college! Comments from all sides for decades show that it is a matter of a thing that basically everyone seems to disagree with when they lose but are chary of changing when they win. This is the essential problem with the EC; the reasons behind it are contingent on a current political reality and cause division. There are millions of Republicans in New York and California that lose out here too.
For a state like California, that potentially very much cares about democracy and abolishing the electoral college, it makes sense why they don’t do it in their own state. Doing so, while Texas doesn’t, will just basically give Republicans the win for all but the most popular democratic presidential candidate.
I don’t see the reasoning why wouldn’t they do so in a state like Michigan, or Pennsylvania though. If it’s basically a toss-up on who wins the next presidential election, deciding to proportion out those electors now doesn’t cost democrats any performance on the national scale. It might even win them some points locally as they can legitimately show progress on making the country more democratic, which apparently is popular.
If a deep Red state like Nebraska can proportion out their votes, I’m going to be very skeptical as to why deep democratic states don’t as well.
Separately, I’m skeptical of the NPVIC, since it’s a normalization of faithless, or at least deviant electors. I wonder what would happen if a Republican candidate like Trump won the popular vote, and California had the power to have their electors cast their votes according to who won their own state. Would California vote according to the NPVIC, or would they defect and sway the election? Would there be a recourse for them doing so? From what I can tell interstate compacts without Federal approval are dubious, and the president has veto power on them. I wonder what a Republican congress would do if a Republican candidate won according to the electoral college, but lost due to an implemented NPVIC.
It seems that the scenario the NPVIC is intended to prevent (electoral college wins while losing the popular vote) is also the scenario where the NPVIC is most likely and vulnerable to challenge.
I left a comment on Richard Hanania's Electoral College post from September with my own arguments against the system, which I'll reproduce here somewhat abridged. I think these arguments are basically irrefutable and show the facileness and lack of imagination of the pro-EC case:
"For a further example, the U.S.' entire foreign policy towards Cuba is predicated on chasing after the votes of a motivated diaspora living in one state. Now granted, Cubans would still be a voting bloc worth courting even if they were distributed proportionately across the country, but their concentration in a swing state has dictated one of the dumbest foreign policy third rails for decades.
The Electoral College also makes statehood (or districthood, which Wiktionary defines as 'the state of being a district') the standard for federal voting rights, which isn't a very consistent policy. Puerto Ricans can't vote in the general election, despite being citizens, just because Puerto Rico isn't a state and doesn't receive electoral votes. But if they move to a different state, suddenly they are allowed to vote. Obviously Puerto Ricans should be able to cast a ballot for president, and the fact that they're enfranchised based on what ground is beneath them is bonkers.
Further, because it enshrines regionalism into Democracy, the electoral college also enshrines interregional strife. Sure, popular vote systems have some regionalism - maybe Iranian voters complain about coastal elites too - but surely it's worse in the US when a Republican can absolutely trash New Yorkers and Californians without any consequence. Abolishing the electoral college might disadvantage Republicans in the short term, but it might also make them actually worth voting for."
Very unlikely. Being unable to ever win national office, they would cut corrupt deals that advantage themselves. Candidates would be of laughably low quality and those states would have to live with their misrule. See the Republicans Party in New York City for a real-world picture of this.
I *also* preempted this in comments on the Richard article:
"[N]ormal, already existing Republicans *can* win the popular vote already: Haley was outpolling Biden *nationally* by insane amounts in some surveys. And if she's your nominee, then without the Electoral College, you don't even have to worry about her being likeable among Pennsylvanians or whatever - you can just coast to victory on your candidate being backed by a majority of Americans. A man can dream."
It is a strong argument but detached from political reality -- a better idea is to make changes on the margins with how parties function:
In the 70s the United States became one of the only countries where parties outsourced candidate selection entirely to voters. Parties should not be internally democratic! Primaries worked because party insiders, money, and ideologues could sideline bad candidates.
Campaign finance laws sidelined the parties and elevated small donors with rising polarization, primaries now promote candidates on the left and right that are more insane ideologically than the typical voters in either party. The parties have become hostage to their bases and the activists who keep them whipped up in a constant frenzy and antipathy at the other party. This is more true in the GOP than the Democratic party.
Nominating conventions that produced Republican nominees like Lincoln, Coolidge, and Eisenhower would be a vast improvement. Nominating conventions would provide and incentive structure for so called "elite human capital" to engage with the GOP and have stakes in the convention.
"Jungle primaries” is another idea. Revising GOP rules in 2012 that favor front-runners. Oftentimes in GOP primaries, whoever wins gets extra delegates even if they received only a modest plurality of the votes. Trump never won a majority of the votes in a state primary until he all but secured the 2016 nomination.
Are you asking for nationwide recounts? What about Wyoming announcing that they've received 200 million red votes, and, well, I guess that's the election? To avoid anything like that, elections would have to be run by a federal elections apparatus, and I don't think moving things further to the federal government is a good idea.
Only convincing argument for the electoral college is that it prevents one state's election rigging from drastically influencing the popular vote by capping the influence of individual states.
Of course, that certainly does not justify the current system, which doesn;t award EVs proportionately to population...
The Electoral College as is actually makes this problem worse though, since it's winner-take-all. A small number of fraudulent votes in a swing state could flip 100% of the state's electoral votes, whereas it would affect the popular vote much less.
On the other hand, with the current system there is no incentive to attempt voting fraud in places like California or Kansas, because what would be the point? So serious fraudulent voting attempts are limited to the swing states. Changing to a popular vote system would incentivize attempts at fraudulent voting everywhere. I don't know if that is a convincing argument to oppose a popular vote by itself, but it doesn't seem to be the case that the Electoral College makes the problem worse.
I would agree that the EC doesn't necessarily make the problem of, "People are incentivized to vote fraudulently" worse, since it means people are more incentivized to do it in swing states but less incentivized everywhere else. But it does seem to make it more likely that an election could actually be swung by fraudulent votes, since it's more likely that the election will hinge on a very small number of votes.
Something kind of similar to this happened in 2000: The election was so close that the result depended on exactly how the votes were counted (do you count hanging chads, ambiguous overvotes, etc.). A system where that happens is more vulnerable to people writing the rules or worse, making on-the-fly judgement when the rules are ambiguous, in a way that helps them win.
The argument here is hypothetical - which system would be most robust if there were significant fraud in preventing that fraud from changing the outcome. Of course, the fact that there's virtually no fraud in our actual elections is an excellent reason to consider this an extremely weak argument for the Electoral College even if all my other counterarguments fail.
Historically, there was lots and lots of electoral fraud in the US. The way that votes were counted in the Rio Grande Valley (in Texas) until 1972 was that the county clerk asked the Democratic Party chair what the tally was. That only really mattered in the primaries because Texas was a one-party (Democrat) state until the 1980’s. I’d much prefer a system that disincentivizes politicians from trying to find ways to go back to the bad old days. The electoral college and gerrymandering and equal Senate representation are high on my list of institutions that do exactly that.
Lol, shitlibs you lost the popular vote too. Watch as this issue disappears from your radar now that it no longer guarantees one party rule by urban Democrats.
I'm sympathetic to the conclusion but I found this wildly unconvincing.
- It doesn't seem obvious to me that "one person, one vote" is a good principle. It seems perfectly plausible to me, for example, that people with less of their life left to live have less at stake in a given election - they've lived most of their lives - and therefore their votes should count for less. It seems perfectly plausible to me that citizens who are more qualified to opine should have extra votes (indeed in Britain this used to be the case, with universities having Parliamentary representation which their alumni would vote on). "One person, one vote" may be a good principle, but the electoral college is hardly the biggest violation of it (non-US-citizens, children, and criminals also don't get the vote), so why should we care especially about this particular distortion of it when we are happy to violate the same principle in far greater ways?
- I certainly don't think democracy is justified on the basis of "wisdom of crowds", and I don't think most people do either. Frankly that seems like the least plausible of the common arguments for democracy (i.e. wisdom of crowds, enabling deliberation based on all information, providing competition between elites, and achieving peaceful transitions of power).
- The electoral college does indeed warp political incentives. This is your strongest argument, although I think you overestimate the extent to which people's votes are self-interested rather than based on a partial but often good-faith assessment of who they think is best overall.
- You don't give any serious consideration to arguments in favour of the EC, and the attempt to pin it entirely on status quo bias is, frankly, below the standards I expect from you. Status quo bias is part of it, but there are plenty of plausible arguments. For example: suppose you think federalism is good, that states should offer different mixes of political policies, and people can move to places where they prefer the policies (or, more likely, good policies are implemented leading to people wanting to go there for jobs and amenities). Politicians in large states might want to impose their policies nationally in order to avoid losing citizens; you'd want safeguards against that, of which the EC might be one. I'm not saying this is a wholly successful argument, or that it's the best argument for the EC, but it's a plausible argument.
You didn't present any of the strongest arguments for the electoral college. The only arguments you presented are a couple of strawmen. Why bother criticizing something if you're not aware of, or willing or able to formulate, the best arguments in its favor?
The strongest arguments for the electoral college are basically the same as the strongest arguments for having a bicameral legislature. If you advocate for abolishing the electoral college, then you should also be advocating for abolishing the Senate. We have the Senate and the electoral college because they prevent highly populous and culturally homogenous enclaves in the country from deciding everything for everyone. It's a stability measure. Yes, it's "anti-democratic" if you define democracy as one person one vote, but the founders didn't think very highly of democracy in that sense. They thought it'd be too unstable.
I suspect the reason sometimes it sounds like the proponents of the electoral college are just reciting its definition or its history is that they're trying to point out that this was intended. Your arguments against it sound like something you just discovered. But the founders considered these, and they thought there should be an electoral college because of these effects, not in spite of them. You might disagree with the intention, of course, but it's important that these effects were intended. Again, the founders believed a system like the one you're proposing would be too unstable. Alexis de Tocqueville also believed that democracies that get too big (with coastal people deciding everything for the midland) would be too unstable.
The Electoral College is not functioning as intended. If you had actually read some history about what our founders cared about then you might have understood that.
I live in a state that massively benefits from this arrangement. My vote counts way more than most of the gullible chumps defending this malfunctioning Electoral College.
I wonder if they will ever actually understand why I find them vaguely funny...bless their hearts.
Intead we have sparsely populated and even more culturally homogenous regions deciding everything for everybody. "Enclaves" as a word resonates with the assumption of homogeneity but if that's what it's meant to do it's not an apt description.
Not really. We have both sides having their way, going back and forth every four to eight years. This gives everyone a sense that they have a say in the system and relieves societal stress. If it weren't for the electoral college, the coastal enclaves would get their way 100% of the time as the midland populations grow more and more resentful and disenfranchised, until one day things inevitably blow up.
Who won elections would still go back and forth with a national popular vote, as they do in all countries with a popular vote. It's just the political spectrum would shift to the left, and as the parties reoriented around the new median elector.
“We have both sides having their way, going back and forth every four to eight years.”
But that’s a poor descriptor of what happens. If you have to set this up as being a system where sometimes the coasts win and sometimes the Midwest wins, you should at least acknowledge that even when the the coasts win, the win is achieved by creating policies that appeal to the swing states, who are unrepresentative of the interests of the coasts (and not especially lined up with the interests of the Midwest either)
“If it weren't for the electoral college, the coastal enclaves would get their way 100% of the time as the midland populations grow more and more resentful and disenfranchised, until one day things inevitably blow up.”
But what is happening today is that the coasts are becoming more and more resentful and disenfranchised, and that is worse because it affects more people. The policies that the less populous Midwest likes are being forced on the more populous coasts. That’s clearly worse than the policies of more populous places being forced on less populous places. And there’s no reason to think this is any more tenable for long term stability than if the situation were reversed.
You use that word "enclaves" again in the way you did before. There are multitudes of people in non "swing" states who are disenfranchised by the electoral college because their votes don't count. Are they part of an "enclave"? Were all the votes to count in all areas we would have a lot less polarization and a far more open dialogue. Whether it's your enclaves (where I have lived) or currently homogenous other enclaves(not so homogenous as you think. I live in one) the current polarization becomes entrenched because of this.
I use "enclave" to mean a densely populated, largely isolated (from the rest of the culture) group of people.
So first of all, everyone's vote counts, just not with equal weight. Secondly, the phenomenon you're referring is not due to the electoral college per se; it's because votes are aggregated at the state level before being aggregated at the national level, and the fact that those states never swing. Imagine a system were each state gets electoral votes proportional to its population. It'd still be true that if you live in a non-swing state, and you vote for the winner, your vote "doesn't count" because at the end of the day, all of that state's votes go to the winner of that state. To change that, we'd have to get rid of the entire system of aggregating at the state level before aggregating at the national level.
But that's part of having a federal system. Basically, you're arguing for getting rid of the federal system altogether and just treating the entire US as one state. That's certainly the kind of thing that the founders wanted to avoid because they believed democracy works better if it's decentralized. The most important election for you should be your municipal election, then state elections, and only then federal elections. The president is just supposed to be presiding over the states and making sure they get along. All the major policies are supposed to be left to the states to decide. So part of this discussion is about whether power should be centralized or decentralized.
I didn't follow your argument that with nationalized elections, there would be less polarization and more open dialogue. It seems to me like what would happen is politicians would start only pandering to the coastal cultures and completely ignore the midland.
I live in Colorado, by the way.
Only at this historical moment. The remedy is for the parties to compete in all states, which implies both moderate and widely acceptable stances and acceptance of the need for state-level agency. This is conspicuously what we do not have today and eliminating the firewall would turn mere dysfunction to active tyranny.
Really? That’s why you think the Electoral College was founded?
Then why is it that none of the Founders pushed for a similar system in their individual states, where rural voters received more votes than urban voters?
The fundamental sovereign units in this system are supposed to be the states. The federal government is just a union among the states to keep them from fighting with each other and to make sure they can trade smoothly. It's not a fractal where you do the same thing at every level. The states can set their own rules for how their leaders are elected, and they often do have the same bicameral structure for their legislature. Not sure about the governor.
Right.
Do you see how that is a completely different argument from “populous enclaves would govern the election”? [paraphrased]
The problem wasn’t cultural homogeneity. It was that states were understood as sovereigns and that sovereignty should be respected.
The question is whether that remains the understanding of the states today. I’m of the opinion that it isn’t, but that the EC is pretty low on the list of structural issues with the US government. But it isn’t about populous enclaves as an actual problem. It’s purely a question of sovereignty, in the same sense that each nation in the UN gets one vote.
But each state doesn't get one vote in the electoral college. We're discussing what the purpose of that is.
You are completely wrong. The electoral was a shitty compromise. They wanted to avoid populist demagogues becoming president but they couldn't agree on a reasonable way to do that. It never served its intended purpose and was already clearly a mistake by 1800. Its initial intention is now illegal. If you really want to advocate for the electoral college, then you need to advocate for faithless electors who can ignore the popular vote and just choose who they want. That was the founders' intention after all.
"they prevent highly populous and culturally homogenous enclaves in the country from deciding everything for everyone" ???
the "populous enclaves" are not "culturally homogeneous."
Will this argument still work when FL and TX are the most populous states instead of CA and NY?
The argument didn't reference any US states. It's a general historical and sociological argument. I think you're insinuating that I have some kind of bias towards conservative states, which is a bad-faith argument and not worthy of responding to.
There are no "highly populous and culturally homogenous enclaves" in the US. The most populous jurisdictions are also the most culturally diverse.
But regardless, relating that whole argument about populations and culture to "the founders" intentions (actually the Framers, for this context) misses the fact that the Constitution does not provide for citizens of any state or description to popularly vote for the president *at all.* The Framers intended for the electoral college to be a deliberative body in its own right, merely appointed for each state "in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct."
I guess people have issues with the word "enclave". Whatever word you want to use is fine. I think my meaning is clear regardless of word choice.
Sure, "culturally diverse" as in they have their own languages and cuisines, but they all live in the same city, have similar daily experiences, and vote for the same set of policies.
Regarding the electoral college being its own deliberative body: There are two issues here. There is the mathematical design of the electoral votes, which gives less populous states an advantage, and then there is the extra layer of deliberation that you're referring to, which has since been removed. I was addressing the first point, not the second.
People who live in large diverse cities do not all have similar daily experiences, by a long shot. While there are some experiences that aren’t available, the range of those that are is wider than in less populous, less diverse places. I know this from personal experience, having lived much of the possible range from rural to urban, but there is still more in the cities that I’ve only glimpsed.
If we sliced the electorate into constituencies by any characteristic other than geography, large diverse cities would have greater representation.
A lot of discussions of this issue proceed on the premise that the US is a unitary polity. In fact, of course, it is essentially an agreement among otherwise sovereign States, delegating certain limited authority to a national government. When you look at it from that perspective, recognizing that the States are the original and principal political entities and that the national government is just a repository for certain specifically delegated roles, a “national popular vote” really doesn’t make a lot of conceptual sense. The presidency isn’t decided by a “popular vote” of the States plus France (to make up an example). That isn’t a violation of one-man-one-vote because France isn’t a relevant polity in US elections. It’s really a similar point about some undifferentiated “national popular vote.”
This is another example of stating what the system is as argument for what it ought to be, as flagged at the beginning of the essay.
Well, yes and no. What it should be isn’t entirely divorced from what it was set up to do and its universally understood purpose. You’re right that one could argue, e.g., that French votes should be included so French people aren’t disenfranchised from US elections and vice versa, but understanding why that would never be viewed as consistent with the systems as they exist is relevant to assessing the desirability of a proposal like that.
It was set up to have a country. Compromise with slave states was necessary to do that. To keep our country we need to move on.
While I agree with this, the country has changed so entirely that this understanding of the states is dead letter, certainly since the Civil War, perhaps as far back as Andrew Jackson.
The reality now as opposed to when the slave states were operative is that we are a unity and that's the only way we'll survive.
I’d say the opposite. Forcing people who disagree with each other quite significantly into a “unity” seems like a recipe for deepening civil conflict.
The US is a massive, multi-ethnic country with huge variation in regional cultures and economies. Our most contentious political issues are a result of insisting on ‘unity’ where a significant chunk of the polity doesn’t want it, then using a federal bureaucracy far larger than was ever intended to coerce people into ‘unity’.
Your arguments are a good overview of the topic. I would add some historical specificity around the ECs creation. It represents the principle of federalism - dividing power between states. The idea was that states had these strong identities and cared about their own power - they would not admit totally superfluous states to the union because that would dilute the existing state's power. This was a perfectly rational calculus at the time, after all.
The issue is that national parties started forming, and once strong party identities were created - we started admitting states purely for the purpose of federal power at the expense of state power. This is why we have 2 dakotas for example, even though there is no rational basis for not having just admitted Dakota as a single state.
In Federalist paper #10, Madison says "The influence of factious leaders may kindle a flame within their particular States but will be unable to spread a general conflagration through the other States." They clearly viewed the states as being a countervailing force against national interests.
Sometimes people say that Hamilton defended the electoral college, as he does here, but what he's describing is nothing like what we have today, so I don't take his rationale for it as a defense of the current structure:
"It was equally desirable, that the immediate election should be made by men most capable of analyzing the qualities adapted to the station, and acting under circumstances favorable to deliberation, and to a judicious combination of all the reasons and inducements which were proper to govern their choice."
He is describing a literal election college, where a few people come together and elect the president. What happens now is what you describe, every election comes down to who the dumbest 20 thousand pennsylvanians think would pass better policy for them. Based on the above, I think both Madison and Hamilton would reject the EC as it exists today because it stokes regional factionalism.
The only way to advocate for the electoral college existing is to advocate for restoring the original intention. If you want it to work, legalize faithless electors and allow them to override the popular vote. Obviously that is insane and never going to happen, but unless it does the electoral just makes no sense.
The problem with arguments like these is that they ignore the good reasons why we have a separation of powers and a strongly federalist government.
One of the main reasons why representative democracy is good is because it results in a ruling class (the representatives) that is pitted against those they rule (the demos). The representatives have the power to create the rules, but the demos have the power to give those representatives their power. This separation of powers limits the ability of either the representatives or the demos to impose rules that the other side rejects: the demos can't impose rules that the representatives will not agree on, and the representatives will lose their power to create the rules if the demos use their power to elect a different representative. As a result, typically only policy that both the demos and their representatives can agree on will get passed, which tends to be a much more limited than what we would see if either the demos or the representatives had full reign.
Why does this matter for the electoral college? Separation of powers is also one of the main reasons why the electoral college is good. Compare the bicameral Congress we have today, with the Senate having two representatives of each state and the House of Representatives having a number of representatives of each state proportional to that state's population. The above argument Bentham's Bulldog provides would also undermine the bicameral Congress, since people in smaller states would be overrepresented in the Senate, and so their votes would be counted unequally rather than giving each voter an equal say (i.e. one vote) in policy passed by the Senate. So, I must conclude, Bentham's Bulldog is also in favor of abolishing the Senate and instead leaving all legislative acts to the House.
However, if you asked most Americans if we should have a system (like we do) where you need both the Senate and the House to pass legislation, well, most Americans should have learned the answer in school: separation of powers. The Senate gives overrepresentation to the states as a way of pitting the power of the states against the power of the federal government. If you think that is a bad idea, then you should agree with Bentham's Bulldog that we should abolish both the Electoral College and the Senate. This separation of powers limits the ability of either the Senators or the House Representatives to impose rules that the other side rejects, since the other side can simply vote not to pass those rules. As a result, only policy that both the purely-democratic House Representatives and the state-boosted (but still democratically elected) Senators can agree on gets passed.
Why should we separate the powers of the state governments and the powers of the federal government, pitting them against each other? As I said, only rules that both the House Representatives and the Senate can agree on get passed, but that truth is limited to the federal level. So, this system specifically creates an impediment for the national demos and their national representatives to overrule the rules created at the state level. In other words, the argument for separating powers this way just is the argument for strong federalism, the view that states should be primarily ruled by their own state demos and representatives rather than the demos or representatives of the nation as a whole.
Strong federalism is good because if gives people (the demos and the representatives) within the state more power than people outside it to create the rules for that state, allowing them to tailor those rules to their specific needs and preventing people outside the state from sacrificing the needs of the people within the state for slight advantages to the majority or what have you. (The same argument also applies to limiting the state's power to create rules for locals, so there should be a bicameral legislature in each state, too.) This is why Bentham's Bulldog's analogies with just giving random ethnicities more votes does not work: there is a good reason why people in the states should be primarily ruled by themselves, but there is no (non-racist) reason why Black people should be be primarily ruled by other Black people (such a system would presuppose that Black people have similar interests or needs in virtue of being Black).
So, as Bentham's Bulldog's is committed to rejecting the bicameral Congress, and that bicameral Congress is an important part of a strong federalist government because it separates the powers of the federal government in order to limit their ability to impose rules on states, then it seems like Bentham's Bulldog is committed to rejecting strong federalism. Just as state-boosted (but still democratic) elections for Senators limit the power of the federal legislature to impose rules on states, so too do state-boosted (but still democratic) elections for the President of the United States, and so it seems like if you reject the latter then you should also reject the former. Yet, as I said above, the separation of powers is one of the key reasons why representative democracy is any good in the first place.
Throwing away this separation of powers between the state and the federal government (via state-boosted democratic elections on the federal level) would, yes, give the national demos more power, but in doing so would be disempowering the state demos, and as we've seen there is a good reason (the same reason to have a strong federalist government in the first place) why the state demos and their representatives should primarily rule the people in their states, not the national demos or their national representatives. So, there are actually pretty-straightforward good reasons to have the Electoral College (or something like it), even if most people couldn't recite those reasons on the spot.
We can discuss what the best mechanism is for this balance of powers (e.g. should Senators be elected by the state demos as we currently have it, or selected by the state representatives as we used to have it?) or what the best balance actually is (e.g. should Senators always number exactly two, or should we make Senators also semi-proportionate to the state's populations, by making them number their proportion plus two?), but I think any argument that suggests throwing out this balance of powers entirely is simply missing the point of the entire U.S. federalist system, and that system is superior to most others in terms of separation of powers, meaning that it is superior to others in respect to one of the main reasons to even have a democracy in the first place.
My main concern with "Abolish the Electoral College" is that having an independent, non-legislative mirror of the legislature, who if all goes well will not be noticed but which is nonetheless final arbiter of electoral legitimacy in the event of constitution crisis is *actually a great idea*. If structured well it prevents the question of legitimacy of the a presiding executive moving to far less legible levels like an ambiguously corrupt county executive's enforcement of voting statutes.
What is really desired is an EC that elects the popular vote winner automatically, the plurality winner if there is no such thing in the cases of minor third parties, and deliberates in the case of major third parties creating no clear victor. Note that, with many states now entertaining RCV, it is not at all clear *what "popular vote" even means*. Does a Maine voter's RCV presidential ballot count towards his top vote, his top vote among the two most voted for candidates, his top vote after instant runoff elimination in his state alone? What if states vary by their RCV method? Who gets my "national popular vote" if I'm filling out a condorcet ballot? What if states experiment with Approval or STAR? Reforming rather than abolishing the EC such that they can stand as final authority on interpreting this information input makes electoral reform safer and more sensible.
Also, I've always found it amusing that an institution scholars of constitutional political economy tend to love, Parliamentary Democracy, is functionally an electoral college that never even bothers with the perfunctory popular vote. To that end, much of the institutional critiques of it are really just critiques of congressional apportionment, fixing which does not require a constitutional amendment. No need to bother with abolishing the EC if you just pass something like cube-root House size.
Now if the USA adopted STAR or RCV/IRV at the federal level for presidential elections, and at the same time multi-member STV for all elected bodies, that would be a real improvement.
There are multiple aspects to the electoral college some don't have many good arguments for them in the current system. For instance, the fact that electors aren't choosen in direct proportion to population is -- given SCOTUS's imo undefendable for originalists deciscion that states can bind their electoral -- kinda suspect (tho see end).
OTOH moving to a national popular vote rather than a system where each state allocates their electors is supremely important because different states have substantial influence over how elections happen in their state. Right now when a deep red state acts to suppress democratic turn out or vice versa it really doesn't matter. Only the states whose political makeup is balanced enough to deter politicians from implementing laws obviously designed to reduce the minority turn out have electoral votes which could be affected by such shenanigans. We want an election decided by the ability of canidates to persuade voters not by the fact that California passes a law giving everyone who votes the day off work or gives out candy at the polls to run up the democratic vote share.
A national popular vote in the US is one in which the election is decided by the deep red and blue states doing as much as they can to turn out their voters and discourage the other voters. Even with complete unconstitutional federalization of everything even sorta kinda near voting the huge size of the country means weather in some states easily decides the election.
Finally, there is the benefit of needing to at least draw some support from many different states making it harder to just win by offering pork to maximize turnout in a few places.
+1. We have to think about the electoral college like politicians do — implicitly using game theory. Just looking at it with a semi-moral value revolving around representativeness misses all of its worth as an institution.
It’s an inheritance from a country that was more of a union of states rather than a single nation. The rational behind its existence is abundantly clear, in that slaveholding Georgia and abolitionist Massachusetts were much closer to separate nations in the past, whereas now most major cities share a much more similar culture whether you’re in Boston or Atlanta.
The issue with “abolish the electoral college” is that it benefits many millions of people. Our system is set up in such a way that in order to abolish it via the normal channels, you’d have to get permission from more than one state that is the beneficiary of that system, which hardly seems likely. To do so otherwise would involve subverting the systems we have in place that were specifically designed to allow for this change, which is hardly practicable or a good idea. Even if the paths to abolishing the electoral college are not feasible, subverting them would lead to an erosion of the rules based system that we presumably want to improve, not degrade, by changing to a more democratic form of election.
The obvious way forward is for states, individually, to switch to a split electoral system like Maine or Nebraska. You’d think more democratic states would be pushing for this, but obviously they’re not doing that, I presume since it would harm their interests. It’s hard to maintain the moral high ground when arguing for a more democratic national system that would benefit your party, when it’s completely within their power to implement a more democratic local system that would not benefit their party, that isn’t being implemented.
In short; So long as Democrats are more likely to win the popular vote, but lose the electoral college, they will argue against it. So long as they don’t argue for a split electoral vote within safe blue states, I see the “it’ll be a more democratic system” argument as a pretense for a convenient power grab.
Pointing out the hypocrisy of a refusal to unilaterally disarm doesn’t strike me as terribly convincing in real life, high stakes situations. One can oppose war and militaries in the abstract while maintaining one because other states do.
The analogy doesn’t carry over when you look at swing states. Surely democrats in these states (when they gain power) should advocate for a split electoral college? After all, it’s not like they’ll significantly harm their parties presidential prospects, while increasing the 1 person 1 vote nature of democracy. In theory they’re likely to win as much as lose those states in a subsequent election.
Nebraska did it in 1992 and they are/were overwhelmingly Red. Essentially they’ve given up an electoral college vote to democrats that Republicans could have kept safely under the previous system. It’s not a stretch then to imagine other states doing so, especially those swing states that are won by party that consistently suggests the electoral college is unfair.
Such a thing does exist, it's called the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, and it goes into force when it comprises 270 votes in the electoral college. It is currently at 209, all traditionally blue states, with 50 more pending.
That’s definitely not the sort of thing I was referencing. It’s in democratic state’s interests to abolish the electoral college, yes, and them attempting to do that through creative means isn’t any different than trying to do so through a constitutional amendment.
My point was that it’s in every states power to make presidential elections more “democratic” by proportioning out their electors by their states popular vote, rather than winner take all. This doesn’t happen though, which suggests that maybe, this talk about abolishing the electoral college is less about caring for democracy, and more about giving more power to the party that has won the popular vote but lost the election multiple times in the past few decades.
Things like the NPVIC are how you advocate practically for a split electoral college! Comments from all sides for decades show that it is a matter of a thing that basically everyone seems to disagree with when they lose but are chary of changing when they win. This is the essential problem with the EC; the reasons behind it are contingent on a current political reality and cause division. There are millions of Republicans in New York and California that lose out here too.
For a state like California, that potentially very much cares about democracy and abolishing the electoral college, it makes sense why they don’t do it in their own state. Doing so, while Texas doesn’t, will just basically give Republicans the win for all but the most popular democratic presidential candidate.
I don’t see the reasoning why wouldn’t they do so in a state like Michigan, or Pennsylvania though. If it’s basically a toss-up on who wins the next presidential election, deciding to proportion out those electors now doesn’t cost democrats any performance on the national scale. It might even win them some points locally as they can legitimately show progress on making the country more democratic, which apparently is popular.
If a deep Red state like Nebraska can proportion out their votes, I’m going to be very skeptical as to why deep democratic states don’t as well.
Separately, I’m skeptical of the NPVIC, since it’s a normalization of faithless, or at least deviant electors. I wonder what would happen if a Republican candidate like Trump won the popular vote, and California had the power to have their electors cast their votes according to who won their own state. Would California vote according to the NPVIC, or would they defect and sway the election? Would there be a recourse for them doing so? From what I can tell interstate compacts without Federal approval are dubious, and the president has veto power on them. I wonder what a Republican congress would do if a Republican candidate won according to the electoral college, but lost due to an implemented NPVIC.
It seems that the scenario the NPVIC is intended to prevent (electoral college wins while losing the popular vote) is also the scenario where the NPVIC is most likely and vulnerable to challenge.
Strongest argument for the electoral college: election night is exciting. Popular vote would have you watching the same two numbers the entire night
I left a comment on Richard Hanania's Electoral College post from September with my own arguments against the system, which I'll reproduce here somewhat abridged. I think these arguments are basically irrefutable and show the facileness and lack of imagination of the pro-EC case:
"For a further example, the U.S.' entire foreign policy towards Cuba is predicated on chasing after the votes of a motivated diaspora living in one state. Now granted, Cubans would still be a voting bloc worth courting even if they were distributed proportionately across the country, but their concentration in a swing state has dictated one of the dumbest foreign policy third rails for decades.
The Electoral College also makes statehood (or districthood, which Wiktionary defines as 'the state of being a district') the standard for federal voting rights, which isn't a very consistent policy. Puerto Ricans can't vote in the general election, despite being citizens, just because Puerto Rico isn't a state and doesn't receive electoral votes. But if they move to a different state, suddenly they are allowed to vote. Obviously Puerto Ricans should be able to cast a ballot for president, and the fact that they're enfranchised based on what ground is beneath them is bonkers.
Further, because it enshrines regionalism into Democracy, the electoral college also enshrines interregional strife. Sure, popular vote systems have some regionalism - maybe Iranian voters complain about coastal elites too - but surely it's worse in the US when a Republican can absolutely trash New Yorkers and Californians without any consequence. Abolishing the electoral college might disadvantage Republicans in the short term, but it might also make them actually worth voting for."
Very unlikely. Being unable to ever win national office, they would cut corrupt deals that advantage themselves. Candidates would be of laughably low quality and those states would have to live with their misrule. See the Republicans Party in New York City for a real-world picture of this.
I *also* preempted this in comments on the Richard article:
"[N]ormal, already existing Republicans *can* win the popular vote already: Haley was outpolling Biden *nationally* by insane amounts in some surveys. And if she's your nominee, then without the Electoral College, you don't even have to worry about her being likeable among Pennsylvanians or whatever - you can just coast to victory on your candidate being backed by a majority of Americans. A man can dream."
It is a strong argument but detached from political reality -- a better idea is to make changes on the margins with how parties function:
In the 70s the United States became one of the only countries where parties outsourced candidate selection entirely to voters. Parties should not be internally democratic! Primaries worked because party insiders, money, and ideologues could sideline bad candidates.
Campaign finance laws sidelined the parties and elevated small donors with rising polarization, primaries now promote candidates on the left and right that are more insane ideologically than the typical voters in either party. The parties have become hostage to their bases and the activists who keep them whipped up in a constant frenzy and antipathy at the other party. This is more true in the GOP than the Democratic party.
Nominating conventions that produced Republican nominees like Lincoln, Coolidge, and Eisenhower would be a vast improvement. Nominating conventions would provide and incentive structure for so called "elite human capital" to engage with the GOP and have stakes in the convention.
"Jungle primaries” is another idea. Revising GOP rules in 2012 that favor front-runners. Oftentimes in GOP primaries, whoever wins gets extra delegates even if they received only a modest plurality of the votes. Trump never won a majority of the votes in a state primary until he all but secured the 2016 nomination.
The electoral college should be abolished, yes. But don't replace it with nationwide first past the post (FPTP), because FPTP is a shitty crappy no-good voting system (https://pontifex.substack.com/p/fptp-is-a-shitty-crappy-no-good-voting).
Instead replace it with something sensible such as IRV, or a Condorcet system such as Ranked Robin (https://www.equal.vote/ranked_robin).
Are you asking for nationwide recounts? What about Wyoming announcing that they've received 200 million red votes, and, well, I guess that's the election? To avoid anything like that, elections would have to be run by a federal elections apparatus, and I don't think moving things further to the federal government is a good idea.
Removing the electoral college is entirely compatible with local control of voting districts.
Only convincing argument for the electoral college is that it prevents one state's election rigging from drastically influencing the popular vote by capping the influence of individual states.
Of course, that certainly does not justify the current system, which doesn;t award EVs proportionately to population...
The Electoral College as is actually makes this problem worse though, since it's winner-take-all. A small number of fraudulent votes in a swing state could flip 100% of the state's electoral votes, whereas it would affect the popular vote much less.
On the other hand, with the current system there is no incentive to attempt voting fraud in places like California or Kansas, because what would be the point? So serious fraudulent voting attempts are limited to the swing states. Changing to a popular vote system would incentivize attempts at fraudulent voting everywhere. I don't know if that is a convincing argument to oppose a popular vote by itself, but it doesn't seem to be the case that the Electoral College makes the problem worse.
I would agree that the EC doesn't necessarily make the problem of, "People are incentivized to vote fraudulently" worse, since it means people are more incentivized to do it in swing states but less incentivized everywhere else. But it does seem to make it more likely that an election could actually be swung by fraudulent votes, since it's more likely that the election will hinge on a very small number of votes.
Something kind of similar to this happened in 2000: The election was so close that the result depended on exactly how the votes were counted (do you count hanging chads, ambiguous overvotes, etc.). A system where that happens is more vulnerable to people writing the rules or worse, making on-the-fly judgement when the rules are ambiguous, in a way that helps them win.
Are we really finding fraudulent votes in swing states that are even more than a few people? Sometimes just confused people?
Twice the person would be committing a crime and unlike most crimes leaving a magnificent paper trail. And the reward?
The argument here is hypothetical - which system would be most robust if there were significant fraud in preventing that fraud from changing the outcome. Of course, the fact that there's virtually no fraud in our actual elections is an excellent reason to consider this an extremely weak argument for the Electoral College even if all my other counterarguments fail.
Historically, there was lots and lots of electoral fraud in the US. The way that votes were counted in the Rio Grande Valley (in Texas) until 1972 was that the county clerk asked the Democratic Party chair what the tally was. That only really mattered in the primaries because Texas was a one-party (Democrat) state until the 1980’s. I’d much prefer a system that disincentivizes politicians from trying to find ways to go back to the bad old days. The electoral college and gerrymandering and equal Senate representation are high on my list of institutions that do exactly that.
Lol, shitlibs you lost the popular vote too. Watch as this issue disappears from your radar now that it no longer guarantees one party rule by urban Democrats.
I thought this needed a more sophisticated analysis
https://ariethoughts.substack.com/p/is-the-electoral-college-obviously
I'm sympathetic to the conclusion but I found this wildly unconvincing.
- It doesn't seem obvious to me that "one person, one vote" is a good principle. It seems perfectly plausible to me, for example, that people with less of their life left to live have less at stake in a given election - they've lived most of their lives - and therefore their votes should count for less. It seems perfectly plausible to me that citizens who are more qualified to opine should have extra votes (indeed in Britain this used to be the case, with universities having Parliamentary representation which their alumni would vote on). "One person, one vote" may be a good principle, but the electoral college is hardly the biggest violation of it (non-US-citizens, children, and criminals also don't get the vote), so why should we care especially about this particular distortion of it when we are happy to violate the same principle in far greater ways?
- I certainly don't think democracy is justified on the basis of "wisdom of crowds", and I don't think most people do either. Frankly that seems like the least plausible of the common arguments for democracy (i.e. wisdom of crowds, enabling deliberation based on all information, providing competition between elites, and achieving peaceful transitions of power).
- The electoral college does indeed warp political incentives. This is your strongest argument, although I think you overestimate the extent to which people's votes are self-interested rather than based on a partial but often good-faith assessment of who they think is best overall.
- You don't give any serious consideration to arguments in favour of the EC, and the attempt to pin it entirely on status quo bias is, frankly, below the standards I expect from you. Status quo bias is part of it, but there are plenty of plausible arguments. For example: suppose you think federalism is good, that states should offer different mixes of political policies, and people can move to places where they prefer the policies (or, more likely, good policies are implemented leading to people wanting to go there for jobs and amenities). Politicians in large states might want to impose their policies nationally in order to avoid losing citizens; you'd want safeguards against that, of which the EC might be one. I'm not saying this is a wholly successful argument, or that it's the best argument for the EC, but it's a plausible argument.