Back when the electoral college was created, 80% of the population lived in rural areas and 20% lived in cities. It made some sense to weight rural votes a little bit to prevent the more densely populated cities from having disproportionate influence over the rural population which was actually much larger but also spread out over an immense area. Today, the ratio has flipped with 80% of the population now living in urban areas, and the vast majority of those urban residents living in the 100-mile border zone shown in the map. 20% of the US population remains in rural areas. So basically speaking, empty land, not people, has a huge disproportionate effect on presidential elections, not simply a bit a of extra weight. It is as if the electoral college enfranchised acreage over actual people. The ratio of rural to urban voters by population is 1:4 but the ratio of votes in a state like Wyoming to the votes of a state like California is 4:1, an exact flip. This state ratio means that 1 Wyoming vote is equal to 4 California votes, or to put it another way, a Californian is counted as one-fourth of a person.
The common rationale for the current Electoral College apportionment formula, that “small states” need a bit of a representational advantage, has been rendered obsolete by both unifying technology and actual demographic shifts. In aggregate, MORE people live in the states Trump won. 55% of the population lives in Trump’s states, but 45% live in Clinton’s states. In small numbers, the vote went 51-49 for Hillary, but 0.003 of a vote cost her the election.
1. Meanwhile, Trump is the losingest winner ever...
Donald Trump “won” with one of the lowest percentages of the popular vote since Republicans and Democrats began competing for the White House and that he received fewer votes than the candidate he defeated – but that votes for third-party candidates included, some nine million more people voted against him than for him.
...
The fact that Trump’s share of the vote was less than losing candidates like Romney and John Kerry, who took 48.5 percent of the vote in 2004 — not to mention both Al Gore, with 48.4 percent, and George W. Bush, with 47.9 percent, in 2000 — will not prevent him from being sworn in on January 20, but it does complicate pronouncements about him representing the democratic will of the American people. (Since Trump was fond of comparing his campaign to the winning vote for a British exit from the European Union in June, it is worth noting that he did not even manage to equal the 48 percent secured by the losing Remain camp there.)
...because the Electoral College is broken.
There is a certain dark irony to the fact that a system designed to prevent the people from choosing an unqualified demagogue has resulted in the election of an unqualified demagogue not chosen by the people. (prospect.org/...)
2. Electoral College’s Unexamined Assumptions
Protection of the minority from being overrun by the majority is one of the rationales for the apportionment of the Electoral College. The current apportionment formula, based on a majority agrarian society was decided many many decades ago. Even though demographics have changed, the apportionment formula has not been adjusted to account for the change in demographics.
Jefferson and James Madison argued that the strength of the nation would always derive from its agrarian soil.
“They had this vision of what they called the ‘yeoman farmer’: this independent, free-standing person who owed nothing to anybody, who didn’t receive any payments from the government, who didn’t live by a wage, but who could support himself and his family on a farm growing everything they needed — and that these were the people who were going to be the backbone of democracy,” said Gerald Gamm, a political scientist at the University of Rochester.
Does that even remotely describe anywhere in America today?
3. The electoral college is mathematically misaligned.
But for 36,000 votes, we would be talking Hillary’s brilliant campaign. With the changing demographics since 1888, a structural problem in the Electoral College has developed that pretty much GUARANTEES an almost insurmountable advantage to Republicans even when they field mediocre or worse candidates.
With every passing day, Trump gave the Electoral College more and more reason to implement the Hamilton solution. Even Republicans are providing ammo, like Evan McMullin of Utah. Quantitative data arguing against the Electoral College is also accumulating. The first thing to remember is that the baseline is one person-one vote. It is on the defenders of the Electoral College to demonstrate how veering from that formula results in outcomes that better represent the will of people.
Here is a graph of voting patterns showing clearly that the underrepresented voters are urban voters, not rural voters. 55% of the population lives in the states Trump won, but 45% live in Clinton’s states, thus undermining a major rationale for the Electoral College that it protects the interests of underpopulated small states. The main difference is not population per se, but population density.
4. Republican awareness of their almost insurmountable advantage has risen to the conscious level.
Republicans have intuitively known they possess this advantage on a subconscious level. One comment in the link said,
“HRC won the popular vote by a little over two million votes. She won CA by over 4M votes alone. This is why keeping EC intact is imperative and there is no way it will get the votes for a C. amendment.”
If the Republicans ever realize that a candidate can theoretically win the Electoral College with only 22% of the popular vote, I wonder what their response would be. Would they join with Democrats in advocating at least a recalibration in the interest of fair representation? Or would they celebrate their nearly insurmountable advantage and block all efforts to either tweak or abolish the Electoral College? We have the answer. Republicans now seek to gerrymander the Electoral College to ensure they never lose in the future.
5. Then why has support for the Electoral college increased?
A recent Gallup poll showed dramatic increase in support of the Electoral College. I looked at the report and found a lot more nuance than that simple statement suggests. Here is the report. With polls, you always have to look at the actual question that was asked. The question basically asks abolish or no. Even me, with all my opposition, I have said that it needs recalibrating (which does not require a Constitutional amendment), so the pollster would probably put me in the “support” column. I wonder how many others ended up in the wrong box. Even more astonishing is that the poll was conducted several weeks after the election and yet, only 66% of adults knew that Hillary won the popular vote.
I also suspect some of the new “support” comes from Republicans thrilled that they won merely because of the Electoral College. In 2000, it was not so clear. At that time, Republicans thought the razor-close result of 2000 meant that there was a future possibility that they could be in the same predicament, that is, winning the popular vote and losing the Electoral College by a razor thin margin. They realized that in such a case, they too would prefer the popular vote to be the “vote of the people,” since the only thing that gave Bush the presidency in 2000 was a 5-4 Supreme Court decision.
This time is different. They see that the land area held by Republicans pretty much guarantees a win for them as long as the Electoral College’s present (mis)alignment is maintained or worsened while population continues to seep away from rural areas to urban areas. So of course Republican support for keeping the Electoral College has increased dramatically since this election.
6. The Political Challenges
This article summarizes the political challenges any reform of the Electoral College faces. Remember too that the overriding theme of the last three elections has been change. Think of how many Trump voters said that they did not get the change they hoped for under Obama, but maybe Trump “will really shake things up.” The popular vote result of the last three elections shows that the people prefer the Democratic vision of change to Trump’s vision.
It is theoretically possible for a losing candidate to win the Electoral College with just 22% of the popular vote. Not that such outcome would ever happen, but exactly how big does the popular vote margin have to be in order to conclude the the Electoral College is broken?
7. The sovereignty of states as rationale for the Electoral College
Every other election or referendum in the country is by popular vote. The original concept of the Electoral College preserves the sovereignty of each state while uniting for things like commerce, international relations and the common defense. Therefore each state “separately” held an election. The majority of each state’s separate decisions became the decision of the union. That’s the concept. Apportionment is the mathematical formula for how many votes each state gets. This apportionment is now out-of-whack.
An argument could be made that when the US fought a civil war over states’ rights and the South, a confederation of separate “countries” banded together as allies to defeat the Union, lost that war, then the US was determined to be one Union. No more was the United States a collection of separate sovereign entities, but ONE sovereign country. The logical implications were never extended throughout the country, so we have this strange patchwork amalgamation of state sovereignty in some issues, but not others. And the fact that the Federal government can supersede state decisions anytime.
So even though we fought a war to establish that the USA is one sovereign country, we still hold national elections as if we were a collection of separate sovereign entities. A true collection of sovereign entities is the European Union. The US is not like that. Our Constitution should probably have been amended long ago to reflect the actual situation. Presidential election by popular vote would reflect the true character of the country as one entity. However, there would probably be more support for realigning the apportionment of the Electoral College than outright abolition.
8. Protecting Minority Vote
Someone asked me, “But doesn’t the EC also protect/strengthen the minority vote?” That is a myth. It also depends on what you mean by “minority.” The founding fathers did not mean minority the way the word is popularly used. Because representation is by population, slave states believed their interests would always be overrun by the more populous North. By population, they meant white. The minority they had in mind was white rural plantations. The slave states wanted to benefit representationally from their population of slaves while denying those slaves citizenship and voting rights.
After slavery was abolished and especially after the enfranchisement of blacks, the entire rationale for for the Electoral College also disappeared. But the Electoral College hung on as “protecting less populous states.” It was never about protecting minorities in the modern sense of the word. Even so, that rationale has also disappeared for two reasons. 1) Red states in aggregate are more populous than blue states. 2) Whites are no longer a majority in America. They are only a plurality.
Republicans will want to keep the Electoral College to protect their growing minority status in the US by amplifying and exaggerating the white majority in red states through the Electoral College, and by effectively disenfranchising the non-white majority every way they can. The 2016 election is the proof.