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| Yes, we are all as confused as you are |
Many of us have been confused and upset about the outcome of
Tuesday's Presidential election. How could Donald Trump be elected when a
majority of Americans voted for Hillary Clinton? Well, it's that time again
when we all start to discuss how silly and quaint we find the Electoral College
system to be in this country. In case you don't know, that is the system by
which we actually elect our presidents, whereby each state votes separately in
a winner take all arrangement. Each state's electors (actual people somehow
appointed to that post) then cast their ballots for the candidate who carried
his or her individual state. The practice dates back to the 1700's and was
apparently a way to avoid the chaos of normal, everyday people casting actual
binding votes for president. Certainly it is an antiquated system that, in
today's world of instant communication, is completely unnecessary.
Until recently, the electoral college wasn't that controversial.
In the first 200+ years of elections, only three times did the winner of the
popular vote go on to lose the Electoral College. Recently however, in an increasingly
divided country, this system has become more problematic. After Tuesday's
result, two of the last five presidential elections have now gone to the loser
of the popular vote (Trump in 2016 and George W. Bush in 2000). If the
Electoral College is getting it wrong 40% of the time, that's a problem. If
it's always getting it wrong in the same direction (to the GOP), that is a
problem.
In addition, electoral votes are supposed to be allotted
according to a state's population. Directionally, they are, but proportionally,
they are not. This means states with higher populations do have more electoral
votes, but not necessarily as a proportion of a state's population. States with
smaller populations generally require fewer people per electoral vote (I'll
call this PPEV). In fact, the bottom 10 states in population have about 300,000
PPEV. In contrast, the 10 most populous states have an average of about 650,000
PPEV. So, simple math tells us that, even if we thought the electoral college
was a good way to elect a president, we still have larger states where an
individual's vote is worth HALF of what it would be in a smaller state. This is
a serious threat to democracy that goes completely unnoticed by most people.
That brings us to 2016, a particularly troubling case of the
Electoral College going off the rails. With virtually all votes counted, it is
looking like Hillary Clinton will win the popular vote by somewhere in the range
of 200,000 to 300,000 votes (or about 0.2%) over Donald Trump. That's a victory
of 47.7% to 47.5%. Not exactly a landslide, but a victory nonetheless. However,
in the Electoral College, if we call the outstanding races for the current
leaders, Trump will wind up beating Clinton 306 to 232. Trump will have won 57%
of Electoral College votes compared to Clinton's 43%, completely out of line
with the popular vote.
Of course, the popular vote and electoral vote are
frequently out of proportion, but generally this disproportion is not
meaningful.
· In 1960, John F. Kennedy topped Richard Nixon in the popular vote by a mere 113,000 votes, less than the margin in 2016. Kennedy, however, won the Electoral College by a healthy margin of 303 to 219 (58% to 42%). While this was a bit out of proportion with the tight popular vote, at least the two votes converged on the same candidate.
· In 1984, Ronald Reagan won the popular vote 58.8% to 40.6% over Walter Mondale. In a popular vote, that is seen as a landslide. But it is nothing compared to the landslide victory Reagan achieved in the Electoral College. Reagan took 525 of the possible 538 electoral votes, a 98% to 2% thrashing of Mondale. So while disproportionate to the outcome in the popular vote, it was a landslide either way and thus insignificant.
· Looking at a much more competitive example, the 2000 election was a nail biter both in the popular vote and the Electoral College. While Al Gore won the popular vote 48.4% to 47.9% over George W. Bush, Bush took the Electoral College 271 to 266, as the election swung on the votes in one state. So, while the Electoral College failed to capture the will of the people in 2000, it really came about as close as could reasonably be expected.
2016 is a rare example where the Electoral College system
not only got it wrong, but by a wide margin. Because of the electoral buffer
Trump enjoyed, it is entirely possible that Clinton could have won the popular vote
by even more, say 2% to 3% (2 to 3 million votes) and still have lost the
election. That scenario is clearly absurd, but not out of the realm of
possibility. It now appears that our entire country has become gerrymandered to
benefit one party.
So we have seen that the Electoral College doesn't weigh
votes equally, and sometimes fails to capture the will of the people. But perhaps
the most troubling side effect brought about by Electoral College is rampant
voter apathy. In theory, voters who live
in a state where polling shows a wide lead for one candidate will be less
enthusiastic to vote, or may "throw away" their vote on a symbolic
third-party candidate. Looking at 2016 election data, this theory appears to
hold true. Of the top 14 states in terms of voter turnout, 9 of them were in
"swing states" where the outcome was ultimately decided by a 5%
margin or less. In total, 12 states were decided by 5% or less and these states
had an average voter turnout rate of 45.8%. In contrast, all other non-swing states
had an average turnout of just 36.5%, nearly 10% less. Doing away with the
Electoral College would mean every state is a swing state, thereby increasing
voter turnout across the board. Most people feel more voting is good for
democracy, but not everyone (See GOP voter suppression and intimidation
efforts).
So what if we did away with the Electoral College and every
state was in play? What would the 2016 election have looked like?
Let's assume that every vote counts and that voter turnout
in every state reached the 45.6% level seen in the 2016 swing states. If we
take every state's actual votes and weight them up to match the 45.6% voter
turnout, Trump obviously still wins in the Electoral College format, but
Clinton's popular vote margin increases significantly. Where, in reality,
Clinton beat Trump 47.7% to 47.5%, the adjusted vote count given the higher
turnout % gives Clinton a margin of 48.4% to 46.8%, an increase of more than a
full percentage point over the actual margin of victory. Her vote margin of
200,000 to 300,000 now becomes 2 to 3 million, all because we made every state
equally valuable to the outcome of the election.
Regardless of your party affiliation or who you supported in
this election, shouldn't this be the goal to which our democracy strives? If
your only defense of the Electoral College system is "That's how it's
always been," that's not a real reason. It's time to actively and
aggressively push to abolish the Electoral College in the interest of true
representational democracy. No more winner take all, no more voter apathy, and
no more elections in which a candidate is elected on a technicality. We can do
this people, we just have to demand it.
