Why I hate the Electoral College

A friend hosts a party or two each year and asks folks to present on various topics. Last month, the theme was "things you hate." Originally, I wanted to present on my hatred of political absolutism...until I realized that sentiment was pretty absolutist in and of itself. So I flipped to an easy target: the Electoral College ("EC").

Obviously the EC is not a college in the traditional sense. If it was, their basketball team would be horrendous. No, "college" is a collective name for electors, like a “banditry of chickadees” or a “bevy of swans.” Interestingly enough, a group of cardinals--regardless of whether you’re talking about my state bird (Illinois) or a group of Catholics about to elect a new pope--is also known as a college.

So what is the EC? As opposed to a parliamentary system, the EC was an attempt to create checks and balances.

Our founding fathers decided that a majority of 538 people, or 270 of our EC, would decide who becomes president. Every state (and DC) gets at least 3 votes—two representing the senate and at least one representing the house. Pursuant to Article II, Clause 1, Section 2, states have different rules about how these representatives are selected and whether they’re required to vote consistent with the public vote, etc.

Unfortunately, our founding fathers made some mistakes. They saved the issue of how our president would be elected to the very end of the Constitutional Convention. Tired, hurried, and no doubt bored, they put forth the model that we suffer under today. That haste, however, came at a price...a system that is often inconsistent with the ideals of democracy.

Want proof? Take a look at the last five presidential elections.

How can this be? The EC distorts the "one-person, one-vote" principle of democracies as votes are not evenly distributed across the population. Take for instance California, with 55 electors, and Wyoming, with just 3. At first glance, one might think that California has the greater electoral power.

That assumption, however, would be wrong. Because every state gets a minimum of 3 electoral votes and the number of electoral votes is capped, the distribution will always favor less populous states. Technically, even a state with one resident would receive 3 electoral votes. Under our electoral system, a Wyoming vote is worth 3.64 California votes; a California vote is worth less than a quarter of a Wyoming vote.

LA is the second fastest growing city in the US. If you consider that 75% of US residents will live in mega-regions by 2050, this math gets a lot worse. The so-called "fly-over states" will hold more and more power over traditionally blue states.

In my home state of Illinois, things aren't much better. My vote counts as less than a third of a vote in Wyoming.

The EC is prone to other problems too. Candidates have figured out that they can campaign disproportionately without a need for consensus (which is antithetical to the goal of the framers) and kowtow to certain regional politics to retain their electoral edge.

What disturbs me more is a scenario that the Constitution never considered: an electoral tie. Should two candidates each receive 269 electoral votes, the House of Representatives would decide the winner. Every state would receive a single vote, with the majority of the electors within that state winning. The candidate receiving the vote of a majority of the states (26) wins.

But here's the problem. House members are not bound to vote as their constituencies did. They can vote for whoever they want. In a state like Illinois with 18 US Representatives, it's conceivable that 9 might support one candidate and 9 might support another. With no majority, Illinois would lose it's vote. Every time this scenario repeats, it makes it harder for a candidate to obtain majority. Our Constitution doesn't deal with a scenario whereby there's no majority. Should that happen (say, 24-24 with two ties), the Vice President then serves in perpetuity. W. T. F?

That brings us to Duverger's Law, which holds that third party voting means nothing in a two party, EC-based system where a majority wins all the electoral votes in all but two states. Take for example, Ross Perot. He won 19% of the popular vote in 1992 but didn't receive a single electoral vote. Or, more recently, the Green Party has played spoiler. The Green Party really isn't a party at all, save for during Presidential elections. Of all of the 520K elections held across the US during 2016, the Green Party fielded candidates in just 117 of them. That's just two-hundredths of a percent. What's that mean? Third party, protest votes are, in fact, throw-away votes. They'll never move the needle with an EC, and they're as valuable as sitting on one's duff and never making it to the polls. Worse, the potential for these votes to play "spoiler" only increases as electoral power shifts to the smaller red states.

What can we do? Get rid of the EC. Short of that, blue states may need to export jobs to red states (or even subsidize residency in red states) to shift electoral power.