Options For Electoral College Essay, Research Paper
Options for Electoral College Reform
The recent presidential election has re-raised the question of electoral college
reform, since the presumptive winner of the electoral college lost the popular
vote, like Benjamin Harrison did in 1888. Many are saying that if the loser of
the popular vote serves as president, he will (like Harrison) be very weakened
by a lack of mandate. Therefore quite a few people, including Senator Hillary
Clinton, are calling for a constitutional amendment that would elect the
president by a pure popular vote. In my youth I would have supported such a
reform. I remember Hubert Humphrey calling for it back in those days. But
there are quite a few other alternatives for reforming the archaic system we
use, some of which might offer advantages over a simple popular vote.
The first question that has to be looked at is, What are the problems that we
are trying to reform? Obviously, we need to reform the habit of using cheap
and unreliable voting equipment such as Votomatic card punches, but that’s
not a constitutional issue. The concerns with the electoral college system
itself are these:
1) The candidate who loses the popular vote can win the election by
being unpopular in the most populous states. This is not necessarily a
problem. The framers quite deliberately chose this rule, giving voters
in sparsely populated states more weight than voters in heavily
populated ones, so that the interests of smaller states would not be
overwhelmed. It was a compromise between backers of states (the
existing power structure at the time, which many were reluctant to see
weakened) and advocates of the people.
2) The candidate who loses the popular vote can win the election if he
happens to get small wins in many states while his opponent gets larger
wins in fewer states, regardless of the size of the states involved. This
is because of the “winner take all” rule that most states use in choosing
their electors. It means that the proportion of the electoral vote often
bears little resemblance to the popular vote.
3) The small number of electoral votes causes a certain amount of
random round-off error. The winner-take-all rule makes this random
error larger.
4) The winner-take-all rule also leads to voter apathy or disgruntlement
in states where one party is dominant, because their vote will have no
effect on the electoral vote totals.
5) When no candidate gets a majority of electoral votes, the vote is
settled by the House of Representatives, throwing out the people’s vote
entirely. This generally leads to a purely partisan battle that loses all
sight of whatever popular mandate really exists. Often the only
resolution is some kind of back-room deal like the “corrupt bargains”
of 1824 and 1876.
6) The electoral college tends to enforce a two party structure, freezing
out alternatives, because nobody wants the election thrown to the
House of Representatives. Third party candidacies are generally seen
only as “spoilers” instead of as real choices. (The framers did not
expect a two party system to arise; some cynics say they really
intended to leave the choice up to the House of Representatives
whenever nobody was overwhelmingly popular.)
7) The forces upholding the two party system also bring about the
necessity of primary elections, which have a host of shortcomings. Or,
if we don’t have primary elections, the result is that most of the
candidate selection process is done before voters have a voice.
8) One problem with the primary system as it currently exists is: The
parties are supposed to be private, independent organizations, not part
of our legal apparatus of government. Mixing the party’s internal
choice of candidates with the state election process is a bad
compromise. It violates private associations’ right to choose their own
candidates and platforms, and gives excess legitimacy to a side of the
political process that doesn’t deserve it.
9) Another problem with primaries is that everything depends on the
states that hold their primaries earliest. States that vote late usually end
up with no voice at all, because most of the candidates have conceded
by then. This leads to states constantly moving their primary dates
backwards to get a more advantageous position, which in turn leads to
the whole campaign season becoming more and more prolonged.
10) The candidate that wins a party’s primaries is often not the one
who would best serve that party in the general election. An ideologue
tends to score better within the party than a moderate centrist does
(though the current fad is for everybody to try to be centrist, since it
worked so well for Clinton).
11) You don’t know anything about the individual electors you are
voting to send to the electoral college, and in many states they are free
to go against what the voters told them to do. This creates an opening
for a capricious individual to violate the voting rights of hundreds of
thousands of citizens.
12) And finally, the electoral college makes America look stupid to
foreigners, especially when we talk about how we’re the bastion of
democracy.
Now, what are the possible reforms? Let’s just go through a bunch of options
we might try, and discuss the advantages and disadvantages of each one. The
first possibility is the most obvious and most frequently discussed one:
PURE POPULAR VOTE. There are two variations to this one, depending
on what you do when nobody gets a majority. If you throw an election with
no majority winner to the House of Representatives, you minimize the degree
of change from the existing system. If you give the presidency to the
candidate with the largest plurality, you solve more of the problems on the list
above, but you make it obvious how poor a mandate the winner has really
got. (The mandates of the people we elect now are no better, but the electoral
college makes them look better.)
Advantages: it brings us out of the stone age, it greatly simplifies things, it
upholds the principle of “one person, one vote”, and it gives us the
opportunity to cut the House of Representatives out of the picture.
Disadvantages: it does little to solve the problems above having to do with a
two party system. Indeed, it makes them worse in one way if the House is cut
out: “split votes” can become a real problem. If two similar candidates divide
the vote of those who agree with them, then a dissimilar candidate gets the
plurality of the votes even if the electorate sides more with the first pair on
the issues. Recounts in close races would be a real problem to implement. But
the biggest problem is that a constitutional amendment to elect the president
by pure popular vote probably could never be passed, because an amendment
requires approval by a large majority of states, and most states would lose
power with this change. Few of the less populous states are going to vote for
a change that gives more power to the big populous states like California and
New York, and less to themselves. However, there are those who argue that
the “winner take all” system actually gives California and New York more
power already; if this is true and can be demonstrated to the satisfaction of
the people in other states, then a popular vote reform amendment just might
be possible.
POPULAR VOTE WITH RUNOFF ELECTION. This is like the pure
popular vote option, except that instead of holding primaries followed by a
general election, you hold a free-for-all election followed by a runoff between
the two top vote-getters. This is the system commonly used for
“non-partisan” elections such as mayor’s races.
Advantages: eliminates the bad compromises of primary elections, and
reduces the control of entrenched political parties over elections, so that
independent candidates have more opportunity. This system reduces the split
vote problem at least mildly; it is more difficult to figure out a scenario in
which the candidate with the most popular views on the issues does not win.
This approach has a much better chance of electing centrist candidates
instead of flip-flopping between the left and the right as partisan elections
using primaries tend to do. It shares all of the advantages of a popular vote
with primaries, and it eliminates the house of representatives from the
process.
Disadvantages: it has the general disadvantages of any pure popular vote,
though none of the specific disadvantages of a popular vote with primaries. It
would have the same trouble being approved by small states. The clearest
problem we’ve seen in contests of this type, such as mayorial races, is that
there may be substantial difference in who votes between the free-for-all and
the runoff; the outcome of the latter may not reflect the consensus will of
those who voted in the former. This is especially true given that only one of
the two could be on the main general election day, and the other is likely to
have a smaller turnout. It would also be true if any great amount of time
passed between the two elections, such as the current large gap between
primaries and the general election. However, that would probably not be as
bad as the very severe split vote problem that would occur if you simply
awarded the election to whoever got the plurality of a free-for-all. That’s why
they have runoffs in the first place.
PROPORTIONAL ELECTORAL VOTE. This simply means that each
state’s electoral votes are divided in proportion to how the state’s voters split,
instead of allowing a winner-take-all system. We would have to be careful in
exactly how we write the mathematical rule for how vote proportions are
rounded off to whole electoral votes. One or two states already do this.
Advantages: this is one of the few reforms listed here that would not require
a constitutional amendment. It could be mandated by Congress, or
implemented one state at a time. It would mean that the electoral college vote,
within the limitations of roundoff error due to having only 538 votes total,
would much more accurately reflect the popular mandate coming from the
states. (It would preserve — some would say restore — the weighting of votes
in favor of small states, which as noted above is probably very hard to
eliminate, so we might as well consider that a good thing.) It would weaken
the hold of the two party system: third parties would still tend to be seen only
as spoilers, but their chances of breaking out of that role would be better.
Disadvantages: if a significant third party effort is made, this reform would
greatly increase the likelihood of the decision being made by the House of
Representatives. When that happens, your vote ceases to count.
PROPORTIONAL ELECTORAL VOTE, PLURALITY WINS. This is
like the above, except with the House of Representatives cut out of the
picture unless there’s an electoral vote tie. Unlike the previous case, it would
require an amendment. Another factor that could be tossed in is an increase
of the number of electoral votes — say, ten or a hundred for each senator and
congressperson, instead of one. This would reduce roundoff error and make
the proportional splitting of votes more accurate.
Advantages: the result gets settled a lot easier and quicker without the House
being involved. This further improves the picture for third parties.
Disadvantages: like a pure popular vote with the winner being awarded on a
plurality, this makes “split votes” a real danger. A conservative may beat two
liberals even if the electorate has a liberal majority, or vice versa. This leads
any large power blocs to do their best to unify behind one candidate picked in
advance and keep as much choice as they can away from the voters.
WEIGHTED POPULAR VOTE. This is a system in which we don’t use
electoral votes, but still preserve the weighting in favor of small states. There
are various options for how to do this. One is that we multiply each state’s
totals by a weighting factor which would be up to three times as large for the
smallest states as for the big ones. Another is that we could include a block of
fake votes, of a total equalling 102/538ths of the number of real votes, and
give each state an equal share of these fake votes, awarded winner-take-all to
the most popular candidate in that state. As with those above, we have the
choice of throwing races without a majority winner either to the House or to
the candidate with the plurality, or holding a runoff.
Advantages: this is very similar in effect to the proportional electoral vote
option, only without the inaccuracy caused by rounding off to whole 538ths
of the total. If we use blocks of fake votes awarded winner-take-all by state,
we reduce the likelihood of races having no majority winner.
Disadvantages: using winner-take-all blocks of fake votes puts more of a
freeze on third parties, but using weighting multipliers — in effect, saying
“Your vote counts 2.8 times as much as his vote” would create an overt
impression of unfairness that, despite it being essentially the same as what we
already have, would probably piss people off and create a lot of resistance.
Also, the “split vote” problem arises with weighting factors the same as it
does in a pure popular vote. The split vote problem is present, but reduced
(rather artificially) with winner-take-all state blocks of fake votes. A runoff
would reduce it further.
ELECTORAL COLLEGE WITH POPULAR VOTE BONUS. This one
was proposed by Arthur Schlesinger Jr in Time magazine. His idea was to
award some extra electoral votes to whoever wins the popular vote. The
number he named was 102 electoral votes, which is silly because it’s just an
overcomplicated roundabout way of awarding the election to the popular vote
winner. But the question gets interesting if you award a bonus of less than
102 votes. The amount you pick allows you to select any desired weighting
between the outcome of a pure popular vote and the outcome under the
existing system.
Advantages: you can create a compromise, with any weighting you choose,
between advocates of the traditional system and advocates of a pure popular
vote.
Disadvantages: like many compromises, there is very little to recommend this
system, in any absolute way, over either of the pure alternatives it is
compromising between. Also, the process of selecting the exact weighting is
bound to be contentious and arbitrary, and therefore repeatedly challenged. It
doesn’t help that the exact degree of weighting for either side is not any
obvious linear function of the number of bonus votes.
PREFERENTIAL POPULAR VOTE. This is a system that was invented
specifically to deal with split votes and lack of a true majority. It is also
called the “instant runoff” balloting system. How it works is that instead of
just voting for the single candidate you prefer, you make one vote for your
first choice, a second vote for your next-best choice, a third vote for the next
best choice after
loses, your vote is transferred to the candidate you listed as your second
choice, and if he loses, your vote is transferred to your third choice candidate.
Ideally, you rank every candidate from first to last, but this leads to a very
complex counting process, so in practice we might ask people only for their
first few candidates, not to rank all the lesser ones they don’t like. Limiting
the number of rankings you vote for to three or four or five simplifies the
logistics of counting while probably having only a small effect on the
accuracy of the outcome, unless the number of candidates is very large. This
system is commonplace in Australia and New Zealand, with several minor
variations by locality. For instance, some local laws require that the voter
rank every candidate on the ballot, whereas others allow the voter to mark
only the first few that they like. It is also used in Ireland.
Advantages: lots and lots. No other system clears up as many of the problems
listed above as this one does. Split vote problems are eliminated because your
second-choice vote goes to the other candidate who is on the same side of the
issues; the candidate whose position on the issues is in the minority will lose
even if the vote on the other side is divided several ways. Third parties can
thrive and attract exactly as many voters as they actually represent the beliefs
of, because you have no fear of losing your vote to a “spoiler” if your second
or third choice is a mainstream candidate. This reduces apathy. Primary
elections become completely unnecessary: a party can run all its candidates at
once and the strongest of the group will get almost all of that party’s votes in
the final count. Elections in general will be driven more by people’s
preferences on issues than by loyalty to parties. We could well see more
candidates running as independents and being elected. The election season
could be significantly shortened. No voter would be frozen out of the
pre-selection process within a party because of variations in state laws. The
House of Representatives or other mechanism for resolving the lack of a true
majority has no possible role except in a rare case where the vote is split so
deeply that even people’s third and fourth choices don’t produce a winner.
This is pretty much impossible where ideological camps are divided into Left
and Right; it might happen if we had Left, Right, Up, and Down factions all
incompatible with the other three, but that’s hardly likely to happen.
Disadvantages: the ballot itself would be more complicated. The counting
process would have to be modernized and made a good deal more
sophisticated and reliable. (But then, the 2000 election makes it clear that we
have to replace a lot of bad voting equipment already.) We would probably
need voting machines that have good preventive interlocks to reduce mistakes
that would invalidate ballots, or there would be a lot more such mistakes
made by voters. (Again, this probably needs doing anyway.) In any
jurisdiction where we don’t have such modernization, the counting process
would be prolonged and tedious. There would always be a tradeoff to make
between having the voters make more secondary choices (fifth best, sixth
best, and so on) which would improve certainty when there are lots of
candidates, vs. limiting the number of secondary choices in order to reduce
the data processing burden on vote counters. (And if we ask for more
secondary choices, a lot of voters probably won’t make them; they’ll vote for
the two or three they like and cast no votes for the others.) A disadvantage
that has been claimed for this system is that there are obscure strategies by
which clever enough voters can actually hurt a candidate’s changes by giving
him a higher vote, but I don’t think this would apply if people were ranking
only their top few choices. It also tends to generate a lot of backroom
horse-trading between various factions over who they will endorse as second
choices, but I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad thing. But as with a pure
popular vote, one big disadvantage is that this undoes the weighting by states
that the electoral college has, which means small states probably won’t pass
it.
PREFERENTIAL POPULAR VOTE POINT-COUNT (THE BORDA
SYSTEM). This is a variation of preferential voting in which, if there are
(say) six preferential rankings on each ballot, a candidate gets six points for
being picked first, five for being picked second, and so on. The candidate
picked last gets one point. The winner is the one with the highest total point
count.
Advantages: like preferential voting only with considerably faster and simpler
counting procedures.
Disadvantages: unfortunately, this system gives voters a considerable
incentive to rank candidates who are threats to their first choice much lower
than they would deserve based on the issues. For instance, if voters for one
mainstream party candidate want to make sure their man beats the other
candidate from the same party, they would rank the other guy lower than the
opposition party candidates. If enough voters act this way, fringe candidates
with no true mandate end up getting greatly inflated vote totals and could
conceivably even win.
WEIGHTED PREFERENTIAL POPULAR VOTE. We could make the
preferential system compatible with the electoral college’s protection of
smaller states by giving each state a weighting factor to multiply its vote
totals by, as in the weighted popular vote system. Or we could toss
winner-take-all fake vote blocks by state into the mix, though I figure this
would make an awkward and ugly fit with a preferential system.
Advantages: all those of preferential voting, plus protection of small states as
under the existing system, and therefore much better likelihood of being
approved.
Disadvantages: overtly spelling out in law that one person’s vote counts for
more than another’s is bound to get people irked. State winner-take-all blocks,
on the other hand, introduce a non-preferential element, and increase the
chances that the majority winner is not selected correctly according to
people’s real rankings of the choices. As with any preferential system, the
ballot and the counting are more complex and therefore would have to be
more computerized than they are now.
PREFERENTIAL ELECTORAL VOTE. This is an attempt to introduce
the advantages of the preferential method into the electoral college. The
voters in each state would cast preferential ballots. The state would award its
electoral votes according to the first choice vote count. If nobody got a
majority of the electoral college, the votes of losing candidates would be
transferred to those voters’ secondary choices, and the electoral vote would be
recomputed. Electoral votes would have to be awarded proportionally by each
state, not by winner-take-all, because if winner-take-all was used, the
preferential part would quite likely never get to operate. With a variation of
this scheme — have each state use a preferential system to select its electoral
votes, instead of using the second place votes only when there is no electoral
majority — you could implement this system without a constitutional
amendment. Even the first version might just possibly be able to be
shoehorned into the space allowed by the present constitution, if the Supreme
Court would allow each state to make its final choice of electors based on
vote totals announced by the other states.
Advantages: retains most of the benefits of a preferential system with less
disruption of the status quo, and probably less contention over the state
weighting issue. Proportional electoral voting does not create the high risk of
there being no majority winner as it would in a non-preferential system, if
you use the stronger version that probably requires an amendment.
Disadvantages: basically, this is at best not much more than an inaccurate
way of doing weighted preferential popular votes; the electoral college
apparatus is pretty much just nonfunctional window dressing. Or, if this is
implemented in the toned-down form without an amendment, states might
want to award their electoral votes winner-take-all, which would re-introduce
a lot of inaccuracy into the process.
POPULAR APPROVAL VOTE. This is a new addition to the list — a
system I had not heard of when I wrote the first version of this document.
Approval voting consists of giving a “yes” vote for every candidate that you
can stand, and a “no” vote for all those you can’t. In essence, you can vote for
as few or as many of the candidates as you wish. It’s like preferential voting
except without a hierarchy of individual ranking. The winner is the candidate
with the most total “yes” votes. State weighting could be applied, or not, the
same as with preferential popular voting, with about the same consequences.
Advantages: the same advantages as the preferential system, and it’s simpler,
imposing no extra difficulties with counting or requiring new fancy voting
machinery. Split vote problems are eliminated, primaries and two-party
constraints are eliminated, everybody can vote for who they really like best,
and the one who is most broadly acceptable wins.
Disadvantages: unlike the preferential system, this one does not distinguish a
ringing mandate from bare tolerance. It gives less of a mandate on issues than
a preferential system does. One can’t help but suspect that winning candidates
will tend to be bland mediocrities… though in practice I suppose this system
will probably elect the same person that a preferential vote would. Still,
voters would probably be happier and feel more engaged if they could
indicate which candidate they really like vs. which they find merely
acceptable. Because of this, any really partisan voter might feel motivated to
vote “no” for all candidates but one, just to make their preference clear,
thereby increasing the likelihood that the winner would have no majority. In
short, it’s difficult to come up with anything very solid as a disadvantage for
this system… all I’ve got here is either subjective, speculative, or just a minor
nit.
APPROVAL BASED ELECTORAL VOTE. This is another one that
could be implemented without an amendment. The electoral votes of each
state would go to whoever got the most approval votes in that state, or could
be split proportionally among candidates according to their approval vote
totals.
Advantages: similar to those of the non-amendment version of the
preferential electoral vote. Voters would get to vote for who they really liked,
and there would be no need for primaries and no obstacles to third parties.
Disadvantages: Without an amendment, proportional assignment of electoral
votes would leave considerable risk of nobody winning an electoral vote
majority. You could have ten candidates with handfuls of electoral votes
apiece. Winner-take-all assignment of states’ votes would perpetuate errors
and distortions of the outcome, without fully eliminating that risk. A pure
approval vote always has a winner, but combining the results of separate
approval votes by state no longer has this advantage. This could send third
party candidates back to the ghetto of being “spoilers” once they become
strong enough to win a few states. A preferential system, if imposed in the
more sweeping way that would require an amendment, could eliminate this
problem even if the electoral college is still used; an approval system cannot
do so.
In conclusion, I think it’s obvious that I would strongly prefer either some
kind of preferential system or a popular approval vote. Any other leaves the
majority of the current shortcomings unresolved. I think a lot more voters
would end up happy with the way they were voting, and we’d have far less
apathy. I think my preference of the systems listed here would be a pure
preferential popular vote, or maybe a weighted one (though of course as a
Californian I can hardly embrace weighting wholeheartedly).
I think the data processing challenges that a preferential system would bring
are entirely manageable, even if voters end up casting many ranking votes.
Each precinct would, instead of submitting a total for each candidate, submit
a table listing votes for each permutation of preference order. The amount of
data would be much larger than what is needed today, but would still be
manageably sized — a paper printout of it could fit into a manila folder if the
voters rank the top eight candidates. (It gets more like milk-crate sized if we
allow nine or ten rankings.) Once such tables are combined at a county or
state level, the translation of secondary votes could proceed without any
further reexamination of the ballots. But if a precinct has inadequate data
processing gear to produce and transmit these large result tables, they’d be
forced to repeatedly recount all the ballots as losing candidates are eliminated
one by one. The burden could be minimized if voters only mark their top two
or three or four choices, but this slightly increases the likelihood of the
winner not showing a true majority.
One person objected that if we had a constitutional amendment describing
such a system, it would be as big as the rest of the constitution. I think it
could be described in general terms in about the amount of text that the
twelfth amendment uses, with the details being left up to congress. Another
common objection seems to be that voters would be annoyed and confused
by such a complex system. But as far as I have been able to learn, when the
system has been tried on a small scale by a few U.S. cities such as
Cambridge MA, people are usually pleased with it.
I also think that almost any of the above would be better than the existing
system.
If none of these national reforms gets accomplished, one positive step I’d like
to work toward is to get the state of California (where I live) to allocate its
electoral votes proportionally. Having such an enormous block of votes be
awarded winner-take-all is just far too unfair both to other states, and to the
millions of voters on the losing side within the state. It is, I believe, a major
contributor to voter apathy. Some may say that this would, at present, be to
the advantage of the Republicans, but in many other times it would have
helped the Democrats, so I think the idea can be considered on its merits for
the long term in a nonpartisan way. The fact that the state is genuinely split
between left and right and is not dominated over the long term by either party
(as are New York and Texas, the other two most populous states) also means
that such a reform has a real chance of being passed. No state where the party
in power always gains by winner-take-all would want such a change. Unless
maybe, just possibly, you could persuade the New York democrats and the
Texas republicans to make a trade, since the effect of both doing it together
might come out pretty much neutral. But California is the place to start.