BARBELITH underground
 

Subcultural engagement for the 21st Century...
Barbelith is a new kind of community (find out more)...
You can login or register.


Underground > Switchboard >

The U.S. Electoral College

  
 
Sekhmet
12:44 / 09.11.04
The last couple of elections have really highlighted what seems to be a bit of a kink in our voting system. Something I've been hearing from quite a few people since the election is "Well, I would have voted for Kerry, but I didn't vote, because in Texas it's pointless." Disregard for a moment the fact that these people are also passing up the opportunity to vote on local and regional issues - gah! - and they have a point.

There are doubtless many people living in states that are strongly blue or strongly red who didn't bother to vote because their opinions go against the known majority, and therefore they would be "throwing their vote away". In the non-swing states it's usually a foregone conclusion which way the vote will go. Only two states - Nevada and Maine - divide their electoral votes; all other states give all of their electoral votes to the victor. (Even in Nevada and Maine, the electoral votes are not divided proportionally according to the popular vote within the state, but by wins in each district.) Therefore, a win by a small margin in a single state can give a candidate a disproportionate number of electoral votes. This is why it's possible, for example, for a candidate to lose the popular vote and still win the election. Ahem.

There was a ballot proposal in Colorado this year to start dividing the state's nine electoral votes proportionally according to the popular vote within the state. It would have been the first state to do so, but the initiative was shot down by Colorado voters amid fears that it would weaken the state's political position. Elections in Colorado tend to be close, so essentially only one electoral vote would ever be contested, which isn't enough for Colorado to maintain any clout with politicians.

As the system currently exists, America is not a true democracy. People are avoiding the polls because they know in advance that their interests will not be represented. We have a president who was not chosen by the people in his first term, but by a an outdated electoral system.

Why are we still doing it this way? It may have made sense when the system was implemented, but is there any reason to keep this vestige in the present day and age?

All previous attempts to dismantle the electoral college system have failed, but there are reform groups still operating. Should there be a major movement to abolish the electoral college?
 
 
MJ-12
15:10 / 09.11.04
Math Against Tyranny
 
 
grant
16:08 / 09.11.04
I personally don't like the Electoral College system, but playing around with it in my head, I know why it exists: to protect the rest of us from New York City.

Basically, it makes it so raw population centered in one or two key areas doesn't make it pointless for people out in Idaho or west Texas to vote -- so the president won't be just the city president, but the president for the whole nation.

Something to bear in mind.
 
 
Sekhmet
16:30 / 09.11.04
Thanks, MJ-12. Very interesting article! First decent argument I've seen on that side.

However, what it seems to boil down to is that the electoral college works well in very lopsided elections, but not in very close elections. In essence, didn't we already know that?

Let me chew over this again... I'm not sure I'm following this very well, between the sports and gambling analogies, since I know nothing about either...
 
 
diz
17:22 / 09.11.04
Math Against Tyranny

that's all well and good, but the current system we have now over-weights area that are peripheral, almost by definition. how the fuck is the fate of the world's most powerful nation being decided in Iowa and Ohio when those areas are so irrelevant in the larger scheme? voters in New York and LA and Chicago and DC and SF should have more power, because more people live there and they're more central to the economy. if some given area becomes more important over time, more people will move there and political clout will follow.

what the electoral college does is build in, essentially, regional "subsidies" of political power, which distort the market, instead of allowing political power to flow freely to wherever the people are.

Basically, it makes it so raw population centered in one or two key areas doesn't make it pointless for people out in Idaho or west Texas to vote -- so the president won't be just the city president, but the president for the whole nation.

but the President should primarily be the city president. humans are urban creatures, and cities are both the center and the measure of civilization. in human terms, rural areas exist to provide goods and services to the urban centers.
 
 
ibis the being
18:03 / 09.11.04
the initiative was shot down by Colorado voters amid fears that it would weaken the state's political position.

Right, this is the essence of why we still have the electoral college. In polls, the majority of Americans are against it, but those states that benefit from it will never vote for its extinction.

It's interesting to imagine how presidential campaigns would be different were the electoral college eliminated. As it stands, the candidates court the swing states like prize brides, ignoring the supposedly irrelevant states for multiple speeches and public appearances in Pennsylvania, Ohio, etc. They also tailor their campaign agendas to reflect the concerns of people in that handful of states - see the gay marriage amendment for one glaring example.

What would the candidates talk about if they were trying to reach a broader swathe of voters? Presumably, issues that are more important nationwide, which seems pretty appropriate, no?

That's not to say there would be a dramatic change, since most issues are national concerns - the economy, healthcare plans, etc. But I think getting rid of the electoral college would help get rid of some of those distractions that make their way into the rhetoric - gay marriage, which I'm pointing out again because I think in a popular vote election this would not have affected the vote. Here in the Massachusetts we were (naively) convinced that no one would use the gay marriage amendment to get presidential votes, because there just weren't enough people for it overall. Which they aren't, overall, but there obviously are in certain swing states.

I think, unless I read it wrong, the argument in "Math Against Tyranny" is based on a concept of the United States as a 19th century collection of states loosely bound to one central government. And I think quite a few Republicans would like to see the US that way as well. But that's little better than tribalism, in my view. It's out of date.
 
 
diz
20:31 / 09.11.04
I think, unless I read it wrong, the argument in "Math Against Tyranny" is based on a concept of the United States as a 19th century collection of states loosely bound to one central government. And I think quite a few Republicans would like to see the US that way as well. But that's little better than tribalism, in my view. It's out of date.

i don't know that it's so out of date anymore, frankly. i think there was a time when it was, from (roughly) Pearl Harbor to the Democratic Convention of '68, but i think before that point, and after that point, the US is a patchwork of competing tribes.

i'm at the "to hell with it" point. i don't see the light at the end of the tunnel for trying to remake the parts of the country that are not like me in the image of the parts that are. maybe we should just say "fuck it," push for a hard states' rights position, and turn the Northeast and the West Coast into liberal enclaves and let the rest become Jesusland. we'll keep open borders for mutual trade and chip in for a joint military, and otherwise stay the fuck away from each other.
 
 
grant
21:22 / 09.11.04
An anecdote from the papers: Why my little brother didn't vote.

A blue voter in a red county....
 
 
PatrickMM
22:09 / 09.11.04
Basically, it makes it so raw population centered in one or two key areas doesn't make it pointless for people out in Idaho or west Texas to vote -- so the president won't be just the city president, but the president for the whole nation.

But the system makes the votes inherently unequal. Why should the vote of someone in Texas count more than one person in New York City?

And I don't buy the idea that it somehow makes the campaigning more equal, that without it, candidates would only be in the cities. Because even if this is true, does it make more sense for that to happen or for the candidates to spend all their time in two or three states and ignore the rest of the country? It's an absolute travesty and needs to go. We haven't been a nation of states for a long time, and this is just one more thing that needs to be updated.
 
 
ibis the being
01:42 / 10.11.04
i don't know that it's so out of date anymore, frankly. i think there was a time when it was, from (roughly) Pearl Harbor to the Democratic Convention of '68, but i think before that point, and after that point, the US is a patchwork of competing tribes.

Well, I agree that it reflects the way the country is, I should have said it's outdated as a model compared to that of most modern industrialized nations. Perhaps I'm being too optimistic, but I'd like to think that the elimination of the electoral college would actually help us move from tribalism to a more cohesive nation.
 
 
alas
02:11 / 10.11.04
Lewis Lapham, editor of Harper's, has an excellent essay on this in the current (i.e., November 2004, but Dec. should be out any day now) issue of Harper's. One of his points is that the elec. college also has allowed African Americans to be essentially ignored in the south as voters. The Senate, too, was essentially designed in such a way that has give undue power to the South, and now rural America for years.

I am a farmer's daughter. I grew up working on the farm. I never thought I would say this, but, pace Willie Nelson: END US FARM SUBSIDIES NOW.

They are part of the problem. Fat chance of ending them at this point, when those states fairly handed Bush the election. But, you know what? Most of the money goes, big shock, not to "family farmers" (there are very very few left) but to vertically integrated massive multinational agribusinesses that have basically created monopolies on many crops (sugar, tobacco--controlling the processing from seed to field to consumer).

It's this myth of the family farm that keeps even many liberals, even me, from seeing the "cycle of dependency" (as the conservatives call it when it's a program that they perceive as helping nonwhites, urbanites, women). When it's big manly farmers getting the dough, these programs are as American and noncommie as apple pie. But what we have here is corporate welfare. And it just bought us more Bush.

Damn. I'm beginning to sound like a libertarian. The thing is--I believe in redistributing wealth! I just don't believe that we should continue redistributing it from the poor to the rich! And I don't think we should redistribute voting power from the urban areas to the rural areas, either.
 
 
grant
13:47 / 10.11.04
I'm totally playing Devil's Advocate here, but:

But the system makes the votes inherently unequal. Why should the vote of someone in Texas count more than one person in New York City?

Well, the opposite would be true if it were a direct by-person vote distributed nationally. That one guy on 40 acres of Texas ranchland can't outvote the 1,000 people living in 40 acres of Brooklyn, even if his life depends on it (which sometimes it does).

As it is, the more populous areas do get more electoral votes, so the New Yorker is more equal to the Texan than you might think. Like, Florida gets more electors (27) than Rhode Island (4) because more people live here than there.

Just from writing this, I'm beginning to think that the college itself isn't the problem as much as the "winner take all" method of selecting electors. It's Nevada and one other state, I think, that don't do that -- where electors for each party are selected by proportion of the vote. Colorado just voted on that (whether to change to proportional elector selection), but I don't know the results. Maine. The other state is Maine.

Actually, let me look something up... Texas has 34 votes, New York has 31... the census tells us that Texas has 21,487 people and New York has 18,250 people. So, yeah, it seems like the votes work out about right as far as power-per-person.
 
 
grant
13:51 / 10.11.04
How does one make the case for proportional voting sexy enough to get it on referenda for states to vote on?

(By the way, the Colorado amendment got defeated, although I don't know by how much.)
 
 
Our Lady Has Left the Building
15:43 / 11.11.04
Hang on, why should the Texan vote be more important just because he has more land? (Or if you want to compare like with like, why should the vote of someone living in a Texan city be worth more than someone in NY?)
 
 
ibis the being
15:53 / 11.11.04
Well, proponents of the electoral college say their votes have equal weight because of the EC. But it's this weird, screwy math that depends on the states being sharply separate entities. In other words, it's not that the New Yorker, the person, has greater power than the Texan - but that New York has more power, because it has more people. They're leveling off by state. Which is precisely what I disagree with, and which I feel goes a long way toward building a divisive USA.
 
 
grant
18:13 / 11.11.04
(actually, technically there are more Texans than New Yorkers, but yeah, that's the point of the EC -- leveling off regional influence by using population as well as regional ((state)) divisions.)
 
  
Add Your Reply