The following is an essay I wrote for a political science class. Please do not quote or cite without my permission.
An Argument for Rejecting the Electoral College
The most basic function of American democracy is to accurately reflect the will of the majority while also protecting the inalienable rights of everyone within the state. To achieve this, our government presents us with candidates, and we vote for those candidates who best represent the ideals, policy, and direction we want. For example, in the 2008 presidential election, both candidates proposed new policies and presented their vision for how they might change America under their guidance. The electorate then voted for the desired candidate, and this acted as an indirect mandate for future policy. However, in the 2000 presidential election "Al Gore won the popular vote by a margin of 543,895 votes (0.5%), and George W. Bush won the [Electoral College] with a bare majority of 271 electoral votes" (Hell & McKee, 2005). This reopened the debate as to whether or not the Electoral College method accurately reflected the will of the people. In 1967 the American Bar Association had recommended scrapping the Electoral College and replacing it with a popular vote with provisions should neither candidate receive 40%. This proposal was passed by the House in 1969 and came close to passing in the Senate in 1970 (Diamond, 1977). It was reintroduced again by President Carter during his time in office with the help of Senator Bayh on the grounds that "the electoral college … is archaic, undemocratic, complex, ambiguous, indirect, and dangerous" (Diamond, 1977). Why do we use the Electoral College to elect our presidents? Is it a valuable system we should keep, or is it a thing of the past we no longer need? In this essay I contend that the Electoral College is counterproductive to American democracy, and it is an ineffective system we ought to replace or revise. I will defend this statement based on three observations: a) The Electoral College works to reduce voter turnout; b) The Electoral College fails to accurately reflect the will of the majority; c) The Electoral College unequally distributes voting power.
The Problem of Federal Representation
The tendency to reject the Electoral College on the basis of being undemocratic is misguided because, in fact, it is democratic; it's just federally democratic and not nationally democratic. It was designed to filter and refine the popular will over the States. On the surface it seems quite ingenious: A portion of willing voters within every state vote, and the majority will of those voters decide which candidate the electors will vote for. By using state electors with a ratio equivalent to the state's population, the will of participating voters represents the entire population of the state, and this also includes representing those who didn't vote. So when the national count of the popular vote contradicts the electoral vote, it's because the Electoral College amplifies each individual State vote over an entire population. There are two main problems with this. First, the distributions of Electoral votes sometimes over-represent people in lower populated states. This is because "the number of Electors for each state is determined by the number of members it has in the House (which more or less reflects the State's population size) plus the number of members it has in the Senate (which is always two regardless of the State's population)" (Kimberling, 2008). This leads to low-populated states such as Alaska, Delaware, North Dakota, South Dakota, Vermont, and Wyoming, having the same voting strength (21 Electoral votes) as a high-population state such as Florida in the year 1988. That means each person's vote in Florida had about one third of an impact as those in the rural states listed above (Kimberling, 2008).
The second problem with the Electoral College's federal representation is that, even though it tries to account for the entire population of a state, it is still a winner-take-all scenario (with the exception of Main and Nebraska) where the electors vote based on the few who participate. This would be fine if the Electoral College system didn't work to effectively depress voter turnout. The weak argument for this being that, because a State gets the same electoral votes regardless of voter turnout, there is no incentive to encourage voter participation. Another argument is that, within election campaigns, the candidates do not necessarily favor highly populated states. Instead they focus more attention and mobilization efforts in battleground or "toss-up" states, and this only encourages voter turnout within those particular regions. According to an argument by G. B. Powell "the winner-take-all systems like the [Electoral College] work to reduce turnout because of the uneven mobilization efforts of the candidates and parties" (Hell & McKee, 2005). The point is that base Republican and base Democratic states remain so because of low voter turnout. Due to the lack of attention given by the candidates, who focus mostly on battleground states, other states are left with a default political position, having not been encouraged to vote. Looking at the 2000 presidential election, if each state had received the same level of spending and visits by the candidates as the top battleground states, turnout would have been about 59.92%, an increase of 3.6% (Hell & McKee, 2005). Of course this kind of visitation and spending is impossible to do for every state. My point however, is that a campaign strategy entailed by the Electoral College forces the neglect of some higher populated states. This seems counterintuitive to how an ideal democracy should work. Why is this? Because the voter turnout is not a reflection of the national or federal majority, instead the Electoral College advocates a decision based on a handful of elite voters (consisting mostly of battleground states), which represents -but does not accurately reflect- the popular will. Thus stated, I present the following argument:
- Democracy is more effective with high voter turnout because it increases accuracy of the popular will, and this leads to a more legitimate mandate for state policy.
- We should not adopt or keep a system that works to reduce voter turnout.
- An Electoral College system reduces voter turnout.
- Therefore, we should not adopt or keep an Electoral College system of election.
The above argument is clearly valid, which means if all the premises are true, then we must reject or revise the Electoral College system. I doubt many will argue that premise one is false. If democracy is supposedly a function of a majority will, then the more who participate, the better it will function. The ends of democracy are to legitimately mandate policy for the state, and the means to increase legitimacy is with higher voter participation. Premise three I argued for in the previous paragraphs, and I will come back to this. Premise two, I'm sure seems questionable. Is reducing voter turnout necessarily a bad thing? There are some arguments that say we might benefit from the elite few who show up to vote, but there is no guarantee of this. Are those voters politically educated or were they paid by the Mormon Church to vote for a republican candidate? It seems there are infinite hypotheses we might bring to the table, and all will be equally plausible until after the fact. Of course we might also imagine a tyranny of the majority within a popular vote system. But as long as democracy is checked by a constitution that guarantees freedom of speech and other inalienable rights, we should assume that more participation leads to better outcome for the majority who willed it. We participate in a democracy at the risk of being a minority, and in the hopes that our voice will count with equal value. This brings me to my next point.
The Electoral College Makes Votes less Equal
Because of the over representation by the number of state electors, there is not an equal value applied to every vote. This is another serious problem contradicting the ideals we might hold for a fair and free democracy. The Electoral College operates on the idea of weighted voting, and "one necessary assumption of weighted voting is that such a mathematical system gives each representative a voting power proportional to the population he represents and that this satisfies the Supreme Court's "one man, one vote" mandate" (Banzhaf, 1964-1965). As John Banzhaf notes, in almost every case of weighted voting there is a failure by the system to do what its proponents assume it does, which is to "allocate voting power among legislatures in proportion to the population each represents … voting power is not proportional to the number of votes a legislator may cast" (Banzhaf, 1964-1965). Thus weighted voting, although claimed to be a practical solution to federal representation, does not produce the results which claim to justify it.
The reason why a weighted voting system was implemented was as a means of complying with the "one man, one vote" requirement while also distributing voting power among unequal state populations. But supposing we could distribute voting power equal to state population, why should we do it this way? In a presidential election we are typically constrained by two meaningful choices, Republican or Democrat. Does it make sense to give low population states the voting power of high population states to decide one office? As individuals, I'm sure those who benefit from weighted voting (because their vote has more influence) have mixed feelings about this. But for those who do not have that same influence, it most-likely seems counterintuitive and unfair. Why should my vote count less? If we were a federation of different nations electing a chairman this might seem plausible and even desirable, but most Americans view themselves as a member of one democratic system governing one nation. The states are simply a way of dividing a large land mass into separate regions with different economical and environmental issues. And this is reduced to cities, counties, and districts in which all are ultimately part of the whole nation. We can keep reducing regional demands until we finally get the individual and we no longer have a collective mind. Because we can do this, we have no justification for implementing weighted voting. "One man, one vote" ought to mean simply that. Every member of a democracy should have equal voting strength. If this were the case, I'm willing to bet that we would have higher voter turnout, because the fact that my state is red or blue has no bearing at all on my voting power or the outcome of a national election.
The Electoral College's weighted voting puts people within Nash equilibrium. According to this model, "If he is rational, a citizen will vote only if his expected gain from voting (namely, the probability that his vote will make a difference in electing his preferred candidate, multiplied by the difference in utility between his preferred candidate and that candidate's opponent) exceeds the costs of voting… [and] because the probability of affecting an election outcome is ordinarily quite low, [it is expected] that few citizens would have an incentive to vote" (Grofman & Owen, 1984). This is reasonable to assume because most voters will vote because they believe in two things: 1. Their vote makes a difference within the constituency of their state, and 2. The state's constituencies of electoral votes will be decisive in the election. Because the Electoral College restricts individual voting power to that of their state's electoral votes, there will be many states which lack participation due to their state's lack of influence on the general election. Idaho for example only has four electoral votes, and if it goes without a catalyst to spur voter turnout, all of those votes will be republican. The paradox created is that the incentive to vote will depend on an actor's belief that there will be low voter turnout, in which case his own voting power goes up (Grofman & Owen, 1984).
Although it is astronomically unlikely such an event would occur, suppose an election could be decided by just one vote as per a newly dictated law. This would surely increase incentive to vote, and voters would attribute more value to their voting power. Not only that, but we wouldn't be restricted to a two-party, two-candidate system of election. We could be sure that our vote would count just as equally whether or not the candidate was unpopular. As it stands in the two-candidate contest of the Electoral College system, an individual has a less than a one in three-thousand chance of casting a decisive vote in the election (Grofman & Owen, 1984). It's as if you were walking into a booth and tossing a coin to decide who to vote for. The upside to this is that mathematically, you can't actually cast a "wasted vote" to an outside candidate because the chance of your vote having influence in an election is less than winning a state lottery. But many will exclaim that their vote surely has some impact. Actually, as I have shown already, it will depend on where you live and how close the election is.
The core argument here is that, we should keep the Electoral College system for electing president if and only if it could be justified by equal distribution of voting power relative to population of the region and it should not work to reduce voter turnout (A iff B&C). The Electoral College system is not justified on that basis (Not-[B&C]), thus we should not keep the Electoral College system (Not-A). The condition "B" is developed by the proponents of the Electoral College who assume it does fulfill that function. "C" (the requirement that this system doesn't reduce voter turnout) is argued for in the first section of this paper. I believe both of these fail, and yet, in order to reject the material condition A, only one needs to be false. Clearly the voting power is not equally distributed in relation to the population of a region when a vote counts over four times more in Wyoming than a vote cast in California (Munger, 2005), and thus we should reject that the Electoral College is justified.
A Quick Mention of the Two-Party System
Proponents of the Electoral College often point out that it contributes to the stability of our nation by encouraging a two party system. As Kimberling points out:
It is extremely difficult for a new or minor party to win enough popular votes in enough States to have a chance of winning the presidency. Even if they won enough electoral votes to force the decision in to the U.S. House of Representatives, they would still have to have a majority of over half the State delegations in order to elect their candidate. In addition… the Electoral College virtually forces third party movements into one of the two major political parties. Conversely, the major parties have every incentive to absorb minor party movements in their continual attempt to win popular majorities in the States. Thus we end up with two large, pragmatic political parties which tend to the center of public opinion rather than dozens of smaller political parties catering to divergent and sometimes extremist views (Kimberling, 2008).
I am partially persuaded by Kimberling on this point. The preservation of the two-party system is perhaps the most valuable function of the Electoral College. It serves to centralize ideologies that might influence policy, and it makes voting easy. However, the concept that a two-party system brings stability, and should be preferred over a multiparty system, is justified by vague generalizations. This is evident because America has had a two-party system for a long time, but it cannot be pinned down as a necessary or sufficient cause to the nation's stability. By observing the United Kingdom, we see that a country can have a multiparty system and have it be a healthy influence. My skepticism is further increased because the Electoral College forces a two-party system or indirectly prohibits the formation of an additional party. Why should this be the case? Can the entire scope of political ideologies be forced into a two-party system? I don't think so, but even if they could, should they? There are very clear and distinct political ideologies that might form a successful party such as libertarianism, socialism, etc. However, I'm not sure we ought to lower the cost of forming such a party, only that they should be able to run their candidates without being restricted or forced into representing the republicans or democrats.
Closing Argument
The Electoral College was a system developed in the nineteenth century (1787 to be exact). This was an era in which we had only 13 States and no way to spread information quickly throughout the nation. Today we have 50 States, and a global information economy tied together with instant access to political knowledge. The transparency of our democracy is for the most part, more complete than it has ever been. Because of this, there is no reason for unequal value of voting power between individuals living in different regions. Furthermore, the number of electoral votes has been shown to be unevenly proportional to state population, and thus federal representation is flawed in justifying the EC. Lastly the Electoral College almost certainly works to reduce voter turnout by discouraging campaigns in non-battleground states, reducing the voting power of high population states compared to low population states, and ultimately making an individual vote arbitrary in deciding elections (for those living in high population, or non-battleground states). As it stands, the current system of presidential election in the U.S. is not ideally democratic. Ideally democratic in the sense that we ought to have "one man, one vote" for which our voice is equally heard and accounted for regardless of regional status. Instead we ought to look at a nationally democratic system of election where the individual citizen's voting power is amplified by virtue of direct popular vote.
Works Cited
Banzhaf, J. F. (1964-1965). Weighted Voting Doesn't Work: A Mathematical Analysis. Rutgers Law Review , 318.
Diamond, M. (1977). The Electoral College and the American Ideal of Democracy. Washington, D.C.: American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research.
Goux, D. J., & Hopkins, D. A. (2008). The Empirical Implications of Electoral College Reform. American Politics Research , 857-878.
Grofman, B., & Owen, G. (1984). To Vote or Not to Vote: The paradox of nonvoting. Public Choice , 311-325.
Hell, D., & McKee, S. C. (2005). The Electoral College, Mobilization, and Turnout in the 2000 Presidential Election. American Politics Research , 700-725.
Kimberling, W. C. (2008). Pro's and Con's of the Electoral College System. Retrieved November 15, 2008, from Dave Leip's Atlas of U.S. Presidential Elections: http://www.uselectionatlas.org/INFORMATION/INFORMATION/electcollege_procon.php
Munger, M. C. (2005). Nineteenth-century voting procedures in a twentieth century world. Public Choice , 115-133.
Sterling, C. W. (1974). The Electoral College and the Impact of Popular Vote Distribution. American Politics Research , 179-204.
