by Matt Barr

The Electoral College Must Go, Part MCMLXXII

I'm not in favor of the direct election of Senators, so you probably won't be shocked to learn that I am unpersuaded by arguments against the Electoral College. Edward Lazarus writes in Findlaw's Writ today that it's "about time we all agreed that the Electoral College has to go." He then writes, "Let's look at the pros and cons," but never actually gets around to the former. I'll let you read his argument -- it's nothing you haven't heard before, and it's not unreasonable -- and then I'll give you the "pros" as I see them.

First, to Lazarus' point that "thanks to the Electoral College, for all practical purposes, the presidential campaign did not even exist for voters living outside the 15 or so potential swing states," it hardly bears note (but if you need it noted, go here) that if you have a direct popular election, it's all going to play out in the most populous areas of the country. Better 15 states be involved than half a dozen or so major metropolitan areas.

Look at the county-level electoral map of your choice. Look at the northeastern seaboard, Illinois, Florida, even California. Now consider the best, most efficient expenditure of resources in a campaign for a national popular plurality. Won't you spend most of your time either in the D.C.-Philadelphia-New York-Boston corridor, or in northern and southern California?

Is anyone going to set foot outside Chicago in the midwest? Is anyone going to try and get out the vote, buy TV ad time, send direct mail to the rest of Illinois? Abolishing the Electoral College risks not 35 states, but tens of millions of people never hearing a word from or about the Presidential candidates. And the same tens of millions of people, election after election. The "battleground" almost never changes.

Those 15 states Lazarus mentions change from election cycle to election cycle (or at least decade to decade). Look at the 1980 map (and try to reorient yourself to the conservative Republican being blue). The 1960 map. The 1992 map.

Consider 2000. I'm not sure this is a desirable result: Vice President Gore won the national popular vote by about half a million by winning wide majorities in the D.C.-Philadelphia-New York-Boston corridor, northern and southern California, southeast Florida and Chicago. Granted, as I've said to anyone who's brought it up to me in the last four years, those wide majorities mean almost nothing, in that no campaigning was done in any of those places but Florida (and some token appearances in California) -- it would be like holding a World Series and then, after a team won four games, breaking the news that they were actually going to give the trophy to the team that had more base hits. (Would that not have changed both teams' strategy from the beginning? Would anyone have tried to walk, sacrifice, advance baserunners, etc.? Would any pitcher have, you know, thrown strikes?)

But what's clear from looking at recent history and the demographics of the country, and considering that campaigns have limited money and resources and need to use them as efficiently as possible, is that while Lazarus' plan would have gotten the 2004 election out of the hands of the 15 states he references, they're sure to be 15 (or whatever number) different states next time, or the time after, or the time after. Abolishing the Electoral College assures that the "battleground" almost never changes.

A Discover Magazine article I read when it came out in 1996, available online here, makes the mathematical point that "In a fair election ... each voter’s power boils down to this: What is the probability that one person’s vote will be able to turn a national election? The higher the probability, the more power each voter commands." This is easy to understand. The rest isn't: Only part of the issue is the probability that the rest of the voting population beyond you will split down the middle, making your vote the deciding vote. As Will Hively wrote in the referenced article:

The degree to which districting helps, Natapoff found, depends on just how close a contest is. Take as an illustration [a] model nation of 135, divided into, say, three states of 45 citizens each. When the race is dead even, of course, no districting scheme helps: voting power starts off at 6.9 percent [the probability that an individual voter's vote will be the "tiebreaker"] in a direct election versus 6.0 percent in a districted election. But when candidate A jumps ahead with a lead [in voter preference] of 54.5 percent, individual voting power is roughly the same whether the nation uses districts or not. And as the contest becomes more lopsided, voting power shrinks faster in the direct-voting nation than it does in the districted nation. If candidate A grabs a 61.1 percent share of voter preference, voters in the districted nation have twice as much power as those in the direct-voting nation. If A’s share reaches 64.8 percent, voters in the districted nation have four times as much power, and so on. The advantage of districting over direct voting keeps growing quickly as the contest becomes more lopsided.

Natapoff now had a two-part result. A districted voting scheme can either decrease individual voting power or boost it, depending on how lopsided the coin being tossed for each voter becomes. He found the crossover point interesting. For a nation of 135, that point is right around a 55-45 percent split in voter preference between two candidates. In any contest closer than this, voters would have more power in a simple, direct election. In any contest more lopsided than this, they would be better off voting by districts.

He goes on to say that the larger the electorate, the closer that "crossover point" gets to 50-50. Essentially, mathematician Alan Natapoff concluded, forcing a winning candidate for national office to win districted blocs of voters instead of a direct majority has almost no effect when the preference for each candidate is around the same -- in other words, the result is likely to be the unaffected by the method of voting, direct or districted. But as preference increases, individual voting power in certain districts (states) increases as well -- meaning candidates have, in Hively's words, more "of a motive to keep the losers happy." Surely, this is a desirable result?

See John Samples' article, linked above (and again here), for the argument that we're not supposed to be a direct democracy, anyway: "Neither the Senate, nor the Supreme Court, nor the president is elected on the basis of one person, one vote." It's a point that's easy to make and Samples makes it more eloquently than I would.

In sum, as little as I wanted to receive recorded phone messages from Sarah Jessica Parker and Gwyneth Paltrow (isn't she in England now, anyway?) exhorting me to go out and vote for John Kerry a couple weeks ago, I doubt my Akron, Ohio-area self would receive any attention at all in a direct, national election. I'm not being selfish, I realize that next time or the time after that, the "battleground" will be redefined. But that's the point.

Read Lazarus' argument about gerrymandering, though, he makes some good points.

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