by Matt Barr

Let's do things California's way because it's so cool and stuff

Now that California and Colorado are trying to award their presidential electors to whichever candidate wins the national popular vote, a point I made long ago here bears repeating and recasting. The harm in a nationwide popular vote is not that dense population centers will have exaggerated electoral influence. They will have exactly the electoral influence their numbers dictate they should have in a nationwide popular vote. It may sound like a trivial, semantic point, but it's really not: It's not a successful argument against "one man, one vote" that each man will have one vote. It's not a successful argument against invading Iraq that we're invading Iraq.

The harm in a nationwide popular vote is that owing to scarcity of campaign resources (time, energy, money) and immutable laws of return on investment, no candidate will ever set foot outside the D.C.-New York-Boston corridor, Chicago, Texas, south Florida and California. The rest of the country will never hear, let alone be able to evaluate, the candidates' pitches.

This isn't an egalitarian issue. As mathematician Alan Napatoff conculded (see my previous post linked above), "districted" voting like the electoral college motivates the frontrunner, who usually becomes the winner, "to keep the losers happy." A campaign stuck in a few major population centers offers no incentive and no promise to govern those who didn't vote for you fairly.

Exacerbating this is that the "battleground" never changes: Demographic shifts are glacial compared to how issues in each campaign differently affect each state or region. That is, while a typical presidential election today turns on 10-15 "battleground states," those battlegrounds shift in each election (or each couple elections, when there are new candidates running). A national popular vote will freeze the "battleground" till people get around to moving out of a population center and a new one arises.

As for what California and Colorado are trying, as a way to force change, it's brilliant. States are entitled to award their electors however they see fit. If some large states essentially outlaw the electoral college, its effect can be blunted to the point where it eventually becomes meaningless without the hassle of amending th Constitution -- such a distasteful proposition lately.

As little as anyone likes an original intent argument anymore, though, the electoral college was instituted precisely so that the major population centers didn't choose the president every time. I can't foresee a successful fledgling union if in the 1790s Virginia went about trying to increase its influence by rejiggering state law on how its electors were appointed. California is the last state today whose influence in a presidential election we should be concerned about.

What some state ought to do is propose a bill awarding its electors to whoever wins the popular vote in the 49 states besides California. Or based on who wins that fall's World Series. Just to show that the fact a state can do something doesn't mean it should.

P.S. How's this for an argument against the electoral college, from the California Literary Review: it creates a white, Christian and conservative advantage in presidential elections. I'm sorry, but -- ignoring, as electoral college opponents do, the scarcity/ROI/keep the losers happy argument above -- wouldn't a nationwide popular vote do the same thing, insofar as all three of those things are, each individually, traits shared by a majority of voters nationwide? This is the first time I've heard we need to abolish the electoral college to boost the influence of smaller segments of the voting population.

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