Just saying I'm a fan of the electoral college

[ebartley]

Romney's ahead in the popular vote totals, and has been for a while. I don't know if the west coast is finished coming in yet, but I'm just while he is that I want the election decided on the basis of the electoral college, not the popular vote

Comments

[agrumer]

I was watching on Fox News, and they announced right around the time you were posting this that Obama had taken the popular-vote lead, but it had been apparent for a while before that that Romney's lead was evaporating. I think it dropped from 100,000 to 20,000 over a commercial break, and that was with most of California still uncounted.

My plan for altering presidential elections, if I wielded the Rod of Rulership and could dictate my will, runs as follows:

• Do away with the Senatorial bonus - each state now gets as many electoral votes as it has Representatives in the House. (Small states would hate this, so it would never happen in real life.)
• Do away with state-level bundling. Each congressional district casts an electoral vote distinct from the others in its state. (Large states would hate this, so it would never happen in real life.)
• Do away with electors. Electoral votes would be allotted to the appropriate candidate automatically, rather than having to go through a special person. (The political parties would hate this, so it would never happen in real life.)

I'd also need to increase the number of seats in the House, probably according to the Wyoming Rule. Alternatively, I could have each congressional district cast a number of electoral votes proportionate to its population (say, 1 vote per 100,000 people).

[ebartley]

People were for some time, however, speculating that Romney needed a +1% advantage in the popular vote to win the electoral college, so it was a realistic possibility that he'd have higher margins in the red states than Obama would in the blue states.

I'd like to do away with electors, and I'm not sure why the political parties would kick - net/net the potential for faithless electors hurts them.

I don't want to break down electors into congressional districts or really anything smaller than the states. States can't be gerrymandered. Congressional districts routinely are.

Doing away with the Senatorial bonus ... eh. I'm not in favor, because I think the large states are already too dominant. I'd like to move towards federalism, not towards California / New York / Texas running the nation.

Increasing the number of seats in the House strikes me as a good plan

[agrumer]

As I understand it (and I might be misremembering), being an elector is a goodie the parties hand out as a reward for hard-working, loyal members. That means the people doing the hard work in the parties, and having lots of social connections to power brokers, would be the ones most likely to kick up a fuss over doing away with electors.

There are ways to write districting laws that do away with gerrymandering; I think Matt knows more about this. I'd call him in as a consultant before giving up the Rod of Rulership. (Assuming I could be convinced to give it up at all. You might need to hurl both it and me into the Cracks of Doom!)

Breaking up the states, electorally, would do away with the dominance of New York and California. Might not do for Texas. Under the current system, New York has 31 electoral votes, and gave them all to Obama. If the system I propose had been in place, New York would have had 29 electoral votes, and, well, it's hard to say exactly how many would have gone to each candidate, but I figure somewhere between 5 and 12 of those would have gone to Romney. (Upstate is pretty conservative.)

Same goes with California; the coast is blue, but inland trends red. Texas is mostly red, but Houston, Austin, and the edge where it meets Mexico are blue.

[kent_allard_jr]

Hark, it's the Redistricting Signal!

There's no formal definition of gerrymandering, although there are some agreed-upon standards for "good" districts: They should be contiguous, compact, "cognizable," close to equal in population, and keep communities of shared interest intact. (The art comes in deciding which values to maximize.) What one can do, at least, is give responsibility to people who don't have a material stake in the outcome. That means some kind of independent commission.

Note that gerrymandering is more of a problem at the state house level than it is for Congressional districts. The latter have to be just about equal in population; state assembly and senate districts can be up to 10% apart. Plus, Congresscriters don't directly draw their own districts the way state legislators do, so there's a slightly greater chance of independent judgment.

[agrumer]

I was looking over the Wikipedia article on US congressional apportionment, and I found something interesting:
The "ideal" number of members has been a contentious issue since the country's founding. George Washington agreed that the original representation proposed during the Constitutional Convention (one representative for every 40,000) was inadequate and supported an alteration to reduce that number to 30,000. This was the only time that Washington pronounced an opinion on any of the actual issues debated during the entire convention.

Our current House, with 435 members, has an average member-to-population ratio of about 1-to-700,000. Changing the ratio to fit the numbers that Washington considered proper would mean multiplying the House by a factor of 23, giving us over 10,000 Representatives!

The Wyoming Rule would just expand it to somewhere in the mid 500s (exact number varying by decade, with new census figures).