The Electoral College

[fclbrokle]

Prompted by my GOTV efforts in this election, I've started to think about the Electoral College and the role it plays in our elections. As we all know, it's possible for someone to become president while losing the popular vote, and this is certainly a bug, not a feature. However, I've been thinking about other consequences of the system, and not

Comments

[easwaran]

The advantage of using states as the districts is that you can't gerrymander the states in order to maximize your party's chances of winning. That's why using congressional districts would be a disaster - Maine and Nebraska are just homogeneous enough and solid enough for one party or the other that it's never been an issue

[secret_panda]

Beat me to the gerrymander comment! Anyway, I'm seconding it, gerrymandering is a big problem. For example, I currently live in a congressional district that is 90% black. Not that redrawing congressional districts based upon the demographics of the constituencies is always a bad thing - I used to live in a very rural town that was in a ridiculously-drawn non-rural congressional district instead of the bordering rural congressional district, so we never got farming pork and were thus very sad (and never voted for the candidates the rest of the district voted for, not that it mattered

[theojf]

I will third the gerrymander comment. Of course, one can legislate against gerrymandering, by giving the control to an appointed nonpartisan committee (California had a bill to that effect in the last election, and it hasn't been called yet).

A suggestion that I first heard from easwaran on how to deal with the electoral college interested me: keep the college, but assign a state's delegates proportional to the state's popular vote. So e.g. Oregon has seven electoral votes, and if 55% vote Democrate, then four of the votes go D and the other three go R. This does a good job of making California voters matter: the 30th California electoral vote counts as much as the second New Hampshire vote. But it's ungerrymanderable.

secret_panda, can you say why vote-by-mail is "a mildly bad idea"? (I'm from Oregon, and so support it both because I think it's a good idea and because I'm from Oregon.) When we started vote-by-mail, there were some worries about people being able to buy and sell votes, or force them otherwise, but that seems not to have happened

[fclbrokle]

Of course I agree with the gerrymandering issue.

The reasoning I gave here would tend to go against assigning electoral votes proportionately, because that mirrors the popular vote too closely. (Indeed, aside from the sovereignity of states, I can't see a good reason to do that instead of just going by popular vote.) Essentially, if you support that, why not just go with the popular vote?

[anonymous]

Part of the reason why states are an effective breakdown method has nothing to do with population size or area enclosed, but a sense of sovereignty--if you, for example, are from Iowa, then (in addition to being an American), you probably think of yourself as "Iowan". If you changed the breakdown method, you would lose this sense of connection to begin with, and so would have a great deal of difficulty even getting geographically close together people to try to understand each others' perspectives (thus limiting the effectiveness of volunteerism in politics outright). Other than that, there is nothing special about the size of states, other than that there are enough of them that looking only at swing states actually significantly decreases the fraction of the country in which campaigning takes place, but few enough of them that campaigning can still be effective (that is, you don't wind up with dozens of "swing" districts spread throughout the country, making it almost impossible to effectively localize campaign efforts

[leech]

We could have it winner-take-all by congressional district (one electoral vote a piece, plus two more for the winner of the state), and then it would be much more likely for the final result to mirror the popular vote.

I feel like you're trying to fit two incompatible constraints:

(A) the system should not give a different result from the popular vote
(B) the system should force the candidates to behave differently from the way they would if the popular vote were their only concern

Also, I question the assumption that forcing both candidates to reach out to swing voters is obviously a good thing. It may have advantages, but there are problems with it as well: we end up with blatant pandering and compromised policies. (See Obama's FISA vote, his late weighing-in on Prop 8, his hawkish foreign policy stances...)

[fclbrokle]

I thought you were going to mention ethanol, which is my big one. (And I'm not sure I agree that the hawkish foreign policy stances were pandering; the toughness isn't of a sort that I particularly disagree with in most cases.)

As far as your first comment, I know they're incompatible; I was looking for the right balancing between them.

[ukelele]

I've always liked the electoral college, but of course I'm a small-r republican, not a small-d democrat, at heart, and I'm from a small swing state, so what do you expect?

But yes, I have always assumed the point of the electoral college is incentivizing politicians to pay attention to more people. In particular, I think with a national popular vote, there would be no reason to campaign in rural areas or most of the "flyover states", and all those people would be effectively disenfranchised by the tyranny of the majority. It *is* annoying that no one ever bothers to ask for MA electoral votes, and anyone here who wishes to see a non-Democrat elected need not bother to vote, but this wouldn't be the case if MA voters didn't overwhelmingly feel adequately represented by the campaigning done in other states.

[purplebob]

But campaigning in the generally-rural areas that happen to be swing states, instead of cities, is paying attention to fewer people, not more. More people are in the cities. The electoral college strategy means you pay attention to different people, and I'm not sure that's a virtue

[ukelele]

But campaigning in the generally-rural areas that happen to be swing states, instead of cities, is paying attention to fewer people, not more.

I think there's a certain advantage to that too, though, in that it forces candidates to interact one-on-one with people. "Campaigning in the cities" means "campaigning essentially via media" -- it doesn't matter if you can't interact one-on-one as long as you come across right on TV; it's slanted much more toward whomever can buy more air time. I want a president who plays well one-on-one, because talking to important individuals is a big part of that job.

Barack Obama's campaign and its incredible coverage is a new phenomenon. I'll be interested to see if it's a strategy more people can pull off in future (or try to).

[fclbrokle]

Just a quick response because I don't have time right now: the reason you were campaigning at all those places in New Hampshire is because it was the only state in your region on the table. They had too much manpower to focus it all in Manchester --- it wouldn't have been efficient. (Indeed, they shifted Champaign volunteers away from Indianapolis because the city had too many people.) If there had been a national popular vote, you would have stayed in Massachusetts and almost certainly Boston, because you would have been much more efficient (and they would have had more volunteers) getting out the vote in Boston

[semidifferent]

You say:

"He must talk to an unfriendly audience and convince at least some of them to agree with him. I'm not saying that it's not arbitrary, and I agree that the system may stifle the wishes of the majority, but I also claim that it might help political discourse in the country."

I assume what you're getting at here is that you don't like the polarization and division in the current system, where a candidate has to convince a plurality of people to like them best, which forces them to be more extreme in some direction or other, and thus not appeal at all to a bunch of people.

If that's the issue, what would you think of a voting system geared more toward consensus or approval (like Borda count, maybe)?

[fclbrokle]

In an ideal world, I think Borda count would be great. In practice, I think it might cause a lot of difficulty in voting. It's hard enough just to count votes properly now, when you only indicate one "yes"...

Also, I'd have to think more about how it might be manipulated, and how it might force politicians to be *too* close to the center, never willing to take a bold risk. I don't know.

[semidifferent]

Of course, given any voting system, one needs to look at its theoretical properties, including how it can be gamed. I'm not really suggesting Borda count itself; but maybe there is a good system which fosters consensus instead of (in addition to?) extremes. It seems like that might encourage productive dialogue more than a plurality voting system.