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?

[theojf]

The best argument I've heard against going with the popular vote is Kenny's, that you want to weight against storms in the northeast. But the best choice is simply to use vote-by-mail or vote-by-internet or some other method so that everyone votes, and go by popular vote. With Ari, I'm not sure I understand why a candidate should reach out to a swing voter?

[leech]

A further comment on this issue: it's not that candidates pandering to the middle is obviously a bad thing either, since it effectively removes extremist voices from the equation, which is sometimes a necessary evil. One potentially more sinister problem is that the artificial middle created by the electoral college is not necessarily the "true" middle. Indeed, if public opinion polls on universal health care are any indication, actual America is significantly to the left of the delicate balancing point to which politicians pander!

[fclbrokle]

You have a good point that the voters candidates must reach out to might not correspond to the real middle. (That said, presumably that only happens when the electoral college isn't going to reflect the popular vote very well

[secret_panda]

It changes politicians' game - everything gets moved to, what, a month earlier? One of out every seven likely voters was undecided within n hours of polls closing (you'd be amazed how many people whom I phonebanked on election day said something along the lines of "oh, I don't know who I'm voting for, I'm still doing research"), and presumably that number was considerably higher a week or two ago, especially when one considers unlikely voters who may have voted had a ballot been placed in their mailbox. Strategies will be radically different, and then politicians will spend the last few weeks/days sitting on their hands waiting for election day to roll around. And what if something big happens just before election day? Like, say, your Senator gets convicted of a felony? (How oh how could Alaska have possibly re-elected Stevens?) It strikes me as inefficient and unpredictable

tongue-in-cheek reply

[theojf]

I certainly don't think that the fact that a change in election policy "changes politicians' game" is in itself a good reason to avoid the change

Re: tongue-in-cheek reply

[secret_panda]

Yes, I am definitely saying that vote-by-mail makes for worse reality TV. Since I am not a politician, I can make decisions however I want

Re: tongue-in-cheek reply

[easwaran]

Seriously, though, what's more likely to get people excited about voting: watching all their friends go to the polls, having the polls turn into block parties and a display of neighborhood solidarity, then getting to huddle around the TV and drink with your buddies as people around the country talk about voting, or getting some junk mail that you can send in if you can scrounge up the money for a stamp that actually shows the correct postage and several weeks later hearing that some person you barely remember voting for won because some person sitting in a warehouse somewhere said so?