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

[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).

As for the comment about the weather - people (including people on West Wing!) can have very long discussions about the effects of weather on election day: if it rains late in the day, for instance, that's bad for Democrats, because Democrats tend to have jobs with non-regular hours and thus vote late. Short of being like Oregon and going completely vote-by-mail (which I think is a mildly bad idea, though certainly early/absentee voting should be as easy as possible), there's not much we can do about this.

I agree with your argument - I'm actually a fan of the electoral college, for reasons I don't have time at the moment to explain.

Semi-amusing sidenote, based on "it is much more pleasant to go door-to-door in regions that are favorable to your candidate": when I was canvassing for Obama in Scranton some teenage girls warned my canvassing partner and me not to go over a particular hill because "they're Clinton people over there, and they don't like Obama people. They will probably shoot at you, or at least set their dogs on you, if you go over there." Luckily, we didn't have to test that prediction!

[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; people also worried about Homeless voters, but there are still polling places open at City Hall, etc. It has cut costs and dramatically increased voter participation. (I also tend to believe that there should be a nominal fine for failing to vote; I've heard it claimed that this is so in Australia.)

[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.)

I suspect that health care was pitched the way it was because the people against universal health care were likely to be much more fickle with their votes --- the threat of voting for a "socialist" was very real to them. That said, I will point out that we did just elect a candidate who supported universal health care, and he won with just 52% of the vote. So either that wasn't the defining issue, or he lost a fair number of votes because of it.

I do tend to think that reaching out to the middle is important. We get more stability because our country doesn't undergo wild swings when a new leader comes into office and decides that they have to appease those who voted for them (their base). I'm a progressive and I support change in a lot of places, but I don't support incredibly abrupt change that causes lots of turmoil. I prefer a slow-but-steady approach. And I definitely don't want a country where nearly half the people hate or fear the President. It's my hope that over the next four years, a lot of people who voted against Obama for reasons that I consider untrue come to the realization that they were wrong, and that he's not so bad after all.

[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.

As someone who's moved a lot, convincing the government that you've changed your address can be quite tricky, and I've been astounded by the number of my friends who thought they were getting an absentee ballot but never received one (many of whom called their local elections people, who insisted that they sent it out). Many people I phonebanked told me that they never received their voter-registration card in the mail. I can just imagine utter chaos. Mail is lost, stolen, compromised (especially mail marked "board of elections," and especially coming from a person/neighborhood where one can easily predict which candidate is checked off inside the envelope); it can be soaked (remember all those mis-scored SATs two years ago, because it was raining?), torn, have coffee spilled on it, etc. It's also much easier to coerce somebody who's voting by mail, or fill out somebody else's ballot, etc. Polling stations are far less likely to be tampered with/have dead people vote at/etc.

And there's something very romantic about lining up on election day to go to the polls. It leads to free bread/coffee/ice cream in exchange for displaying your "I voted" sticker, lots of patriotic good will, and the chance for people like me to spend the day poll-standing/phonebanking and then obsessing over exits polls and returns as they come in. Not nearly as exciting as it would be if everyone votes a week or two before.

All this being said, I'm not actively against vote by mail. I'm just not for it. I love easy absentee voting (TN was very nice about it, especially considering that I had only physically lived in the state for 26 days and because my birthday placed me within twenty-four hours of the absentee-registration deadline [in TN, one cannot request an absentee ballot until one's paperwork has been processed, and one's paperwork cannot be processed until one in 18]), I love early voting, I love easy chaos-free friendly-poll-workers, let-me-explain-to-you-how-this-works election days. I just don't think the US government could successfully run a valid election by mail.

Sorry if this is somewhat inarticulate - I'm pretty low on sleep at the moment.

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.

In any case, I don't think that an election should turn on "something big happen[ing] just before election day". Because what if it happened just after? That's inefficient and unpredictable to my mind. Conversely, I'm pretty sure that by having a ballot sitting in front of you, most Oregon voters just _make up their minds sooner_. I've spent the last two months sitting on my hands waiting for election day to roll around.

Which is all to say that I don't think that any of your criticisms are particularly well focused on vote-by-mail. Most of them apply at least as well to absentee voting --- indeed, because Oregon is entirely mail-in, we do it pretty well, complete with anonymizing tamper-proof envelops (something that wasn't included in my California absentee ballot). Dead people don't vote in Oregon since they don't receive ballots, and every name is checked (if you want to go tampering with ballots in any other state, just submit a bunch of absentee cards for other people). In fact, coersion has not been a problem in Oregon, although a lot of us worried it would be.

Vote-by-mail makes phone-banking easier, since when ObamaOffice calls, I can just say "I've already voted" and never have to hear from them. As for obsessing over exit polls, is your argument that vote-by-mail makes for worse decision making or for worse reality TV?

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. :)

I'm not saying that a change in how politicians attract the electorate is inherently bad, I'm saying that *this* change would be bad, and if it were not one in the morning I would attempt to explain myself better. As for something big happening, reporters (and juries, etc) can act if they have a solid deadline, but without knowing when the public is going to vote it is difficult to coordinate their maneuvers. Again, not inherently bad, but can you imagine what would have happened if the Sarah Palin public-vetting process was cut short by a month?

As for vote-by-mail versus absentee, the difference is scale (and, sadly, socioeconomic factors, as those voting absentee are skewed toward highly-educated, less like to be coerced, etc). Oregon also has advantageous demographics that the rest of the country does not share. I'm totally on board that this is a great idea for Oregon, but the rest of the country? *gulp*

Re: tongue-in-cheek reply

[secret_panda]

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?