THE ELECTORAL COLLEGE—AN INTERNET AGE DINOSAUR (PART 2)

THE ELECTORAL COLLEGE—AN INTERNET AGE DINOSAUR (PART 2)

This post discusses two important political costs that the Electoral College imposes on America’s political system.  The first is that it periodically elects “minority” Presidents; that is, candidates who have lost the popular vote can become President.  The second is that it confers great political influence on strategically located special interest voting blocs—influence that is often grossly disproportionate to their actual size.  Our increasingly strained system can no longer afford these costs.[1]

The Electoral College has elected Presidents who lost the popular vote several times during our history, most recently President George W. Bush in 2000.  Some would dismiss this “minority president” problem as being the result of a small series of unpredictable flukes.  But political scientists believe that it is precisely when Presidential elections are closest—i.e., most competitive—that the chances are greatest that using the Electoral College system will result in the election of a Presidential candidate who receives a popular vote minority.  Of the eleven presidential elections in our history through 2008 in which the leading candidate had a margin of less than three points over his closest competitor, the Electoral College (assisted by the Supreme Court in at least one case) has chosen a candidate who did not receive a popular vote majority in at least three (some would say four), elections. [2]  In other words, we overrule the popular will and elect a minority President between one out of every three and one out of every four times in close elections.  Yet those are precisely the elections when voters think that the outcome matters most and when the violation of democratic principles is most harmful.

Electing minority presidents is also dangerous, because it can lead to the election of a President who is viewed as illegitimate by a large part of the American people.[3]   As the events of September 11, 2001 proved, America cannot afford to have a President who is seen as illegitimate.  When the United States came under terrorist attack, President Bush needed to be able to perform his role as Commander-in-Chief without facing any questions about his legitimacy whatsoever.  But Bush had lost the popular vote in the 2000 election to Albert Gore, Jr.  That fact, together with the Supreme Court’s extraordinary intervention in the 2000 election through its Bush v. Gore decision, had brought Bush’s legitimacy as President into question for many people.[4]  More than two years after the election and well after the 2001 attacks, 38 percent of the American population still did not consider George Bush the legitimate president of the United States.[5] We need Presidents who can exercise the full powers of that  office with unquestioned public support for his or her right to exercise them.  Minority presidents lack the needed legitimacy to gain that support.  And there is another large cost imposed by the Electoral College on our political system—it unfairly gives disproportionately large influence to special interest voting blocs in strategic states. Here’s how.

Under the Electoral College structure (combined with the “winner take all” unit rule for choosing electors), small blocs of interest group voters located in strategic states who will all vote the same way based on an issue of overriding concern to them can “swing” the outcome of Presidential elections.  The result is that satisfying the political interests of those bloc voters becomes far more important to candidates than it would be otherwise.  The nature of the membership of such strategically placed blocs has changed over time as our population has grown and the concentration of various demographic and political groups has shifted from one part of the country to another through migration. For example, during the 1990s, it appears that rural voters were disadvantaged by the Electoral College because their vote was concentrated in electorally less important smaller states, while Hispanic voters were given a significant voting advantage by it because their vote was concentrated in electorally influential large states.[6] During some earlier time periods, it appears that the Electoral College may have given a significant advantage to Jewish voters, who tended to be concentrated in states that had large numbers of electoral votes.[7]

In some states where the major parties are very competitive, these strategic blocs may consist of as few as 100,000 voters.  By comparison, in the 2012 election, more than 129 million votes were cast, and Barack Obama was elected president by a nationwide margin of about 5 million votes, so the loss of 100,000 votes would be of little consequence in a popular vote system.  If the Electoral College did not exist, therefore, these same bloc voters would have no more influence on Presidential politics than any other similarly-sized group of voters.  The possibility of presidential “rewards” to favored blocs is especially troublesome in the context of national security and foreign affairs, when policies not in the national interest may be adopted to curry favor with a particular bloc of voters, such as an ethnic group whose members are concentrated in a few strategically important states.[8]

The temptation to pander to bloc voters in order to win close elections can be very great.[9]  In 2016, for example, it is quite likely that enormous attention will be paid to the political demands of relatively small voter blocs in fewer than ten contested swing states with roughly 100 electoral votes (out of a total of 538 votes), since they may well decide the election outcome. To allow the special interests of such small groups of voters to control presidential election outcomes cannot be good for the country, and would occur far less often in a popular vote system.

That the Electoral College elects minority-vote presidents and also gives vastly disproportionate influence to strategically located special interest groups are only two of several very good reasons to abolish it.

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[1] The Electoral College also prevents the rise of national third-party presidential candidates, a large cost that will be discussed in a later post.

[2] These three elections are 1876, 1888, and 2000.  Lawrence D. Longley and Neal R. Pierce, The Electoral College Primer (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), 135; George C. Edwards III, Why the Electoral College is Bad for America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), 45.  Some political historians would add a fourth, based on the fact that the House of Representatives chose John Quincy Adams as President in 1824 over Andrew Jackson, although Jackson led the Electoral College voting by a large margin (but failed to achieve a majority) and quite probably would have been the popular vote winner (had popular votes been cast).  If 1824 is included, the rate of Electoral College failure to choose a popular vote majority candidate correctly in close elections would be greater than 35 percent.  Some might see Abraham Lincoln’s election with less than 40 percent of the popular vote as a counterexample, though.

[3] Joseph A. Pika and John Anthony Maltese, The Politics of the Presidency, 6th ed. (Washington, D.C.: CQ Press, 2004), 52, 67-70.

[4] Justice Stephen Breyer’s dissent in Bush v. Gore persuasively argued that the 2000 election should have been decided by the House of Representatives.  Doing so would very probably not have changed the election outcome.  Thus, the argument that the Court’s decision was both legally wrong and misguided is not “sour grapes.”  Bush et al. v. Gore et al., 531 U.S. 98 (2000), at 144 (Breyer, J., dissenting).  The decision’s greatest political vice was the damage it did to Bush’s political legitimacy, which would have been greatly strengthened by winning a contested House election, just as Jefferson’s was strengthened by the hotly contested 1800 House election he won.

[5] George C. Edwards III, Why the Electoral College is Bad for America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), xvi.

[6] Lawrence D. Longley and Neal R. Pierce, The Electoral College Primer (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), Table 21, 148.

[7] Id..

[8] For a good recent example of these potential election dynamics, see Nate Cohn, “Why the Cuba Issue No Longer Cuts Against Democrats in Florida,” New York Times, December 17, 2014, http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/18/upshot/why-the-cuba-issue-no-longer-cuts-against-democrats-in-florida.html?_r=0&abt=0002&abg=0 (accessed 12/19/2014).  Note that the merits of President Obama’s decision are irrelevant to the political analysis here.

[9] For a classic example of the political calculations that result from the existence of strategic bloc voting in an Electoral College system, see the memorandum to President Truman from his senior adviser Clark M. Clifford, “Memorandum for the President,” November 19, 1947, available at http://www.trumanlibrary.org/whistlestop/study_collections/1948campaign/large/docs/documents/pdfs/1-1.pdf. (accessed 12/19/2014). Though it was written in 1947, this memorandum is still entirely relevant to today’s presidential politics.

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WHY SHOULD STATES HAVE EQUAL VOTING POWER IN THE UNITED STATES SENATE?

The United States Constitution provides that the Senate shall be composed of two Senators from each state. This composition was agreed on as a compromise in 1787 between large and small states. Large states wanted Congressional representation to be based either on population or wealth (or some combination). Small states wanted equal representation in Congress. The Philadelphia Convention agreed that states would receive their seats in the House of Representatives based on relative population, but that states would be equal in the Senate. The result was that as of 1790, states with 19 percent of the American population had 46 percent of the votes in the Senate. [Note 1]

Many Founders knew when they agreed to the 1787 compromise on state voting power in the Senate that it was flatly inconsistent with the republican principle of majority rule that was the basis of government legitimacy under the new Constitution. For that reason, leading delegates such as James Madison and James Wilson originally strongly opposed it. They realized after a bitter fight that they had no choice but to accept this distortion of the popular will to get enough states to agree peacefully to the Constitution. Unfortunately, the limited distortion they accepted has now been transformed into a far larger distortion than they intended as the nation has grown.

In 1787, the largest state was about 12 times as large as the smallest state. As of 2000, California was about 50 times larger than North Dakota. But California’s two Senators, who represented about 34 million people in 2000, still had the same number of votes as the Senators from North Dakota, who represented 2 percent as many people. This sharply increased distortion of the popular will has major effects on national policy. Senators from small rural states often do not vote the same way on national issues as Senators who represent major cities such as New York and Los Angeles. Here’s a way to see the negative effects this serious failure to follow popular will creates.

Suppose we did an experiment in which we reconfigured the current (“Old”) Senate to make a “New” Senate that more directly reflects the popular will. Then let’s look at a series of actual Senate votes over about twenty years from the late 1960s to the 1980s and see the likely results if the New Senate had voted on them instead. (See Note 2 for details). On a number of issues, national policy would have changed under the New Senate, often reaching the opposite result from the Old Senate.

For example, the New Senate would have adopted national “no fault” auto insurance standards to cut consumer insurance costs. (Voting Study, 4). And it would have refused to provide a federal loan guarantee to bail out defense contractor Lockheed Corporation. (Voting Study, 4). The New Senate would also have adopted fundamentally different positions on several major foreign policy and environmental issues than the Old Senate did. The New Senate might well have supported a constitutional amendment for direct election of the President in 1970 (Voting Study, 6-7). In short, the New Senate experiment shows that national policy is strongly affected by state voting strength in the Senate, often in unfortunate ways that do not represent the national popular will.

Here’s an example from the Voting Study: Federal No Fault Auto Insurance (Senate vote, May 31, 1976). On motion to recommit and thus kill bill to establish federal standards for no-fault motor vehicle insurance, results: Old Senate: Yeas: 49 Nays: 45. Motion adopted; bill killed. New Senate: Yeas: 68 Nays: 75. Motion failed. Bill would have been adopted.

Should Americans today accept the very large distortion of popular will that results from the Constitution’s two hundred year-old compromise on Senate voting? Should we do so even though it adversely affects national policy and badly weakens the democratic legitimacy of the entire Congress? Or is it time to create a New Senate that will actually make decisions in the national interest? Such a reform would sharply dilute the power of special interest groups (or “factions”) by balancing their interests against many others in the larger states and by lessening the power of smaller states where their influence might be strong enough to be politically dominant.

Notes

Note 1. For an excellent account of the struggle over representation at the 1787 Convention, see Richard Beeman, Plain Honest Men: The Making of the American Constitution (New York: Random House, 2009). For additional discussion of the consequences of this compromise, see George William Van Cleve, A Slaveholders’ Union: Slavery, Politics and the Constitution in the Early American Republic (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 119-121.

Note 2. First, the old Senate would be expanded somewhat. Then the formula for allocating Senate votes for states would be changed. In the “New” Senate, each state’s number of votes would be increased so that it was mid-way between the Old Senate and a full population system like that used for the existing House of Representatives. The New Senate Voting Study (pdf attached
to this post) shows how this would work (pages 1-2). In our experiment, the actual Old Senate votes are adjusted to show the likely results if the New Senate had voted on them instead; the results are shown in the Voting Study.

NOTE: THE TEXT OF THE NEW SENATE VOTING STUDY IS CONTAINED IN THE PDF DOCUMENT BELOW:   

state voting power in senate

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