On Mon, 14 Jan 2002, Nathan Newman wrote:
> The electoral college, due to its voting formula, gives disproportionate
> voting power to small states.
Maybe I'm missing something, but as far as I can see, this isn't true. It is true of Senate, because there there the votes are about dividing up the pie. Then a person from Utah does have 10 times the pull of citizen from California. (Or more accurately 10 + 1 divided by two, since it's Congress as a whole that counts). And it shows in things like the division of farm subsidies.
But not in the electoral college, because there the only choice is a binary, yes or no. In that case, citizens of small states would only have a disproportionate vote if small states had interests in common and voted as a bloc. But if the fact of their being small is unrelated to their interests -- if small states cancel themselves out with random variation just like big states did -- then the electoral college leaves citizens of small states just as disadvantaged as citizens of big states. And as far I can see, this is exactly the case. Small population states that are western and rural, like Wyoming or Utah, are balanced out by small population states that are urban and eastern, like Rhode Island or Delaware. And the last election demonstrates this almost too perfectly. Of the 13 smallest states (the blocking minority of more than a quarter), 6 voted for Bush, six voted for Gore, and the 13th voted for both: Vermont, the one state where the Nader margin was the difference.
So half those states got screwed just like half the big states got screwed in this last election: they guy they voted for, and the guy who won the popular vote, lost the election. And had things worked out slightly differently, the other half would have gotten screwed. (Which was exactly what was originally forecast -- remember, before the election, it was the Gore forces who were chortling about how they might win the election even while losing the popular vote. Although afterwards they were shocked, Shocked.)
People who say the electoral college was designed to protect the rights of states are re-writing history. The Senate was designed to do that, and it does, and small states will fight its abolition out of self-interest. But the electoral college was formed on entirely different principles that didn't touch on the state principle at all. Rather it was formed to avoid popular democracy and to have our betters elect for us. And since that is one founding principle that not even original intentionists can defend, there is no defense for it.
Perhaps most ironically, the electoral college was designed to do exactly what its defenders say it was designed to avoid: to allow third choices and to avoid getting trapped by a binary set of unsatisfactory candidates. The founders thought elections where no candidate got a majority would be the rule rather than the exception. And then the electoral college could get together and agree on a compromise, just like a parliament, only more so. A system of ranked voting that accomplished the same result automatically would be closer to the original intentions that want we have now.
The real screw job of the electoral college is not the miselection of the president, which happens once a century or so. It's the disenfranchisement of the huge swath of the electorate that grows out of a first past the post system organized with such huge districts. The people who are screwed are people who are in the minority of their states, and thus ignored during campaigns, like Democrats in Texas and Republicans in New York. In which case the whole state gets ignored during the campaign. Where if they were grouped together with similar voters in other states their voices would then count and both candidates would have to pay attention to them. Presidential campaigns would then be forced to be truly national, which might help truly national interests and issues to coalesce. Whereas the first past the post state system (aka the already amended electoral college) contributes to regionalism -- once again producing exactly the opposite of the result it's defenders say it's supposed to do. The electoral map of this last election looks like a map of the Confederacy against the Union. In an American context, you can't get more regional than that.
And of course the most extreme manifestation of this mass disenfranchisment is the absurd result that if you vote for a third party who is closer to your interests, you are guaranteed to help the party that is farthest from your interest. That's as undemocratic a thwarting of the democratic will as you can get. But it's equally undemocratic to all voters. And it's not just being able to vote for third parties that count. It's the debate that would ensure if third parties could run that's important. The two party system hugely narrows the scope of political discourse by hugely narrowing what could possibly electorally matter. That is its real crime against democracy. And its the state-sized first past the post districts that plant that monopoly in stone. This is perhaps why the miselection of a president produces so few shockwaves: because the narrowing of discourse tends to produce two campaigns that are so much the same that most people don't feel they missed by much.
All of these things screw small states just as much as large ones. So in theory, there is no reason it can't be changed. It violates the interests of people in all states equally. And it violates the interests of left and right equally -- because believe it or not, both believe in their hearts that they would benefit from a larger turnout: that they truly represent the will of the people. And right wing activists would like to be able to vote for third parties just as much as left wing activists would, if not more so. And they would like just as much to widen the arena of discourse.
However the one group of people who would be clearly disadvantaged by a change are the set of already elected candidates. The majority of people who got elected under the current rules can be expected not to want to change them. That's a constant everywhere. But even more to the point in America, every candidate elected under the two party system has an interest in perpetuating the duopoly. That's why bills introduced in Congress without fanfare die in every session -- because without fanfare, it's purely an internal matter for the one group that has a real interest in killing it.
So as far as I can see, electoral college reform is theoretically perfectly possible and would be a wonderful thing for all of us. But only as the goal of a popular movement. Which it will never be so long as activists say
> I know lefties like to fight over issues that are completely unwinnable,
> but this issue is the silliest one to condemn the Dems that I can
> imagine.
On the contrary, the interests behind this change are so broad it could be one of the rare right-left against-the-establishment movements worth joining. Like term limits with brainpower. But you're quite right that there is no point in starting with elected officials, Dem or otherwise. They would have to come afterwards -- when it a movement developed to the point that they thought it was an issue they could win an election on. Then they could be counted on to sacrifice their long term interests to their short term ones. Just like with term limits.
Perhaps this last election left enough residue behind to get such a movement started?
Michael
__________________________________________________________________________ Michael Pollak................New York City..............mpollak at panix.com