On Wed, 27 Oct 2004, Doug Henwood wrote:
>>>> Why no mention of the Electoral College
>>>
>>> It would be nearly impossible to abolish
>>
>> That's a bit of an exaggeration. Passing a constitutional amendment is
>> difficult, but it's not a revolution.
>
> You'd have to get the small states to give up their 2-to-1 advantage.
That advantage is a myth that's been handed down based on way oversimplified math. If you really want to get into the game theory and probability and arcana, a good place to begin is Steven J. Brams' _The Presidential Election Game_. (To make a long story short, the EC vote per voter is entirely overwhelmed by the winner take all aspects of the system. The venerable fractions you mention are almost completely irrelevant in practice. The actual real cost per voter convinced is a function of the probability of convincing enough voters to take you over the 50% line of any given state multiplied by the number of EC votes you'll get for that effort. When you do all the math, which is absurdly complex, you find out that the advantage is overwhelmingly to big states.)
But you don't really have to get into the math to know this. You can just look at the dynamics of all actually existing campaigns. If small states were disproportionately powerful they'd be disproporationately wooed. And they're not. They're ignored. They've always been ignored. Even now, in a super close election, the fact that someone even visits Nevada is news precisely because who should care about its measly 5 votes. And it was even worse half a century ago. Then you could win the election with the votes of 8 big states.
So if their self interests are rightly understood, small states have zero interest in preserving the electoral college. They are disadvantaged in exactly the same as everyone else by the winner take all aspects. A blocking majority for an amendment would 13 states. In the 2000 elections, the bottom 13 states split exactly evenly: 6 for Gore, 6 for Bush, and New Hampshire was a tie -- 48% for Bush, 47% for Gore, and 4% percent for Nader. In every one of the states that voted for Gore, they were screwed in the worst possible way you can get screwed by an electoral system: they guy they voted for, and who won the popular vote, didn't get the position. And it could just have easily have gone the other way, in which case the other small states would have been screwed the same way. (Although people forget it now, the opposite scenario was actively considered on the even of the 2000 election. Bush was up 2% on all polls, and so it was universally considered that if there was a disjunction between the EC and the popular vote, it would be Gore who was favored by the EC, and there were articles about him planning his final stretch precisely with that possibility in mind).
So small states gain no influence under this system at all. They are disadvantaged in exactly the same way as big states. And if there is one thing that this election is making clear to everyone, the winner take all system means all votes are irrelevant that aren't in battleground states, which everyone hates, including the people in battleground states. It's absurd that if people in Texas or New York changed a million minds it wouldn't matter but 10,000 people in Ohio would. The winner take all aspects of the system effectively disenfranchises the vast majority of the voters in states of all size and social composition.
The only thing holding up the EC is inertia. Examined closely, not one of the arguments holding it up holds water, neither the idealist ones nor the venal ones. They're just mantras that comfort people and lull them back to sleep. People simply know it would be trouble and then they get bored, and entrenched interests are against change on principle since they got where they are under existing rules.
But a constitutional crisis might change that faster than is presently imaginable. And if a second election is decided in the courts -- if it becomes clear that what happened in 2000 wasn't a 100 year flood but that the system is clearly broken and can't produce clear winners -- then a constitutional crisis is exactly what we'll have.
We might well soon be a crisis moment where past practice is no guide to future performance. For that reason this might well be something worth thinking about and preparing for where before it never was.
Michael