The way we elect the president of the United States is fundamentally flawed. The winner-take-all Electoral College disproportionately favors swing states, depresses voter turnout, and corrupts our democracy. Americans across the political spectrum realize the need for substantive electoral reform: according to a 2013 Gallup Poll, 61 percent of Republicans, 63 percent of Independents, and 66 percent of Democrats approve of replacing the College with a system based on the popular vote. Unlike the myriad controversial issues that divide America, electoral reform garners bipartisan support. Congress must take measures to amend the Electoral College and bolster the integrity of the American voting process.
Swing States, Voter Turnout, and The Perils of an All-or-Nothing System
William Kimberling, deputy director of the FEC Office of Election Administration during the 1990s, maintained, “The Electoral College system imposes two requirements on candidates for the Presidency: that the victor obtain a sufficient popular vote to enable him to govern (although this may not be the absolute majority), and that such a popular vote be sufficiently distributed across the country to enable him to govern.” However, Kimberling’s argument fails to account for the inconvenient truth that candidates ignore wide swaths of the American populace in order to game the election process.
Since the College is winner-take-all, the vote of a Democrat in such a red state as Texas, or a Republican in such a blue state as New York, carries absolutely no weight. As famed Appeals Court Judge Richard Posner wrote in a Slate article, “A solid regional favorite, such as Romney was in the South, has no incentive to campaign heavily in those states, for he gains no electoral votes by increasing his plurality in states that he knows he will win.” This civic catastrophe undermines our representative democracy. Obama should not have won all of Massachusetts’s 11 electoral votes merely because Massachusetts has a liberal majority. Romney should have had to make his case to undecided Texans. Clearly, an all-or-nothing system encourages candidates to spend little time in partisan states.
Instead, the Electoral College’s winner-take-all nature causes candidates to focus heavily on swing states. In the four elections since 2000, 40 out of 50 states have voted for the same party every presidential cycle. With 200 electoral seats out of the 270 needed to win nearly guaranteed for both the Republican and the Democratic candidate, the party nominees spend a disproportionate amount of their time and money in Florida, as well as Colorado, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Ohio.
Swing states have also enjoyed significantly higher voter turnout than non-swing states. In the 2012 race between Obama and Romney, in swing states, 63 percent of the voting-age population cast ballots; whereas in non-swing states, voter turnout was a paltry 55 percent. This gap in voter turnout between swing and non-swing states has grown in each presidential cycle since 2000, ballooning from one percent to eight percent in the last election.
Given that voter turnout does not affect a state’s representation in the Electoral College, it is unsurprising that the segregated South opposed reform efforts. Alex Keyssar, professor of History and Social Policy at Harvard Kennedy School and author of The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States, told the HPR, “If you had switched in 1920 or 1950 from the system that we have to a national popular vote, the South would have had much less influence in presidential elections, because the South was getting electoral votes based off its black population even though its black population wasn’t voting.” As manifested in the racist history of the College, a system in which voter turnout is not encouraged is inherently undemocratic.
Moreover, instead of voting for the actual presidential candidates, Americans vote for their state’s electors, who in turn vote for the president. Amazingly, 21 states still do not require their electors to vote according to the statewide popular vote. Carlos Diaz Rosillo, lecturer in government at Harvard, contends that the greatest flaw in the College is “the potential of one or two people, who vote for somebody other than the person they intended to, to change the outcome of an election.” Indeed, “faithless electors” have the power to nullify tens of thousands of citizens’ ballots, a massive violation of Americans’ right to vote. Although faithless electors are uncommon, this indirect system of election is anachronistic, inequitable, and dangerous.
Reforming the College
An all-or-nothing Electoral College is an untenable way to elect our president. According to William Kimberling, in a fair electoral process, candidates should have to appeal to voters across the country. Nevertheless, the Electoral College benefits candidates who tailor their campaigns to a tiny fraction of Americans. We desperately need a new system for presidential elections, one that incentivizes voter turnout, ensures distributed support, diminishes the excessive power of swing states, and eliminates the possibility of “faithless electors.”
Reformers often suggest switching to a strict national popular vote. Proponents of the national popular vote particularly emphasize that the Electoral College over-represents small state interests. The number of electoral votes a state receives is based on how many senators and representatives that state has. Since small states are disproportionately represented in the Senate, they also have disproportionate representation in the College. Sen. Richard Durbin (D-Ill.) rails against this inequity, arguing that 3 million voters in the least populous states of Alaska, Delaware, the District of Columbia, North Dakota, South Dakota, Vermont, and Wyoming have as much voting power in the Electoral College as 9 million Floridians.
However, Durbin overlooks the importance of small state interests. A presidential candidate should have to to appeal to both large and small states, and a strict popular vote would perhaps cause candidates to campaign only in the most populous areas. Rosillo emphasized, “If you switch the system to a popular vote you would only have the big cities be prioritized. The campaigns would move to New York, Chicago, L.A., [and] Houston.” In order to ensure that rural areas are included in the electoral process, perhaps the best solution is a compromise between the Electoral College and a pure popular vote: in other words, a proportional allocation of electoral votes.
In a proportional Electoral College, each state would still receive a certain number of electoral votes, and smaller states would still be slightly overrepresented. However, instead of having electors, and instead of a candidate winning all of a state’s given electoral votes, the votes would be apportioned based off the percentage of the state’s popular vote that each candidate received. For example, in the 2012 election, President Obama won almost every swing state en route to a landslide 332 to 206 victory in the Electoral College, yet these results are incredibly distended. Obama only won the national popular vote 51 percent to 47 percent. In a proportional electoral college, Obama would have won approximately 271to 257, a much more accurate representation of how close the election was.
In sharp contrast to the winner-take all method, a proportional allocation of votes allows political minorities within states to have a say in the political process. Moreover, instead of candidates catering their campaigns to swing states, party nominees would be impelled to appeal to a much broader constituency. Although candidates would still try to target undecided voters, the disproportionate power of swing-state voters would decrease. Effectively disenfranchised voters, like New York conservatives or Texan democrats, would be reincorporated into our democracy, and voter could even rise. At long last, the votes of all Americans would matter.
Unfortunately, amending the College seems a distant fantasy. In an interview with the HPR, Rep. Niki Tsongas (D-Mass.) observed, “Obviously, when Al Gore lost to President Bush, it was an issue everyone was focused on.” Nevertheless, now reform efforts have lost momentum. Tsongas notes that reform is “worthy of a hard look, but with everything else going on right now, it is not a priority.” The Congresswoman went on to mention that even if a vast majority of Americans called for changing the system, Congress might not take action. Using the examples of gun control and immigration reform, Tsongas emphasized that widespread popular support does not necessarily result in legislation.
Particularly in recent years, reform proposals have been packaged with plans to increase the federal government’s control over the election process. When paired with more controversial issues like national voter registration, Electoral College reform is seemingly destined to fail. Moreover, since electoral reform would require a Constitutional amendment, members of Congress are reticent to change the system. It is important to remember that the 12th Amendment, the only successful constitutional reform of our electoral procedures, was passed in the wake of the 1800 election, which initially resulted in a tie between Thomas Jefferson and Aaron Burr. As Electoral College scholar Thomas Neale hypothesized, “As long as the electoral college system functions well enough to avoid provoking a national crisis of similar scale, it may remain unchanged, if not unchallenged.” Thus, although the Electoral College is clearly a broken system, it seems that policymakers will yet again eschew common-sense reform. Sixty-one percent of Republicans, 63 percent of Independents, and 66 percent of Democrats want a better way to vote, but as Keyssar lamented, “the vote’s not there.”
Image credits: HPR/Nebras Jemel