Greetings, everyone! Your resident Hawk here. In the wake of the 2012 U.S. Presidential Election, I'm going to be posting a series of threads regarding the putrid state of our electoral system and the various correctable (and often hilariously complicated) problems with voting in the United States of America. I'm going to be cribbing heavily from CPGGray, who has made the most compelling, easy-to-comprehend videos on these topics I have ever encountered. Quite honestly I'll be taking points from him wholesale. He has never said anything in a video that isn't true and verifiable, and I vouch for him wholeheartedly.
Why am I doing this, and specifically, why wait until after the election is over?
Two reasons:
- During election season, this stuff would by nature be discussed in terms of Man vs. Guy, and I don't want that
- We're all sort of hopped up on hopium and want to keep the debate going and well...
Also I won't be seen as bitching for change because my guy lost.
Yeahhhh. So anyway, first things first:
Donald Trump said:
Whoa, you may be thinking. That sounds radical.
I promise you, it's the most reasonable, pragmatic and logical position to take. I feel very confident that I can convince anyone with an open mind to come around on this one, mostly with the magic of maths.
We had a couple recentish threads on it:
Al Gore and His Beard Hate the EC
What Would You Do With Your Electoral Vote?
Some backstory: I used to be an ardent defender of the EC. Even after the 2000 election, when living in my home state of Florida showed just how tragic the results of the college can be, I still maintained that it was a necessary component of our democracy. I believed that the value of allowing the small states sufficient representation at the expense of votes being unequal was worthwhile. I believed it was a necessary evil for fairness in our democracy that swing state votes would count for more, because it would keep the smallest states in the discussion, and ensure that national presidential races were competitive.
The problem is that it's a huge heaving massive crazy outrageous failure at all of these things.
Sufficient representation? FAIL.
Keeps small states part of the discussion? FAIL.
Keep presidential races competitive? FAIL*.
*It does wonders for keeping certain individual state races competitive, every damn time, but more on that later.
So why and how does the electoral college fail so hard?
Let's start by talking about this from the perspective of what happened last night.
Without even knowing how it works, we all at least know that the electoral college is the reason we have swing states. Since an electoral margin above 270 is all that is needed to win, it stands to reason that simply focusing on the swing states needed to reach that number is the most important aspect of an election. It stands further to reason that focusing a potent, well-organized ground game on those swing states would provide enormous electoral benefit, and that polling data reflecting this effort would make the result of said races quite predictable.
Enter Nate Silver:
His prediction on the left, actual on the right (we're still waiting on my silly-ass state to stop reading ballots upside-down or something).
Of course, I am not arguing that the electoral college is why Nate was able to be so accurate, nor that he wouldn't be able to accurately predict a race decided solely by the popular vote. What I'm saying is this: the electoral college made it very clear what Obama and his well-oiled campaign machine had to do to win. They did it, polling reflected it, and Silver predicted the outcome state-by-state accurately.
By focusing on the states needed to win and ignoring massive segments of the population entirely, the Obama campaign carved out a significant electoral victory without any regard for how many people had voted for the president. Indeed, when Obama was reelected last night, fewer people had cast a ballot for him than Mitt Romney, to the tune of a few million votes. He then extended that electoral lead into a bit of a rout, and gained a popular majority as well, but that's a discussion for a thread about how well-run the O-man's campaign was.
What's my point? Because of the electoral college, Obama knew he could ignore California and Texas. He knew he could ignore Indiana this time around. He knew he could ignore New York but not New Hampshire, but really didn't have to give New Hampshire that much attention either. He knew that he'd need to pay constant attention to Ohio, and failing to gain its votes, a safety net of other swing states (he ended up getting both). And small states? Hah. How many visits would you estimate the President made to Wyoming or Kansas? Is it 5? Too high. Is it 3? Still, too high. Is it more than zero? No, it is not. It's zero. Those two states along with 30 others did not receive a single visit from Obama during the campaign.
Every candidate understands long before election day that he will have to focus on- and only on- a small handful of states, and possibly only one, to win the election.
Whether or not you understand why this is bad yet- accept the premise for the moment that it is. Now, let's talk a little bit about how it works. Here are the Cliff's Notes:
- The number of electoral votes each state gets is determined by its # of representatives in Congress
- Each state gets 2 senators and 1 representative by default, so 3 is the minimum number of votes any state can have
- The additional representatives (and thus electoral votes) are allocated roughly in proportion to the population of the state
- If a candidate wins a majority or clear plurality of the popular vote inside a state (either 50% +1 or the highest number of votes), he or she gets 100% of that state's electoral votes- except for Nebraska and Maine who can split their EVs
- There are a total of 538 electoral votes up for grabs
- 270 electoral votes means that you immediately win
Here's a symbolic map of the country based on the weight each state is given in the EC:
So there's the basics. Now let's wade a little further into crazy-land:
- Even though populations shift, the total number of electoral votes must remain the same. Thus states swap votes all the time. Florida had 27 in 2008 but 29 now, while Massachusetts donated one of its 12 to the cause of justice and fairness. -_-
- The allocation isn't actually proportional; the smallest states get too many and the biggest states get too few
- Washington, D.C., the national's capital, was specially granted 3 electoral votes (the same as the number of votes the smallest state has) despite not being a state
- As we all know from 2000, there's no provision to stop a president from winning the EC but losing the popular vote (winning despite a majority of the country voting for someone else).
Hopefully you're starting to see the potential issues with this system here. Votes are not equal. The requirement that each state have at least 3 votes throws all hope for logical consistency out the window. Proportionately, Georgians should have 1 vote but get 3; Hawaii should get two votes but get 4. Where do they get them from? Our hippie friends in the west, mostly- California gets 10 fewer electoral votes than it actually should. At the same time, someone who votes in Montana has their individual vote count way more than someone who votes in California (actually 4 times as much), because their vote is a higher share of the total population of that state.
Ultimately, and this is the most egregious aspect of the system, neither of those two votes matters virtually at all- because they're strongholds for either party, there's no hope for converting a single electoral vote in either one to the other side. Thus the real vote inequality is demonstrated by this, per Nate once again:
He (generously) calls it a "Return on Investment"- the likelihood that an individual's vote will be the difference between victory and defeat. It may surprise you that Nevada beats Ohio in this list considering that Ohio was the ultimate swing state this time around. That's because while Ohio was more crucial for Obama's path to victory, the lower population of Nevada meant that an individual's voters carried more weigh in determining that state's winner- and the winner of that state being Obama more likely than not meant that those voters more than any other in the country were likely to have decided who won the presidency.
As you can see we're already fairly deep into ludicrous territory, but I promise you that the insanity of the Electoral College continues:
- Electoral votes are note actually given by the states to the candidates, but to super-awesome, special party members called Electors who vote for President in December. Nothing- nothing at all- compels these Electors to vote in a manner that reflects the wishes of their state populations. If they so chose, the Electors could wage a fully-constitutional bloodless coup, installing as President the loser of the electoral college vote in the general election.
- By taking advantage of the electoral college and winning states without caring about people, you could theoretically win the presidency with a whopping 22% of the vote. Yes, you could become elected even though 70%+ of the country voted against you.
- Since they have no electoral votes, residents of the U.S. territories (Guam, Virgin Islands, stc) cannot vote for president in any way. In fact, even full natural-born U.S. citizens who move to the territories cannot cast a vote for president, which makes them the only place in the universe an American is not allowed to vote. You can vote while traveling abroad to any foreign country to be sent to your home state, and you can vote from motherfucking space. "Hawkian, is that even a big deal?" 2.2 million people live in the territories. That's more votes than the popular vote margin for Gore in 2000... and a hell of a lot more than the 537 that (sort of) determined the electoral winner.
Yeeeep.
tl;dr: The electoral college sucks out loud. It may once have been a solid, fair idea for our nation, but in its present form it is indefensible, a blight on the will of the voters and anathema to democracy.
I've left quite a few things out, specifically the arguments for keeping the electoral college and their rebuttals (mostly because I'd like to see if they come up in this discussion), as well as what we'd replace the electoral vote with, and changes that would need to be made to our voting system to avoid new problems under a straight popular vote (that last one will be within the scope of another thread).
So, GAF: Do you support the electoral college?
