re: #241 KGxvi

I’ve shifted over the years on the Electoral College from mostly agnostic to believing we should probably abolish it. The way it has evolved, it has rendered many voter’s ballots irrelevant. If you’re a Republican in California or a Democrat in Wyoming, your vote doesn’t really matter, because the margins in those states are so wide.

But if we go to a national popular vote, a Republican no longer has to win California for those votes to matter, they just have to close the margin in the state. Same for the Democrats in Wyoming. It actually puts more votes in play, rather than less. It would also likely make presidential campaigns a lot more expensive because a smart nominee/campaign is going to look to invest resources where they hadn’t previously invested. But you take the good with the bad.

The EC would probably be better if we didn’t have an artificial cap of 435 members of the House. But even then, you’d have to either award electors proportionally or via district to be best representative.

I’ve used two arguments:
1. the one you just presented (which is that each vote counts equally — someone red in a blue state has the same effect as someone red in a red state). People currently can be discouraged from voting if they figure their vote doesn’t matter — which is true if your state isn’t a battleground state.

2. The current setup of winner-take- all — even if electors were truly proportional by state — can lead to a candidate winning 60+% of the popular vote and losing the electoral college.

But there is another overlooked factor: states that have large voter disenfranchisement (e.g. Florida) play too large a role; representatives are allocated by population size, not eligible voters. If your voting population is 10% less than it should be, then your state should have 10% less impact on the results. Indeed after the passage of the 15th amendment, African Americans were finally counted as a full person BUT in southern states they were barred from voting — so the South got even more electoral influence than they originally had under the 3/5 compromise. Southern states are still stopping people of color from voting but benefit from their presence in the number of electors they are assigned.