Practitioners of science assume that disputants on all sides of a question are moved by the same goal of finding out the truth about nature. As a consequence, they feel obliged, in their writings, to address the strongest argument that can be marshaled against the view they are espousing. In an ideal world, this practice would apply universally, including to questions of politics and public policy.
So what is the strongest case that can be made in favor of the Electoral College?
I honestly don't know of a good argument. The result of our most recent election, wherein Trump prevailed by a comfortable margin in the Electoral College despite losing the national vote by more than 2 million ballots (about 1.5% of all ballots cast), has put defenders of the Electoral College on the defensive, and it's hard for me to detect in their squirmings anything like a cogent argument. Here is a representative specimen from the hand of D.J. Tice, an editorial writer at the Minneapolis Star Tribune newspaper. Some observations.
(1) That Tice is not constrained by the earnest conventions of science may be detected in his slippery linguistic formulations. For example:
[I]t's unfortunate that the main problem with the Electoral College has struck again. For the second time in 16 years--the fifth time in U.S. history--the Electoral College outcome and the popular vote were in conflict.
It seems the rhetorical task here is to minimize the "main problem" by indicating its rare incidence, a goal that is aided by skating over the fact that presidential elections are quadrennial events. Thus "fifth time in U.S. history" means about 1-in-every-11, and "for the second time in 16 years" means 2 out of the last 5.
(2) Tice's "unfortunate" doesn't begin to describe it. The outcome is "unfortunate" because it's undemocratic, which is worse than mere misfortune. The concept of "fortune" suggests remedies are beyond our reach, which isn't true.
(3) On the possibility of remedies, Tice writes:
I am still convinced the Electoral College does America more good than harm. More precisely, I am still not convinced that alternative systems would surely be better, free from difficulties and distortions. Imaginary systems always are perfect; real ones never are.
This has to it the sound of hard-headed good sense but is actually the functional equivalent of: "I'm against dropping the Electoral College and if I could think of a reason I'd be sure to divulge it."
(4) Since Tice doesn't, let's describe, however briefly, the undemocratic essence of the Electoral College. After the election, one of my FB friends linked to an article about the Electoral College at some right-wing site and commented that small states, "like the Dakotas," should have a few more electoral votes (and large ones a few less), so that they wouldn't be ignored in presidential campaigns. Annoyed by the way in which his similarly benighted FB buddies were chiming in, I pointed out that the Dakotas have between them 6 electoral votes and a population of about 1.6 million, which comes to about 267,000 people per electoral vote. California has a population of about 39.1 million. If it got 1 electoral vote per 267,000 population, it would have 146 electoral votes. But it only has 55. With disparities like this, it's inevitable that the outcome that matters will sometimes diverge from the choice made by the country's voters.
The Electoral College is a gob of spit in the face of the democratic principle about "one citizen, one vote."
(5) It's actually worse than that. So steeply does the Electoral College discount so many ballots that the people who cast them might as well not have voted at all. There are still a few million uncounted ballots, but who cares? The people who cast them live in Utah and Washington and California, not Pennsylvania and Michigan and Wisconsin. Another way to put it: since the outcome is determined by electoral votes, the value of a ballot is discounted to essentially zero if it is cast for a candidate who loses within the boundaries of the state in which it's cast.
(6) And it's actually worse than that, since it's pretty much known which state outcomes will determine the national victor before the voting begins. If you are a Republican from Maryland, or a Democrat from Alabama, you have no voice at all, and you know it on Election Eve as surely as you know it on the day after. The campaigns validate this conclusion by ignoring you.
(7) Let's return to what Tice says instead of what he ignores. Another of his arguments is a what-if:
[T]he Electoral College tends to produce decisive outcomes. A pure popular vote contest might often lead to a disputed result.
I don't think Tice believes this "argument" himself--note the profusion, in so small a space, of the weasel words "tends," "might," and "often." Anyway, why should only he be allowed to play what-if? Rank the following in order from most to least "decisive":
(a) In a national popular vote election, the count shows one candidate ahead of the other by 5,000 votes. (This seems to be Tice's "nightmare scenario.")
(b) In an Electoral College election, the count in three relatively large states is within 1,000 votes. The other electoral votes are divided in such a way that if candidate A wins the largest disputed state, then she's president; whereas, if candidate B wins the largest outstanding state, he also needs to win one of the other two.
(c) No candidate wins a majority of electoral votes. Under the Twelfth Amendment, the House of Representatives then chooses the president, with each state's delegation receiving one vote. Even though a majority of individual representatives vote for candidate A (who won the popular vote by 2 million), candidate B becomes president after receiving a majority of the votes within 26 state delegations.
It seems to me clear that (a) is preferable to (b) and that (c) is the real "nightmare scenario"--even though I can imagine even worse.
(8) In the spirit of science, let's allow Tice to speak for himself over the course of a few paragraphs (I've linked to his whole article above, too):
The Electoral College, by giving states, as distinct polities, a role in choosing presidents, forces politicians to concern themselves with appealing to a broad coalition of concerns across America.
Under a pure popular vote system, running up one’s vote totals in small but loyal regions and narrow demographic groups would be a smart politician’s single-minded objective. There would be little strategic sense in broadening one’s message to pursue a wider appeal.
But when a candidate has to win separate contests inside the borders of numerous states to prevail, he or she is forced to break out of the partisan stronghold and seek support in the opposition’s backyard.
I wonder whether Tice thinks that what he describes here is what Donald Trump did. If not, his analysis is divorced from reality, right?
It seems obvious to me that Trump did not seek broad support and that his campaign was targeted narrowly at white working class voters who, happily for him, are pretty heavily concentrated across a swatch of "swing states" running along the Great Lakes, from Pennsylvania to Wisconsin. These "distinct polities," as Tice calls them, are not really distinct. Trump was able to eke out narrow victories in several of them with a single demographic strategy, because the boundaries between them are artificial.
Suppose California were divided in two by an east-west line drawn somewhere between Los Angeles and San Francisco. Clinton would then have won an additional two electoral votes, and, in the world according to Tice, she would have earned them, because she would have appealed to another "distinct polity." Is it necessary to explain patiently why this is stupid?
(9) It would be a point in Tice's favor if Trump had sought the support of racial minorities. Then he would have been trolling for votes in his opponent's "backyard," which is what Tice indicates the Electoral College forces candidates to do. But Trump did not do that. He did the opposite of that. By deliberately alienating racial minorities, he assured that he would lose California and Illinois and New York by yawning margins. But he also signaled to the group he was targeting that he was their guy, and he pulled through in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, and Wisconsin. It's a discouraging strategy--and, thanks to the Electoral College, a highly plausible one. Clinton won hundreds of thousands of what might accurately be called superfluous votes--ballots with a mark by her name that she didn't need to win the electoral votes of the state in which they were cast. In what turned out to be the crucial states, Trump got just what he needed.
(10) I wish it weren't true that Tice's most soaring words should be read with this racial angle in mind. He writes:
From the beginning, this has been a vast, varied nation, embracing residents of crowded cities and of lonely frontiers under a single government. Differences in interests, customs and beliefs have only multiplied. Allowing people to enjoy some rights, autonomy and equality through groups and communities — especially as citizens of the separate states that gave the national government birth — is an important way America’s system has safeguarded freedom in all its forms.
The institution of chattel slavery was by far the most prominent difference in interest existing at the time the separate states gave birth to the national government. Plantation owners feared they would be outvoted by the more populated northern states, so they extracted compromises that we still live with today. Why does every state, no matter how large or small, have two senators? To protect the interests of slave owners. Why does the Constitution describe such a convoluted method of choosing the chief executive? It wasn't to advance the cause of merchants in Philadelphia! These two atrocities are mutually reinforcing in the respect that the distribution of electoral votes is based on the size of a state's congressional delegation, including senators. In the beginning, this meant that, compared to Pennsylvania, South Carolina was over-represented in the Senate and in the Electoral College; today, it explains the wildly disparate "pull" of a voter in one of the Dakotas compared to a voter in California.
Though it might have developed otherwise, a peculiarly depressing aspect of the Electoral College is the way in which it is still achieving the same dirty work for which it was originally intended.
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