With the FBI Director having cast his early ballot, the presidential race is tightening, and the magi of cable tv are busy deconstructing the candidates' respective itineraries for the remaining days of the campaign. I've forgotten where Hillary and her opponent (aptly described by Samantha Bee as "a crotch-fondling slab of rancid meatloaf") are going, but you don't have to read Politico to know where they're not going. They're not going to the Land of Lincoln, fifth most populated state in the country. They're not going to the third biggest, either--that would be New York--or to Texas, second in both area and population. And, of course, they're not going to California, the largest of all, not by just a little or only with respect to population: if the Golden State were a country, it would easily be among the world's top ten in GDP.
Yes, it's time for my quadrennial screed against the electoral college.
If the presidential candidate for whom the most Americans vote would be guaranteed the presidency, then the voters of Chicago might get a campaign visit, and those who live in Manchester, New Hampshire, might get a reprieve. But it's not really the disproportionate attention that upsets me. What really upsets me is that the source of the disproportionate attention is disproportionate influence. The candidates know exactly what they are doing. They are making their pitch to the voters who will determine the outcome of the election, and ignoring the ones who won't. This is not some swashbuckling overstatement meant to grab attention before executing a transition to the caveats. It's the naked truth. Go to Nate Silver's site and check out the "voter power index."
If you live in a state that is pretty evenly divided--a "battleground," a "swing state"--then you got the power. But if you live in Illinois or New York or Texas or California, or Idaho or Wyoming or Rhode Island or Vermont, or Maryland or Tennessee or Washington or Mississippi, you don't. I suppose that if you are a Democrat living in the Bay Area you should take the time to vote for Hillary. It's doing your part to help her win 55 electoral votes. But if you are a Californian who prefers rancid meatloaf, there really is no reason to vote. Your ballot can "make a difference" only in California. If you stay home, your guy will win zero electoral votes in the state. But, if you take the trouble to vote, you will "help" him to win . . . zero electoral votes in the state. To have a voice, you have to be able to contribute money. How great is that? Whereas, if the winner were determined by national popular vote, your ballot would boost your candidate's total from n to (n + 1). You'd be there in the determining tally.
Tell me I'm wrong about this. You can't, because I'm right. The stuff said by defenders of the electoral college is uniformly without merit. You hear, for example, that it's "rare" for the winner of the electoral college to lose the national popular vote. Let's just put to one side for the moment that in Silver's model there is currently better than a ten percent chance of Clinton winning the popular vote while losing in the electoral college. What kind of a lame-brained argument is this business about "rare"? It's as if a medical researcher decided not to avail himself of a cure for ALS, since the disease is "rare."
There is a remedy at hand for a glaring fault. Seize it.
Some of the relatively unknown provisions of the electoral college descend into mere farce. Suppose, for example, that no one wins 270 electoral votes. One of the poll aggregator sites recently showed states with 269 electoral votes at least leaning Clinton's way. If she won those, but the bad meatloaf prevailed in all the "toss-ups," there'd be an electoral college tie. (The above quite plausible electoral map depicts a 269 to 269 tie.) It's also possible that the clean-cut Mormon guy (redundant, I know) wins Utah's six electoral votes, which would raise considerably the likelihood that no candidate gets to 270.
In this event, the president would be chosen by the House of Representatives. According to the Twelfth Amendment, each state's delegation gets one vote. So California's 53 representatives would vote, about 40 of them for Clinton, while Wyoming's one congressman would vote for the meatloaf, and the tally that counts would stand at a 1 to 1 tie. Under this scenario, Clinton loses for sure, since, thanks to gerrymandered congressional districts, states she carried, such as Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Virginia, have a majority of Republican representatives who would vote for the meatloaf. The choice voters in these states made for president would thus have been cancelled by partisan mapmakers.
The Director of the FBI has been harshly and justly criticized by Democrats and Republicans, but it's easier to defend him than to explain why the electoral college should not have been abolished a long time ago.
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