Get Rid of the Damn Thing

Yes, there's shenanigans afoot in Pennsylvania- electoral college shenaningans to be precise and Mother Jones is on the case. Basically, GOP legislators in the Keystone State are proposing to give every Congressional District in Pennsylvania their own electoral vote and the 2 extra votes would go to the overall statewide winner- currently only Maine and Nebraska allocate their electoral votes this way- every other state and the District of Columbia use a winner-take-all allocation for electoral votes.

The magic number, as all the world knows is 270. Reach that and you're President- but let's back up a little first, kids.

The American electoral system, unlike every other sane and sensible country in the world doesn't actually conform to the 'one person, one vote' principle that is usually how democracy works. Instead, our Founders in their infinite wisdom decided that the mass of citizenry were too stupid and uneducated to make informed choices about who they wanted to be President AND didn't want the big states crowding out the small states in terms of influences, so they came up with the crazy idea of the electoral college.

Basically, the Electoral College is the big kahuna. You take the number of congresspeople a state has, add 2 senators and BAM, you've got the total number of electoral votes for that state. (Iowa has 5 congressmen, 2 senators and therefore 7 electoral votes- but that was in 2008. We'll be down to 6 for 2012.) As I've said already, 270 is the grand prize- and, as we saw in 2000, things get a little sticky, because it's possible to win the popular vote and lose the electoral vote from time to time and in order to be President, you need to win the electoral vote.

The debacle of the 2000 election saw a flurry of calls to abolish or reform the electoral college one of the most interesting was the National Popular Vote compact, which lobbied states to pass legislation that would guarantee their electoral votes to the winner of the popular vote- so far 11 states totally 132 electoral votes have signed on. There's also the matter of so-called 'faithless electors' or electors that refuse to vote for the candidate to whom they have been pledged- only 24 states have laws against them. Which means there's a pretty good chance that the electors you pick don't have to vote for who you vote for.

But anyway- the whole Mother Jones article got my brain twirling: would doing the electoral vote proportionally using the Congressional District plus 2 rules implemented by Nebraska and Pennsylvania have an affect on the actual outcome? So I put my political scientist cap on and dug up some data.

The results actually didn't make all that much difference in 2008- but then again, 2008 wasn't that close of an election. In a close election, applying the Nebraska-Maine rules to the electoral college nationwide could make it interesting indeed. But in the 2008 case, I found the following:

Obama- 348
McCain-179

That's including the states (California, Hawaii, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, Vermont, Washington and DC) that have signed the National Popular Vote compact pledging their slate of electors to the winner of the national popular vote. So it really wouldn't have had an impact in 2008- and it assumes that where goes your Congressional District, goeth your Presidential vote which I doubt would necessarily hold true 100% of the time.

What a Nebraska-Maine solution would do however, is make the electoral college more reflective of actual voter preferences- and as the Electoral College was designed partially because the Founders didn't trust the population and partly to keep the small states from getting shut out, these could make a lot of states that normally don't get much play in Presidential elections more influential again.

But that still leaves the question of the electoral college itself: personally, I find it antiquated, anti-democratic and hopelessly out of date. If it's purpose was to keep small states from getting swept under the rug then it's failed- as presidential elections come down to a handful of states- with large populations anyway. The big states are holding sway- which is in direct contravention to what the Founders wanted or needed.

So get rid of the damn thing already! Replace it with a popular vote- if no candidate achieves more than 50% of the vote, then the top two candidates proceed to a second round. Everybody else does it and it works just fine- let's not encourage gerrymandering and political corruption anymore than we have too.