Thinking About the Electoral College
After the 2000 election, a lot of people were upset about the Electoral College. The primary arguments against it are:
- It doesn’t necessarily reflect the popular vote
- It widens the gap between two contenders
- It makes it even harder for a third-party to contend
These are legitimate arguments, and I do think that we are in need of electoral reform. The supporters of the Electoral College approach have very valid points, however. Primary among these is the anticipated impact that a pure election would have is that candidates would pander entirely to a few urban areas with large populations. We can already see that they pander to the majority with promises of middle-class tax cuts and such.
I see two problems with this argument, however. First, the rural areas that would ostensibly be shafted in such an election, probably would not be, in practice. I say this because we already have minority voting blocks that command a great deal of attention in the US: unions and african-americans are a both good examples. Only about 20% of households in the US have union affiliation, and yet candidates cater to their issues heavily. African Americans only make up about 13% of the population, and yet both major parties campaign heavily for their votes.
The second problem that I see with the "urban focus" argument is that it contradicts the basic assumption of US democracy that every person’s vote is equal. Proponents of the electoral system who talk about campaigns centering on highly-populated areas imply that the minority in rural areas should have as much say as the city-dwelling majority. This simply does not make sense in a democracy. From the perspective of civil liberties, certainly it is necessary to protect the freedoms of the minorities from the tyranny of the majority, but in terms of elected leaders, the majority should win. Frankly, this argument is somewhat racially loaded as well, as rural white people consider themselves the "backbone of the country" (and perhaps they are correct in some sense, but that’s not the point) and they explictly or implicitly think their say should carry more weight than urban areas that have more blacks and hispanics.
I should also note that because rural areas in the modern political climate tend to vote Republican, the Electoral College essentially biases the Presidential election to the Republicans.
I don’t think the Electoral College will ever go away. I also don’t think that reform will ever occur on a federal level, and I’m not sure that it should. What will happen over the course of our lifetimes is that more and more states will go to proportional representation from winner-take-all. The states have complete control over the actual allocation of the electoral votes, and already several states have gone proportional.
This article proposes that an increase in the number of members of the House of Representatives would resolve the problem, as each state has as many electors as members of Congress. Currently, populous states are underrepresented per-capita. By increasing the number of representatives, it would be possible to bring the electoral system more closely in line with the popular vote.