Against the Electoral College

Hi friend,

You’ve been sent this link because you made an argument for the electoral college that I think is wrong. I created this document because I keep responding to the same arguments over and over.

My reason for abolishing the electoral college (EC) is simple: everyone should have equal rights under the law, but the EC gives some people a vote that is worth more than others. Without the EC everyone would have the same amount of power to choose the President and that would be better for everyone. Secondarily, it would give more legitimacy to the President because more people would have supported him or her than any other candidate. More legitimacy creates more goodwill towards the President and allows him or her to enact more of their agenda.

I will now address a number of common arguments for keeping the EC. If you have read these and don’t find your argument, please feel free to comment. If you feel that my rebuttal does not address your argument well enough, please let me know and I’ll do my best to improve the argument here.

The most common argument I hear in favor of the EC is the following:

The EC was designed to give more relative power to the smaller states, which is an important feature of our federal system.

First, I think you might be confusing the role of the Senate in the US Constitution with the role of the EC. The Senate was explicitly designed to balance the interests of the small states with those of the larger ones. The EC, however, was not designed with this purpose in mind. According to Federalist Paper #68, the primary purpose of the EC was to limit the possibility for corruption. It was thought that the distances involved, because each state’s EC was to meet in its own territory, as well as the prohibition against sitting elected officials from serving as electors¹, would ensure “that the office of President will never fall to the lot of any man who is not in an eminent degree endowed with the requisite qualifications.” (Fed #68)

Furthermore, the current over-weighting of the small states in the electoral college is a consequence of the cap placed on the size of the House of Representatives in 1921. If we used the original formula of 1 representative for every 30–40k people there would be 8857 seats in the House of Representatives, which would give us nearly 9000 electoral votes, only 100 of which would come from Senate seats. The number of votes per state would be closely aligned with their proportion of the population as a whole. Thus, it cannot be true that the current makeup of the EC was designed by the Founders to favor small states. It was not and further would not have if the original system had continued until today.

Now, instead, you might argue that regardless of the original intent of the Founders, it is still desirable to give smaller states more power. I will now show that in practice the EC does no such thing. Instead, the EC gives disproportionate power to states with closely divided electorates, regardless of size.

I will explain what I mean. How often have you seen a Presidential candidate campaign heavily in Wyoming? How about California? Wyoming is one of the smallest states and California is one of the biggest. If the EC favored small states, then a campaign would be better off spending money in Wyoming because each electoral vote gained there would come from persuading less people. After all, votes in Wyoming are worth 3.6x as much as a vote in California, according to the electoral college influence. Alternatively, California is worth the largest number of electoral votes of any state. Winning California alone gets you 8% of the EC votes you need to win.

In practice, campaigns almost never campaign in those states. Democrats really only buy ads or campaign in CA to raise money to spend elsewhere. Republicans almost never campaign there.

Instead, here’s a map of the state the Trump and Clinton campaigns spent money on in the last weeks of the 2016 election:

There are some small states, e.g. New Hampshire and Maine. There are some big states, e.g. Florida and Pennsylvania. However, there’s no clear pattern according to size. Instead, the largest factor that determines the amount of money spent advertising in each state is how close the polls are in those states. Because nearly every state gives *all* its electoral votes to the statewide winner, taking a state from a 49% loss to a 51% win is worth much more in the EC than taking a state from a 53% win to a 55% win.

The EC does not favor small states, nor does it blunt the power of the big states. Instead, it arbitrarily allocates voting power to states that have a high chance of deciding the balance in the electoral college, i.e. closely contested states.

At this point even people who would like to see smaller states allocated additional power should realize that the EC is not accomplishing this goal. This should be unsurprising since it was never intended to do that. The question is what we should replace it with. I argue that the fairest replacement is the one that gives everyone an equal say in the President: a national popular vote. I’ll now address some common objections I hear to a national popular vote deciding the President.

First, many people argue that candidates will only visit the largest cities to campaign. Since none of our 5 largest cities are in a state that is close in the electoral college, currently they get no attention from candidates. When was the last time you saw a President campaign in New York City or Houston? Campaigns might spend time in big cities because that’s where the voters are most concentrated. If every vote is counted equally, campaigns will want to go to places where they can reach a large number of voters at once. But candidates would not *only* want to go to big cities. Campaigns don’t just go to places where there are the most voters. Instead, they want to visit places with a large number of *persuadable* voters. If 90% of the population of LA is already going to vote for you, then you are better off going to a smaller city if more of the voters there might change their minds in response to a visit. The same logic applies on deciding where to spend money to buy ads. Saturating Chicago with ads is pointless when you could instead run some ads in a smaller city and reach voters who might have missed your message.

This isn’t simply a theoretical argument. We currently have 50 races for executive office in the United States for which the electoral college does not apply: governors! Even in states like Illinois which are dominated by a single large city, governor candidates for Illinois don’t only campaign in Chicago. They go to smaller cities, rural areas, the state fair, etc. Persuadable voters can be found anywhere and candidates will go anywhere to find them because every one of those votes is worth the same as any other.

Another benefit of the national popular vote is that people who are members of a minority party in a state will still have an incentive to vote. Under the EC, it is pointless for Republicans in California to vote for President, since their state will go to the Democratic candidate regardless of what they do. Similarly, Democrats in Alabama might as well stay home. With a popular vote, the California Republican’s vote will be worth just as much as the Florida Republican’s. This will have the effect of increasing voter turnout across the board, which increases civic engagement and democratic legitimacy. Currently, you see much higher turnout in states which are closely contested in the electoral college.

This will also help other candidates for statewide office. Suppose you are a Republican running for a state legislative seat in California but the Republican voters are staying home during the election because they know their vote will have no effect on the outcome of the Presidential race. If those voters were just as motivated to vote as voters in any other state, you will not have to work as hard to motivate turnout. This will keep individual states from being dominated by a single party as easily.

[1] “Their transient existence, and their detached situation, already taken notice of, afford a satisfactory prospect of their continuing so, to the conclusion of it. The business of corruption, when it is to embrace so considerable a number of men, requires time as well as means. Nor would it be found easy suddenly to embark them, dispersed as they would be over thirteen States, in any combinations founded upon motives, which though they could not properly be denominated corrupt, might yet be of a nature to mislead them from their duty.” (Fed #68)