I had some posts on the electoral college a few weeks ago. After Andrew Gelman discussed them on his blog, I thought more about the issue. In my post, I dismissed the arguments in favor of the Electoral College, and most of them are pretty bad, but there is one that deserves to be taken seriously. It was given by Akhil Reed Amar in the New York Times a few days ago: "Any reforms might backfire, with unforeseen and adverse consequences. The Electoral College is the devil we know." Twenty years ago, this was a pretty strong argument: the last time that there had been a conflict between the electoral college and the popular vote was over 100 years ago (1888). So the possibility of a discrepancy seemed like just something to speculate about, not a serious possibility. But it's happened in two of the six elections since then, making the "devil we know" considerably less appealing. You could say "so what? A candidate winning the Electoral College while finishing behind in the popular vote is no different from a football team winning while finishing behind in yards gained." [I'm pretty sure I read something like this shortly after the election, but I forget who wrote it]. The answer to that can be found in a survey question asked a few days before the 2000 election:
"As you may know, presidents are chosen not by direct popular vote, but by the electoral college system in which each state receives electoral votes based on its population. Over the past one hundred years, the winning presidential candidate has won both the popular and electoral vote. Let us suppose in this election that one candidate were to win the popular vote and one candidate were to win the electoral vote. Who would you favor serving as the next president of the United States--the one who wins the popular vote, or the one who wins the electoral vote?"
57% said the candidate who won the popular vote, 33% the candidate who wins the electoral vote, with 10% not sure. Note that this question didn't ask about changing the system in the future--it asked about who should be president after the 2000 election. It also pointed out that we currently did it by electoral vote, not by popular vote. Nevertheless, a clear majority said that the president should be the one who won the popular vote.
The implication is that every time there is a discrepancy, there is a risk of conflict--if leading supporters of the losing candidate don't accept the result, there is a lot of popular sentiment that they can appeal to. In 2000 and 2016, leading Democrats accepted the outcome--there were only a few complaints, and no effort to mobilize against it. But can we count on that happening again if there's a discrepancy in 2020? I wouldn't bet on it. People could say that the Electoral College results are tainted by voter fraud or voter suppression in a few key states. Of course, that wouldn't prevent a president from taking power, but it would make the losers feel justified in engaging in more extreme tactics, which would make the winners feel justified in engaging more extreme tactics themselves.
[Data from the roper Center for Public Opinion Research]
The biggest problem with ideas for scrapping the electoral college is that it requires a Constitutional Amendment, which just isn't going to happen. We can't get an Equal Rights Amendment for women even though I think an overwhelming number of Americans believe in equal rights for women. The proposal that states grant their electors on the basis of who wins the popular vote has some legs but I doubt it will succeed. The easiest fix is for Congress to just increased the number of Representatives to the House. They have that Constitutional power (actually duty), but they haven't exercised it in over 100 years. A lot of things would be fixed by having say double or triple the number of representatives. This country started with a representative for every 30,000 people. That was arguably a truer democracy than today even when one accounts for slavery and the disenfranchisement of women. (I wouldn't make the argument, but it is not obviously false.) Today, about a representative represents about 700,000 people. Of course, any change is unlikely because the status quo favors various elites that profit from the current system. The electoral college is biased toward Republicans by design because the Republicans after the Civil War carved up a bunch of Republican dominated territories to keep the South from ever gaining political ascension again. (We don't really need two Dakotas.) Then Nixon's Southern Strategy turned the Republican Party into the Midwest and Southern party securing an electoral college advantage for the Repubs. I am skeptical that Republicans will ever give up this advantage by allowing the electoral college to be abolished, but the same is not true for increasing the number of reps. There are places where Republicans would gain and places where Dems would gain. And, people would gain by having more representative power. There should be enough for both sides for a deal to be possible. Unfortunately, probably any substantive change is out of the question because our elites won't allow it.
ReplyDeleteAlthough it's unlikely to happen soon, it's not impossible. With the 17th Amendment, 3/4 of the state legislatures agreed to give up their power to elect Senators, presumably because they thought that public demand was too strong to ignore. I think there is a good case for expanding the House, but that wouldn't solve the main problem with the Electoral College, which is that the winner-take-all practice essentially adds a random element to the result. A reform that would reduce although not eliminate that problem would be to have electoral votes given by congressional districts, as Maine does now.
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