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November 20, 2008

Terrible Op-Ed on the Electoral College

From today's NY Times:

And, while these reasons for the Electoral College have lost all relevance, its disadvantages loom ever larger. To start, the system excludes many voters from a meaningful role in presidential elections. If you live in New York or Texas, for example, it is generally a foregone conclusion which party will win your state’s electoral votes, so your vote has less meaning — and it can feel especially meaningless if you vote on the losing side. On the other hand, if you live in Florida or Ohio, where the outcome is less clear, your vote has a greatly magnified importance.

Voters in small states are favored because Electoral College votes are based on the number of senators and representatives a state has. Wyoming’s roughly 500,000 people get three electoral votes. California, which has about 70 times Wyoming’s population, gets only 55 electoral votes.

I certainly am not the first to make the following observations, but they bear repeating.

By the criterion above, unless an election for president is decided by one vote then any voter has wasted their vote, be that they voted for the winner or the loser. Being decisive is not the primary reason to vote or no one would vote.

But if you care about making people's votes valuable by putting them into decisive situations, the electoral college actually increases the likelihood that your vote changes an election outcome. In a state by state apportionment of electoral votes, you only have to switch your state to get a electoral votes to change. So all you have to do is swing your state to swing the nation. That is suboptimal under some social welfare functions, but does increase the rewards of voting, and therefore turnout and the rewards of voting.

Wyoming gets three electoral votes. If California apportioned their electoral votes the way that Maine or Iowa does, then more than three electoral votes would be in play there. They could get all the attention they want. Working completely within the system of the electoral college you could reduce the amount of focus on rural stats. It is true that close states get more attention, but it is also true that there are large numbers of swing voters there, so they would get more attention under any almost system, including a plurality based national vote.

Posted by OneEyedMan at November 20, 2008 7:23 AM

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