The Electoral College: still a bad idea (part II)

The Electoral College should be abolished. To me this is pretty uncontroversial, but given the nature of our Constitutional structure it is tremendously difficult to make even obvious changes.

My previous post discussed the possibility that 2012 could become another example of an Electoral/popular split. If it did, it would of course be the second time out of the last four cycles. To me, the fact that this is even a possibility absolutely demolishes the single best argument in favor of keeping the Electoral College: that it is unlikely to ever make much difference.

Obviously, the primary argument against the Electoral College is that it is undemocratic. In this system, a relatively small number of voters have massively disproportionate effect. Anyone who lives in a ‘safe’ state in a given election is basically casting a meaningless ballot. While I am by no means a democracy-absolutist, and favor plenty of restrictions or limitations on the absolute spirit of democracy, those restrictions need to have a good reason to exist. And they should have a somewhat limited effect.

With the Electoral College, you end up with the vast majority of the population feeling no compelling reason to value their votes on the most prominent political question of the day. Which is damaging not just because it undercounts those votes, but also because it structures their broader political participation.

Which brings me to the supposed benefits of the system. Let’s go through them:

Geographic diversity

Supposedly, this system is better because it encourages campaigns that cover the whole of the country, rather than just the high-population coasts. For example:

the Electoral College serves to make Presidential elections truly national, requiring candidates to register support not just in the high population areas on the East and West Coasts but also in the interior of the nation where interests vastly different from those of the Boston-New York-Washington corridor and the San Francisco-Los Angeles-San Diego corridor motivate voters.

First, this is a great example of the vagueness in such claims. WHY precisely is geographic diversity a value? It can only be if the policy-focus it produces is better than you’d get with a ‘national’ campaign. Well, what happens when candidates focus narrowly on swing states? You get insane subsidies for ethanol thanks to Iowa. Virulent China-bashing for Ohio voters. The stupidest policy in the world (TM), our Cuba embargo, which has survived solely because Florida is a swing state. Excessive support for coal. And so on. Which of these reflect the value of geographic diversity?

Second, and building off of this, the Electoral College system doesn’t really enhance ‘geographic diversity’ in elections. It empowers a certain set of states – virtually none of which represent some of the most populated geographic regions of the US. Ohio, Florida, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Colorado, Nevada. What do you notice about these states? None of them represent the densely-populated states of the Northeast, the Pacific coast, or the South.

Florida is kind of in the South, but not really. Colorado or New Mexico are in the southwest, but I bet the people of Texas don’t consider them to be perfect representatives of Texan interests. New Hampshire is in the New England but gets comparatively little ad spending precisely because it’s so expensive to pay for the media markets around it, which are not in play. Washington and Oregon used to be swing states, but are tipping further left these days. And the tens of millions of people in California probably feel like they have some different interests, anyways.

A system of one-person, one-vote has the advantage of improving geographic diversity via the simple process of making every single vote count. As an electoral strategy in such a system, trying to vulture votes merely from big cities on the coasts wouldn’t be tremendously viable. There are, after all, almost two hundred million people living in the Midwest and South.

Third, ‘geographic diversity’ is often a stand-in for a larger dismissiveness about certain kinds of people, which I find distasteful. We are a nation of people, not a nation of territory. The agents of our political system are people, not parcels of land. Those people shouldn’t have less political power simply because they happen to be bunched together in cities. More on that in a second.

Founder worship

The founders designed this system, so who are we to challenge it? Longtime readers of the blog will be well aware of how I feel about this argument.

I have a modest Burkean impulse to approve of existing institutions and the ennobling spirit of our history. But this is tempered by a desire to have institutions that, well, make sense. Some sort of reverence for the Founders can be useful if it’s serving the purpose of helping to bind together an existing political community. But treating them as infallible serves precisely the opposite purpose.

Further, it’s not like ‘the Electoral College’ looks anything like the Founders actually intended. And it hasn’t for almost 200 years. The original process for most state legislatures to directly select Electors. In the early 19th century, states started to turn to popular votes, which became a basically universal practice in 1828.

So: if you value the opinion of the Founders, you really should be pressing for states to take away the designation of Electors based on popular votes.

Status quo bias

This arguments says constitutional amendments are a big deal so we should be really skeptical about having them.  See above.  Preserving a stupid status quo is stupid.  It would not be at all complex to do this, and it is inconceivable that we would employ this system if inventing a new Constitution today.

Madisonian bottlenecks

For an example of this argument, see Jonathan Bernstein. I enjoy his perspective a lot on most things, but his fascination with Madisonianism is a bit too much for me in normal cases. And the Electoral College is not even a normal case.

The problem with this argument is twofold. First, I generally believe that the nature of checks and balances has changed a lot in the past 225 years.  The more radical claim is simply that the Madisonian system is a relic, designed for a time of limited communication and long distances.  The more moderate variant is: even if you love want to preserve the goal of competitive factions, we simply have other ways of doing it now.

Which is to say: given the nature of political legitimacy and effective government in the 21st century, I don’t see ‘too much unity’ as a particularly pressing problem.  Which means that embracing complexity for its own sake isn’t a great idea.

This is especially the case when the Electoral College double-counts a particular form of complexity.  It just models the same over-representation of rural citizens that we already have in the apportionment of the Senate.  I can’t think of any good reason why we need an additional layer of complexity in the selection-process for the executive.  The states are already represented in the legislature. What is the value of representing them again via the vote for the presidency?

Which brings back to the casual dismissal of huge chunks of the country.  When you favor the existing system, you are saying that this is a nation built of states, not of people.  And you are saying that if you make the mistake of sharing a geographic territory with too many like-minded people, you don’t really matter.

There should be very good for deciding that two different people should have disproportionate influence in an election where they are considering the precise same question.  The Electoral College does not come close, in my mind, to passing that test.