The Way We Vote

The colonial representatives sent to Philadelphia in the summer of 1787 to form a central government were deeply suspicious of their project. Independent to a fault, they had barely cooperated enough to defeat the British and more than once colonial governors refused to release control of their state militia to the command of General Washington. That they were able to hammer out details for a functioning government and cede enough power to it to represent the colonies – now called states – to the world was, as Catherine Drinker Bowen later called it in her eponymously named book – the miracle at Philadelphia.

Among the many miracles that summer was the method of electing the executive called the President:

Each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors, equal to the whole Number of Senators and Representatives to which the State may be entitled in the Congress …  

From the outset, the Founders were wary of allowing the people to select a President by direct vote. Some thought it impossible to convene a national population to vote, scattered as it was across the mostly rural colonies and territories. Others thought a popular vote might be too parochial by voting the interests of their communities. And quite likely more than a few of these Founders – well educated men who read Greek and Latin texts for pleasure – doubted that their less-educated countrymen were capable of making as good a choice for President as their state legislatures. The state legislatures, after all, were popularly elected by the citizenry to represent their political interests.  

The electoral “college” was the compromise solution proposed by James Wilson, the delegate from Pennsylvania, which became Article II, Section 1 of the US Constitution:

The Electors shall meet in their respective States, and vote by Ballot for two Persons, of whom one at least shall not be an Inhabitant of the same State with themselves. And they shall make a List of all the Persons voted for, and of the Number of Votes for each … The Person having the greatest Number of Votes shall be the President, if such Number be a Majority of the whole Number of Electors appointed … after the Choice of the President, the Person having the greatest Number of Votes of the Electors shall be the Vice President.

In the era before there were political parties, the candidate receiving the largest number of votes became President and the runner up became Vice President.

This provision has gone through Constitutional amendment so that a vote for a presidential candidate is also a vote for a pre-selected Vice President and for electors who in 23 states are committed in good faith or by law (27 states) to cast their vote for the presidential and vice presidential candidates of their party. In the event of an electoral tie or a failure to get an electoral majority, the president is chosen by the US House of Representatives under a one vote per state rule.

The number of electors per state is equal to the number of US Representatives (a proxy for population) plus the number of Senators (two per state regardless of population.) There are 435 Representatives and 100 Senators. Thus the minimum number of electors a state can have is three (at least one Representative and always two Senators.) This produces a bias towards small and often rural states, because small state delegates in 1787 were concerned that they would be made irrelevant by large population states otherwise.

For example, today there are seven states with three electors each and six states with four electors each. Those 14 states – more than one-fourth of all states – represent a total of 48 electors versus the largest state, California, with 55 electors. But the number of registered voters in the 14 smallest states totals 6.8 million people compared with 13.9 million registered voters in California. That means that California has almost twice the population of registered voters than the 14 smallest states but not twice the number of electoral votes. Stated differently, a registered voter in California has half the political impact in choosing a president that the voters in the 14 states have. Some would say that’s a good thing. I’d be among them.

The way the electoral system is designed makes it possible to “price” electoral votes among states. A California electoral vote costs (requires) 252,000 popular votes, but an electoral vote in the smallest 14 states costs an average of 141,000 popular votes. An electoral vote in Wyoming, the smallest state in terms of registered voters, costs 4,345 popular votes compared to California’s considerable higher electoral vote cost. An electoral Texas vote costs 173,000 popular votes – almost twice the cost of a North Carolina electoral vote (81,000.) Electoral votes are cheaper in the small states than they are in the large ones – an incentive not to ignore them in presidential campaigns. Votes, of course, also cost money in terms of campaign spending so the electoral votes in big states cost more in dollars than those in small states.

Does the electoral system abnegate the will of the people as expressed in their popular vote? Well … only if the purpose of the electoral system was to reflect the popular will. It wasn’t. In our electoral system, there are no popular vote recounts except when voting tallies are close and would change the outcome if they are wrong – such as Florida in 2000. Florida gave Bush the election by a margin of five electoral votes. Since Florida represented 25 electoral votes its close popular votes in some districts could have changed the outcome and a recount was required. But if Bush had been ahead by 75 electoral votes, Florida’s 25 wouldn’t have changed the outcome. So, in most elections we know who won the next day.

Because candidates are after electoral votes they spend little time and money on “safe states” and focus on the “swing states.” If they were elected by the popular vote, that would change. They would ignore all but the top 10 to 15 states with the most registered voters. State boundaries would mean nothing in a popular vote election because every vote would count equally regardless of the state. Therefore, close election outcomes would be challenged and forced into a recount – nationally – since who “won the state” would be irrelevant. It could take months to know who won the election.

Because of the “winner takes all” allocation of electors, Obama got 26 electoral votes in 2008 by squeezing out a popular vote win in Indiana of 1% and a North Carolina win of 0.3%. He got an additional 27 electoral votes by winning the Florida popular vote majority by 2.8%. Thus in three close state races, he won 53 electoral votes. California, which he also won, has 55 electoral votes. However, he won California’s 55 electoral votes by winning 3.3 million more popular votes than the 5 million cast for McCain, whereas, he won the 53 electoral votes of Indiana, North Carolina, and Florida by winning 280,000 more popular votes than the 7.5 million cast for McCain. Nationally, Obama won by a margin of 192 electoral votes.

Ross Perot entered the 1992 presidential race and siphoned off 20 million popular votes – about 19% of the votes cast. Therefore, the incumbent President George H. W. Bush got 38% of the popular vote while Bill Clinton got 43% – less than a majority and a 5-point spread. Perot got no electoral votes because he carried no states. Bush got 31% of the electoral votes and Clinton got 69% – a 37-point spread and more than half of the electoral votes. The 1992 election showed two things about the electoral system: it’s difficult for a third party candidate to win a national election, and failure to win a popular vote majority doesn’t force a runoff when there is an electoral majority – which almost always there will be.

There were 15 elections in the 20^th century in which one or more third party candidates caused the President to be elected with less than 50% of the popular vote. Among them were both of Woodrow Wilson’s elections, Truman’s 1948 election, Kennedy’s 1960 election, and Nixon’s 1968 election. Few people cared because of the electoral system. It’s doubtful that the outcomes would have been different with a popular election and runoff, because third party candidacies are usually protests against the established parties and would be excluded in the runoff.

Once the popular vote in a state exceeds 50% plus one vote, the margin of the popular vote victory thereafter does not matter in determining who gets the electoral votes, but it does matter in determining the national popular vote margin. For this reason, one candidate could get more popular votes – winning on that basis – and yet get fewer electoral votes – losing on that basis.

In 1876, Rutherford B. Hayes won by one electoral vote, but he lost the popular vote by more than 250,000 votes to Samuel J. Tilden. In 1888, Benjamin Harrison received 233 electoral votes to Grover Cleveland’s 168, but he lost the popular vote by more than 90,000 votes. Therefore it was remarkable that Democrat voters felt cheated when in 2000 Bush won the election by five electoral votes but lost the popular vote by more than 540,000.

Critics point to these kinds of “defects” as Exhibit A for getting rid of the electoral system. Last year in October a Gallup poll showed 62% of the people surveyed want the Constitution amended so that the President is elected by a nationwide majority, whereas keeping the electoral system was supported by 35% – almost 2 to 1 against.

The electoral system is not the problem with elections. Political parties are the problem. Over the last half dozen elections, the political parties have diverged more and more, and the Obama administration has been the most divisive in my political awareness, which goes back to my childhood and the last year of the FDR administration. The country has become more polarized with red states and blue states, and now there are purple states. Getting rid of the electoral system will solve none of these problems. If anything, the political chasm between the left and right will make popular elections worse because every vote will be contested.

The Gallup poll findings last year were indulgent silliness. Amending the Constitution is not easy. That was by design. A constitutional framework that can be changed with the whims of the times would lead to governmental instability. Article V of the Constitution specifies the two ways amendment can occur. Two-thirds of the House and Senate must agree to amend before it is submitted to the states where three-quarters of both state houses must agree with the amendment. That means 13 states can currently block approval. The second way to amend is to by-pass the US Congress and call a Constitutional Convention, which requires two-thirds of the states to accomplish. Then three-fourths of the state ratifying conventions must agree to amend. Since the Constitution was ratified, the second method has never been used.

These are high hurdles for amendments, which explains why only 27 have passed and 10 of those were the original Bill of Rights.

If we obsess over a more “popular” presidential election, why not abolish the Senate whose two Senators per state disregard population? Why not have proportional representation of multiple parties in the House of Representatives and abolish the predominant two-party system? There are no serious proposals for these kinds of change, so why argue for a popular system to replace the electoral system of electing a President?

It is assumed that Gore would have become President had we had a popular vote system, but that can’t be argued with certainty. In safe states many voters stay home knowing that their vote will not change the electoral outcome. The 34 electoral votes in Texas would have been awarded to the popular vote winner if 600 people had voted in 2000 instead of the six million who did vote. Not so if the election system was popularly-based.

With the 23^rd Amendment, the District of Columbia, which is not a state, was granted three electors, meaning that a total of 538 electors currently exist. In order to win the presidency, a candidate must win half of the electors plus one – i.e. 270 electors. With the exception of Maine and Nebraska, all of a state’s electors go to the winner of the state’s popular vote. In Maine and Nebraska, the winner of the state vote majority gets two electors, and the other electors vote according to the district majorities.

The next time I post a blog we will know who will be the President for the next four years. In the meantime, the reason that Obama and Romney are crisscrossing the country with endless speeches and ad campaign buys is due to the electoral system. Both candidates know that a single vote by an unknown voter in each state will decide who collects the state’s electoral votes. Both candidates are trying to influence that voter.