America's Worst College
Let's choose our president by popular vote.
By Timothy Noah
Posted Wednesday, Aug. 11, 2004, at 3:49 PM PT
The best possible outcome for the 2004 presidential election would
be for John Kerry to lose the popular vote but win in the Electoral
College. Obviously it would satisfy a primitive hunger for payback to
thwart Republicans in the most significant way that Democrats were
thwarted in 2000. But there's a high-minded reason, too: It would give
both parties a common interest in abolishing the Electoral College and
establishing the popular vote as the means by which presidents are chosen.
(That Kerry is, coincidentally, the superior candidate strikes me as
self-evident, but I will elaborate between now and Election Day.)
The sheer idiocy of the Electoral College is a subject that got
appallingly little attention amid the chad-obsessed frenzy surrounding the
2000 election. There's a bit more discussion of the problem now, possibly
because it's summer and everybody's running out of things to say about the
coming election. Concern, I'm happy to report, spreads across the
ideological spectrum. In a June 14 cover package, Business Week ran two
separate stories (click here and here) arguing for the Electoral College's
elimination. In a July 29 column for the Nation, Katha Pollit complained
that the Electoral College "awards outrageously disproportionate political
power to rural conservative states with fewer voters than, say, the
enlightened borough of Brooklyn." In a July 4 review of Hendrik
Hertzberg's superb new anthology, Politics, Richard Brookhiser, a
conservative, distanced himself from Hertzberg, a liberal, on all
substantive matters save Hertzberg's call for electoral reform. If the
Electoral College again chooses a presidential candidate who lost the
popular vote, Brookhiser predicted, "the calls for change will be
deafening."
Most recent discussions about abolishing the Electoral College have
ended with the fatalistic observation that America will never be rid of
it. "[T]he current system ... will never change," Pollitt wrote, "because
the small states would have to approve a constitutional amendment and why
would they do that?" Well, they might do it after it was pointed out to
them that the Electoral College helps big states even more than it does
the small ones.
The small-state advantage derives from the fact that the number of
electors each state gets equals its total number of House seats (which
reflects population size) plus two (for its two Senate seats). If the
number of congressional seats is low enough, those two extra electors can
make a big difference. Delaware, Wyoming, North and South Dakota, Montana,
Vermont, and Alaska each have only a single House member, so their
electors exaggerate their proportional representation by a factor of
three. But this advantage is outweighed by the advantage conferred on
large states by the winner-take-all allocation of electors in every state
save Nebraska and Maine. In their book Electoral College Primer 2000
(which, alas, was not updated for 2004), Lawrence D. Longley and Neal
Peirce calculated that the states enjoying higher-than-average voting
power under the Electoral College were the following (in declining order):
California
Texas
New York
Florida
Pennsylvania
Illinois
The states with the least voting power under the Electoral College
were the following (in ascending order):
Montana
Kansas
West Virginia
Maine
Arkansas
Utah
Nevada
Small states tend to go Republican (though Democrats are starting to
make inroads in the West). Big states tend to go Democratic (mainly by
leveraging big-city coalitions of minorities, labor unions, and white
professionals). Neither Democrats nor Republicans have much to lose or
gain by abolishing the Electoral College, and that's why the subject
didn't get much attention in 2000. But the lack of partisan advantage
would make it a lot easier for a Let the People Vote amendment to the
Constitution to clear the House and Senate by the necessary two-third
majority. (If President Kerry found the bill insulting, no matter;
constitutional amendments clear Congress as resolutions, and consequently
can't be vetoed.) The amendment could then proceed to the states, where it
would be ratified if 38 approved. Since only six states enjoy
higher-than-average clout under the Electoral College, the remaining 44
might not be too resistant to abolishing it.
The key would be to persuade small states that losing their
disproportionate clout relative to medium-sized states would be balanced
out by the loss of disproportionate power enjoyed by big states. It's the
big states, after all, that small states tend to perceive as the enemy.
Alternatively, we might find that voters self-identify as citizens of a
particular state far less than they self-identify as members of national
constituencies (African-Americans, farmers, liberals, suburbanites, etc.),
or even (gasp) as Americans. As the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette columnist
Michael McGough recently observed, "There are good reasons why Americans
say 'the United States is,' not the 'the United States are.' "
Quite apart from these questions of self-interest, some people think
the Electoral College is superior to a popular vote for a variety of
political-science reasons. They're wrong. In future columns, I'll take on
their arguments.
Timothy Noah writes "Chatterbox" for Slate.
http://slate.msn.com/id/2105055/
.
|
