Talk Elections

Maine and Nebraska are the only two states that do not have a winner-take-all electoral vote allocation method. Instead, each congressional district gives an electoral vote to its winner and the two leftover electoral votes are given to the statewide winner. The only time that one of these states actually did split its electoral votes was in 2008 when Obama won NE-2 while losing the rest of the state.

Horrible system, obviously. If big states started doing it, then the presidency would be determined by who could do the best gerrymander.

If it coupled with neutral redistricting reform, then I think it has value. People in states dominated by the other party but in large homogeneous regions (upstate NY, eastern WA, black areas of the Atlanta metro, Rio Grande valley of TX) would feel like their vote mattered more. In gerrymandered states it just becomes another point of abuse.

Horrible The EC should be absolished.

I agree that this system is bad, but here's why the EC should remain

A) If there were no Electoral College, all campaigning would be blanket ads, and then it would be a battle of who had more money. With the Electoral College, candidates pick battlegrounds and actually meet voters, meaning they can win by being a better candidate/person, and don't just have to be the richest. Candidates also have to spend less time fundraising.

B) Sure, the Electoral College might elect a loser every once in a while but it shows the importance of having a diverse electorate and appealing to people in many states. One easy fix I have for this is so, when nobody gets 270 EVs, the winner of the popular vote wins instead. That would reduce the already low probability of an EC win PV loss

C) Sure, ties are chaotic, and that's why my above plan should exist.

D) Sure, many states get ignored, but it might be better if a candidate spends more time in Florida than Kansas. Also, how would candidates know where to campaign with no Electoral College?

Well, the point I make is this: Just pick to two most populous states: CA and TX. No sane candidate campaigns in these two states, because they're safe D/R. Actually very unfair.

An option to prevent a popular vote loser from winning an EC majority (like in 2000) would be at-large electoral votes. Let's say you have a number of electoral votes that are awarded to the national popular vote winner.

Bad system. Even if we were able to curb gerrymandering, there's still the natural gerrymander of urban clustering which would bias the system inherently. I don't really see any good reason we shouldn't base it on the national popular vote, despite all the concern trolling about how that would just mean candidates would have to campaign to places where, you know, the most people live.

Horrible system, would make gerrymandering more effective and make it possible to win the Presidency from a greater popular vote deficit. The EC should be shifted to a proportional-by-state or Australian-Senate style system.

It is equivalent to how district-based parliamentary systems (such as Canada, UK, and Australia) choose their PM.

It's not really, though. Not precisely.

This would allow presidential gerrymanders. Beyond awful.

Um, no.

With the current gerrymandered map, it would be worse than the EC.

Should the U.S. Senate also be abolished, though?

To be fair, though, someone (such as Bush in 2000) who was a popular vote loser under our current system might not have been a popular vote loser under a popular vote-based system due to the fact that a popular vote-based system might have caused Presidential candidates to conduct different campaigns, have different campaign themes and messages, et cetera. Indeed, here is a good FiveThirtyEight.com article about this :):

http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/would-al-gore-have-won-in-2000-without-the-electoral-college/

Also, though, what about if the popular vote is an exact tie? ;)

In addition to this, though, if the Electoral College should go (which is the argument that some people are making), then why exactly shouldn't the U.S. Senate go as well? After all, both the Electoral College and the U.S. Senate favor smaller U.S. states (to some extent).

Yes.

I appreciate your consistency. :) I really do. :)

Abolish the EC entirely, and use a parliamentary system with full preferential voting.

Even then, Republicans would gain an edge due to their populations being less concentrated.

That may be true in today's political environment. But we should be focused on the long-term best policies for fair districts. Th relative concentrations of the parties shift as the parties realign with different voting blocs. Today the urban-rural divide is dominant, but it wasn't always so, and won't be always so. Our biggest impediment to neutral reform are party hacks who look at races primarily through the lens of the next election.

Exactly!

My position is that I support direct popular vote for President. The only advantage I see to the electoral college in modern times is that in a close election, you would only have to recount one state.

Imagine if in 2000, we had to do a nation wide recount for President. We only had to do it for Florida.

Atlas, people in general, have a tendency to predict future elections based on the most previous election. I do agree with you that the urban-rural divide will not always exist. I remember in 2006 when everyone assumed 2008, 2012, and 2016 would mirror 2004. It was similar, but it did not exactly mirror it. No one in 2000 expected Virginia, North Carolina and Georgia to be more likely to vote Democratic then Missouri, Arkansas and Tennessee in 2016, for example.

Proportional allocation would make sense if it was done based on vote received statewide, but not based on congressional district.


Yes.

That article explains perfectly why the popular vote would be a preferable system to the Electoral College. Candidates would focus on campaigning and advertising across the entire country, instead of just in swing states. The vast majority of America is currently ignored in Presidential campaigns, and the incentive to tailor policy positions to swing states would be removed.

I often hear people claim that abandoning the Electoral College for the popular vote would be bad because then candidates would just focus on large population centers. First, no they wouldn't. At least, not necessarily. Both parties don't get equivalent turnout from those places. Second, and more important, so what if they did? If they're reaching out to more people, and to do that they're reaching out to the places where more people live, isn't that a good thing?

I can't see where the policies adopted to appeal to voters would differ significantly from swing at the state level versus that at the federal level. The only semi-exception would be policies of importance only in a few swing states might get extra attention, if it's share of the swing state EV were significantly greater than its share of the national EV, but I can think of any for which that is the case right now. Ethanol gets excess attention not because Iowa is a swing state, but because Iowa has the first caucus.

It’s about as sensible as making change by giving up two $10s for a $5.

People who seriously think this are welcome to DIAF.

Not to mention, most swing states are heavily urban anyway. Probably moreso than the country as a whole, if anything.

The ways things currently are is fine enough.

incredibly stupid. Enabling Presidential gerrymandering? No thanks...

Republicans were salivating over this five years ago. They've gerrymandered the House to be out of reach for years to come, if they'd done this to the electoral college, then we'd be out of the White House for years and years and years. That's the same reason they were talking about repealing the 17th Amendment for a hot second there.

Well if it went by congressional district, Democrats would have a much harder time.  I'm not in favor of it but the presidential election isn't a popularity contest either.  If it's that close and the candidate with less votes comes out on top then it shouldn't matter.  Our system was set up like this to prevent the majority from becoming a mob and because our founding fathers didn't think the average voter was sophisticated enough to decide who should be president.  The Electoral College is a nice compromise.  Only a few times has it not favored the winner of the popular vote.

If the system was set up to prevent the majority from becoming a mob, why would the system be perfectly fine with an arbitrarily geographically entrenched minority becoming a mob?

Not quite. The equivalent in a US type system would be for a joint session of Congress to elect the President (with one vote for each Senator and Representative or one vote for each state delegation). That was an option that the Constitutional Convention considered, but ultimately rejected.

A group of specially chosen persons, for the sole purpose of electing a President, would not be so subject to the necessity for acting in party groups that the members of a legislature are.

But in the case of the EC the electors are chosen by the state parties and are typically party insiders. The electors are more likely to function in party groups than legislators.

How is a presidential gerrymander different than a presidential gerrymander? 

The EC is at least nominally "neutral" (even though it's screwed Dems 4 times and Reps once, and even that once (1960) is debatable). State houses are decidedly not so.

It would only work if the redistricting for the house and the EV is done by a FEDERAL, and COMPLETELY NEUTRAL, redistricting committee.

But even if the redistricting is neutral, doesn't it give the Republicans an advantage because of the natural packing of Dem. voters into dense urban environments?  That's why even if the CD lines were drawn in a fair way, the GOP would have an advantage in the House due to the geographic distribution of their voters.  And for the EC, that would come on top of the small state bias that already exists, because the EC tally includes the number of senators for a state as well.  And that also benefits Republicans, because they're (on average) stronger in small states.

The urban packing advantage isn't as big as people think, but it does depend on the specific geographic rules used. Packing has the biggest impact in states with cities large enough to contain whole CDs. But those same cities typically must have VRA mandated districts that would require at least the same level of Dem packing. States with mid-sized cities where the whole metro area is only about 1 or 2 CDs in size may tend to benefit Dems since the city will pick up the suburbs but not the rural surroundings.

Well, in theory, I am opposed to it.

But I am glad it will wake Democrats up and make them realize they can not abandon large groups of voters.

Electoral college was lost just due to Democrats depending on Demographics to save them. Florida was lost.. we couldn't win the Senate.. and we won't win the house without reaching out to white working class voters.

One interesting question is, if it were to switch to the CD level, would that increase or decrease the number of voters being targeted by the campaigns?  On the one hand, there are only so many competitive districts.  Presumably fewer voters would live in true "swing districts" than live in "swing states".  On the other hand, this election showed that even state level polling can be problematic.  CD level polling is presumably even worse.  So campaigns would have to go after some districts that are seen as more of a reach, because there's always the possibility of an upset.

Plus, they'd have to go on the air in more TV markets, since any big metro area is going to have at least one competitive district in the region.  And they'd do rallies in competitive districts that are adjacent to uncompetitive districts, drawing in voters from the uncompetitive places as well.

There would be a lot of money spent in media markets with target districts. For example both parties had the money to compete for state house districts this year in IL. As one example, $4.5 million was spent on one state rep race in the St Louis area. Most of the population is in MO so it was expensive to target the IL side. The big prizes would be competitive CDs in competitive states with the bonus 2 EVs up for grabs.

However, more and more money would shift to cable and online in the future if this CD-based allocation were used. As video moves towards streaming even more would go into targeted online.

Best system ever

Horrible system. The rubes are already over-represented enough as it is.

I'd like to see each state allocate their EVs like ME and NE. I expect especially going forward this plan would have strong support in Philly, Pitt, Detroit, Milwaukee, and Madison, at least compared to the status quo.

Why would it be popular in big cities?  The CDs in big cities are heavily Democratic, so those districts wouldn't be competitive under such a system, and the candidates would ignore them.  The voters in Philly have far more power in the current system, since Pennsylvania is a swing state.

I think the EC is fine the way it is, but if it has to change then I think it would make the most sense to do a proportional system with the winner getting the two Senate EC votes- e.g. Trump won Florida and gets 14 EVs derived from the CDs, and gets the two EVs from the senators.

Are you kidding me?  At least when the Electoral Vote allocation by state leads to an unfair result, it's an accident.  What you're proposing here is far worse because CDs are created every 10 years by partisans who are trying to increase their party's power.

I'd be even worse than it is now.  Then the damn thing could be gerrymandered even more than it already has been.

Given all of the hullabaloo about the electoral college being a deliberative body, it is interesting to note that Alexander Hamilton had realized that it did not work.

The Federalist was propaganda to encourage ratification of the Constitution. It was not an analysis or explanation. We don't know whether Hamilton believed that the electoral college would, could, or should be deliberative. Remember, he was a lawyer, a trained dissembler.

But by 1800 he realized it was not deliberative. In the 1800 election he campaigned for the Federalist Adams/Pinckney ticket. All but one elector voted for the same pair of candidates. Interestingly, this happened whether the electors were popularly elected or chosen by the legislature. You might expect a legislature to align on partisan lines. Some legislatures did in fact choose a mix of electors, some voting for Adams, and some voting for Jefferson. But even in those states, every Adams elector also voted for Pinckney; and every Jefferson elector also voted for Burr.

After Jefferson and Burr tied in the electoral college, the choice between Jefferson and Burr devolved onto the House of Representatives. But this was the lame duck House, elected in 1798 and 1799. It was dominated by Federalists (the newly elected Congress was dominated by Democratic-Republicans) but they would not take office until March 1801, and not actually meet until December 1801. There was intrigue to elect Burr, since the Federalists regarded Jefferson as the more dangerous man. But Hamilton used his influence to prevent this from happening.

He later proposed this version of the 12th Amendment.

 (https://itshamiltime.com/2014/01/16/after-1800-hamilton-and-the-twelfth-amendment/)
It would have provided for popular election of electors. Rather than using congressional districts, it used electoral districts, which was the usual practice among states that chose electors by district. The CD+2 at-large elections of Maine and Nebraska are very much a 20th Century constructions.

Perhaps recognizing the national character of the election, the amendment provided that Congress would draw the electoral districts, and also provide the mode of election. Government-printed ballots would not come into place until much later, so there would not have been explicit pledging, but elections would have been partisan just like those for Congress were becoming.

This year, with only ME and NE awarding EVs by Congressional District, Trump won 306 to 232.
He won 230 CDs (the Presidential winner in 3 districts won by Republican Congressmen have not yet been determined) and 30 states, so he would have won with at least 290 EVs by the Congressional District method.
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1oArjXSYeg40u4qQRR93qveN2N1UELQ6v04_mamrKg9g/edit#gid=0 (https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1oArjXSYeg40u4qQRR93qveN2N1UELQ6v04_mamrKg9g/edit#gid=0)

Don't you mean 229 CDs.