The Electoral College

[Fmr. Gov. NickG]

In response to the OP:

The electoral college doesn't assure that the candidates have to appeal to a broader segment of the population than a simple majority vote.   In the case of a majority vote requirement (achieved through nationwide STV, for instance), a candidate would have to appeal to more than 50% of the population nationwide.  Under the electoral college, a candidate can win by getting much less than 50% of the vote.  This is basically less broad a segment of population by definition.

The only sense in which one can say the electoral college requires "broad appeal" is that a candidate must appeal to a larger spectrum of the population geographically.  But  geography is only one characteristic around which we identify our politics, and it is one with ever declining importance.  Instead of having to appeal to a majority of states, why shouldn't a candidate have to appeal to a majority of races, or a majority of ages, or economic class, or religions?  All these things define our politics today more so than geography, and yet the electoral college offers to protection to these groups. 

A candidate can win the electoral college by appealing only to middle-class white Christians, because they are sufficiently geographically diverse.  Groups that happen to be geographically consolidated (like Hispanics) are severely damaged by the electoral college.  Bush in 2000 lost every racial group but one, every religion but one, every sexual orientation but one.  How can someone who won the presidency with just 5% of the black vote claim to have broad support? 

This is why the electoral college is archaic.  It divides people based on one trait: where they live.  This trait was the most important factor in people's political decisions when the constitution was written (largely because only one race, sex, and class was even enfranchised), but this is no longer the case.  A simple popular vote doesn't offer special protections to minorities, but it also doesn't punish meaningful minorities by exalting a single increasingly irrelevant one.

[Fmr. Gov. NickG]

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Good question. The answer is this: a geographical unit, the state, is recognized as the fundamental subdivision of the United States. It is the states--not races, ages, classes, or religions--that are represented in the Senate. It is the states--not races, ages, classes, or religions--that have their own governments.

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Any federal system divides people on that trait. The states are, by definition, divisions based on where people live. Shall we abolish them, too?

Yes, the definition of states on the basis of geography is archaic.  But it is so entrenched in our politic consciousness to be perhaps irreversible.  One could make a good argument for maintaining the electoral college and our current system of federalism because it would be too unsettling to our past experience and national history to be worth the change.

But you seem to want to defend the electoral college in a sort of de novo review...that it would actually be a good system were it put into place only today, because it demands that a candidate receive broad support.  I'm arguing this is not true, and many other systems would more truly demand broad support. 

The electoral college allows a candidate to completely ignore any minority group as long as the majority is geographically dispersed.  I don't think this is a desireable attribute of a modern political system.

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