Electoral college reform

[Bleeding heart conservative, HTMLdon]

Option 5

[Bacon King]

Option Six.

Increase the size of the House significantly by following something like the Cube Root Rule. With the increased size of the House, the Eectoral College becomes more proportional and therefore will accurately reflect the winner of the popular vote much more often.

[angus]

Option Six.

Increase the size of the House significantly by following something like the Cube Root Rule. With the increased size of the House, the Eectoral College becomes more proportional and therefore will accurately reflect the winner of the popular vote much more often.

I still don't agree with the EC, but I am 100% percent with you on unlocking the size of the House. It would make it more proportional and fair.

You like to bloat the government even more?  In Rome, Titus increased the number of senators from 100 to 300.  Later rulers increased it even more.  Julius Caesar took it up to 900.  Bloated government, armies stretched too far and too thin, the greedy elite back in Rome became fat and lethargic and dependent upon the importation of goods from distant outposts.  Sound familiar?

[True Federalist (진정한 연방 주의자)]

Option Six.

Increase the size of the House significantly by following something like the Cube Root Rule. With the increased size of the House, the Eectoral College becomes more proportional and therefore will accurately reflect the winner of the popular vote much more often.

I still don't agree with the EC, but I am 100% percent with you on unlocking the size of the House. It would make it more proportional and fair.

You like to bloat the government even more?  In Rome, Titus increased the number of senators from 100 to 300.  Later rulers increased it even more.  Julius Caesar took it up to 900.  Bloated government, armies stretched too far and too thin, the greedy elite back in Rome became fat and lethargic and dependent upon the importation of goods from distant outposts.  Sound familiar?

One also wants one's representatives to actually be able to interact with those they represent, so you want small district sizes.  The cube root rule is a reasonable rule of thumb that tries to balance the desire for small district sizes with a small house.  It also is a fairly good approximation of the size of the House of Representatives up until it was arbitrarily locked at 435.  While the jump from 435 to 675 seems sudden, that's a century's worth of delayed growth released in one bite.

[angus]

I'm aware of the cube root rule.  It's like a religion with many posters here. 

I'm actually a fan of having decent representation, and in the abstract I don't really care how big you make the legislature, although electing 675 assholes doesn't seem like a reasonable alternative to electing 435 assholes.  I guess the finer doctrinal point to the cube root religion is that with 675 you get a smaller percentage of assholes.  Something like that.  I don't really buy into it.  Given our culture and our technology, it's hard to make that argument.  You just end up with more people making more soundbites and sucking more of the GDP with their huge staffs and other expenses.

[Dave from Michigan]

option 1 with IRV

also increase the size of the house to at least 675 (cube foot rule) maybe up to 800 by 2050

[Blackacre]

Either Option 1 or 6 with a twist: keep the system as it is, but every state loses 2 electoral votes. Wyoming has 1, NY and Florida get 27, etc. You get as many electoral votes as you have representatives in congress. Without the automatic 2 per state, it becomes more proportional to state population.

[DemPGH]

Option 1 or 5 for me. If we're not doing a direct PV, then I really don't have any complaints about the EC.

[Icehand Gino]

option 1 with IRV

also increase the size of the house to at least 675 (cube foot rule) maybe up to 800 by 2050

[pbrower2a]

3 -- a proportional or nearly-proportional split. The electoral college relates closely to having a federal system. Some states have low voter turnout and some have high voter turnout. Besides, I do not want any Presidential election ever decided by a low vote total that results from a natural disaster at the time of the election.  That could have happened with Hurricane Sandy.

The Devil is in the details,  so here is how one can do it. First, give two of the electoral votes of any state to the winner of the plurality. Then divide the rest by all performers in the Presidential election and preliminarily divide all electoral votes by the total vote. No fraction of an electoral vote will be offered. People who start fruitless write-in candidacies so that they can get recognition in Wikipedia for having won some tiny fraction of the electoral vote for winning four popular votes in California and none elsewhere would be ignored as now, and third Parties that get less than their share of one Electoral Vote would be ignored. Charles Manson could conceivably get a millionth of an electoral vote, and I doubt that we want to see that.

After that first round the remaining candidates would split the total votes allocated to them in proportion to the votes for that candidate, but only in whole numbers. Any remainder of the total of relevant votes (those allotted to those not ruled out for not getting enough votes to qualify in the first round) would go to the winner of the plurality.

 Going with the states with the highest number of electoral votes first -- California:

Barack H. Obama           Democratic    7,854,285    60.24%   55
Willard Mitt Romney     Republican    4,839,958    37.12%     0
Gary Johnson                   Libertarian       143,221      1.10%     0

As you can see, Johnson (L) falls short of winning 1/53 (about 1.89%) of the total popular vote in California as do other third-party and independent nominees. 

So after the first round Gary Johnson drops off because he does not win 1/53 of the total vote as do the other third-party nominees and we get

Barack H. Obama          Democratic    7,854,285    60.24%   
Willard Mitt Romney        Republican    4,839,958    37.12%   

Divide what remains relevant evenly into 53 electoral votes not allocated on a winner-take-all basis:

Barack H. Obama           Democratic    7,854,285    61.87%   32.79
Willard Mitt Romney     Republican    4,839,958    38.13%   20.21

Because there will be no fraction of an electoral vote, the winner gets his count adjusted upward, and we have -- after adding 2 to the winner of the plurality -- 

Barack H. Obama             Democratic    7,854,285    61.87%   35
Willard Mitt Romney     Republican    4,839,958    38.13%   20

California becomes a contestable state.

Now let's try Texas, with 38 electoral votes:

Willard Mitt Romney       Republican    4,569,843    57.17%   
Barack H. Obama      Democratic    3,308,124    41.38%   
Gary Johnson               Libertarian    88,580              1.11%   

Romney wins two electoral votes for winning the plurality in Texas. Divide the total vote by the vote for the different candidacies and one finds that Johnson falls far short of the 2.78% of the total vote necessary for winning an electoral vote in Texas.  So what remains is

Willard Mitt Romney       Republican    4,569,843    58.08%   
Barack H. Obama      Democratic    3,308,124    41.92%   

Allocating 36 electoral votes one gets:

Willard Mitt Romney       Republican    4,569,843    20.88   
Barack H. Obama      Democratic    3,308,124    15.12   

Giving Romney the allotted two statewide electoral votes and the fractional vote one gets:

Willard Mitt Romney       Republican    4,569,843    23   
Barack H. Obama      Democratic    3,308,124    15   

So Texas becomes a relevant pace for campaigning. 'Swing votes' become relevant in such high-population areas as Orange County (California) and  Dallas County (Texas). The count for the two biggest electoral prizes is

Obama 50 - Romney 43

on the assumption that the candidates do nothing different.

New York State and Florida both have 29 electoral votes:

New York (blowout)

Barack H. Obama   Democratic    4,159,441    63.39%   
Willard Mitt Romney   Republican    2,401,799    36.61%   

No third-party nominee won 1.27 of the total vote so those nominees are ignored.   

The split is 20-9.

Florida (really close)

Barack H. Obama   Democratic    4,237,756    50.44%   
Willard Mitt Romney   Republican    4,163,447    49.56%

The split of Florida is now 17-12 for Obama, which is vastly different from winning 29-0.

With the four largest states in electoral votes the total is now 87-64 under this system instead of 113-28 with a WTA system in place.  With this method in place President Obama is down 26 electoral votes and Mitt Romney is up 26 from the reality of a WTA system. As it is the Electoral College gives a structural advantage to the Democratic nominee. Aside from Texas the five biggest states that President Obama lost were Georgia (16), North Carolina (15), Arizona (11), Indiana (11), and Tennessee (11). In contrast President Obama won Illinois (20), Pennsylvania (20), Ohio (18), Michigan (16), New Jersey (14), Virginia (13), Washington (12), and Massachusetts (11).

So let's see what offsets look like. Georgia and Michigan look obvious enough because the states have the same number of electoral votes and were decided by similar-but opposite margins:

Georgia

Willard Mitt Romney   Republican    2,078,688    53.96%   
Barack H. Obama   Democratic    1,773,827    46.04%

Romney 10 - Obama 6

Michigan

Barack H. Obama      Democratic    2,564,569    54.80%   
Willard Mitt Romney      Republican    2,115,256    45.20%

 

Obama 10 - Romney  6

Perfect! It was 16-16 in WTA reality between these two states.

I'm not saying that there are any other offsets that good. 

Some whiz could probably calculate the effects of this system. It is still effectively WTA for a state with three electoral votes. No such state was close in 2012. Four? New Hampshire was the closest of them:

Barack H. Obama      Democratic    369,561    52.83%   
Willard Mitt Romney      Republican    329,918    47.17%

   

One would have to get 50% of the relevant vote to win even one electoral vote in N3ew Hampshire or any other state with four electoral votes unless the state gets to allocate electoral votes in part by Congressional district as does Maine.

Five? Nebraska suggests itself because it allotted one electoral vote to President Obama in 2008.

Willard Mitt Romney    Republican    475,064    61.13%   
Barack H. Obama      Democratic    302,081    38.87%

   

With five electoral votes a state would allocate one vote to the second-place finisher with so much as 1/3 of the total vote.

With six electoral votes, four allocated based on popular vote, some of the blowouts would not be WTA.

Utah illustrates the case:

Willard Mitt Romney      Republican    740,600    72.62%   
Barack H. Obama                           Democratic    251,813    24.69%   
Gary Johnson                                Libertarian      12,572      1.23%   
Ross C. 'Rocky' Anderson                   UT Justice        5,335      0.52%   
Jill Stein                                           Green                3,817       0.37%   
Virgil H. Goode, Jr.                      Constitution        2,871      0.28%   
Other (+)                                                                     2,807      0.28%

If the largely-irrelevant candidacies vanish as I put in the initial rules one gets this:

Willard Mitt Romney      Republican    740,600    74.63%   
Barack H. Obama                           Democratic    251,813    25.37%   

and President Obama gets one electoral vote in Utah.

........

It might cause difficulties for news readers who can no longer say "Smith wins 11 electoral votes from the Indiana" at 7PM on Election Night because if the Democrat wins 44% of the popular vote in Indiana he will still get  four electoral votes in Indiana.  More likely the nature of our elections change so that (with the current patterns of voting) a Democrat is likely to seek out votes in places like El Paso, Dallas, San Antonio, Houston, Memphis, New Orleans, Atlanta, St. Louis, Kansas City, Omaha, and  Indianapolis.

So what would be wrong with allocating electoral votes by district? I'd have no problem with Maine and Nebraska keeping their current systems due to a grandfather clause. Allocating votes based on the electoral college means that a State legislature could decide how that state votes by gerrymandering Congressional districts so that one Party has a built-in and rigid advantage. President Obama would have lost Michigan, Ohio, and Pennsylvania on that basis even though he won those three states by clear margins.  Congressional districts have a transitory nature as it is.     



 
 

[True Federalist (진정한 연방 주의자)]

With a proportional allocation of the electoral vote in each State, we'd likely see different patterns than now because the wasted vote argument for not supporting minor parties would be weakened.  So if that were the only change, the primary result would be to throw more elections into the House for a vote by the State delegations, which I would argue is a worse choice.

[pbrower2a]

It does get messy when a strong independent or third-party candidate appears on the scene as in 1992:   

William Clinton   Democratic    44,909,806    43.01%    370    68.8%
George Bush   Republican    39,104,550    37.45%    168    31.2%
H. Ross Perot   Independent    19,743,821    18.91%    0    0.0%

California splits its 54 electoral votes thus:

William Clinton      Democratic    5,121,325    46.36%   27
George Bush      Republican    3,630,574    32.86%   17
H. Ross Perot      Independent    2,296,006    20.78%   10

New York (33):

William Clinton      Democratic    3,444,450    50.05%   19
George Bush      Republican    2,346,649    33.88%   10
H. Ross Perot      Independent    1,090,721    15.75%      4

(it figures 18-10-4, but the rounding error goes to the winner of the plurality)

Texas (32):

George Bush   Republican    2,496,071    40.70%   15
William Clinton Democratic    2,281,815    37.08%   11
H. Ross Perot   Independent    1,354,781    22.22%      6

Florida (25):

George Bush   Republican    2,173,310    41.01%   13
William Clinton Democratic    2,072,698    39.11%     8
H. Ross Perot   Independent    1,053,067    19.87%     4

Pennsylvania (23):

William Clinton   Democratic    2,239,164    45.39%   13
George Bush   Republican    1,791,841    36.13%     6
H. Ross Perot   Independent      902,667    18.20%      4

At this point it is Clinton 75, Bush 51, Perot 28. Clinton at this point has a clear plurality in electoral votes but not a majority. I'm stopping my calculations here due to shortness of time and lack of confidence in my steadiness of crunching numbers. I guess this election goes to the House. Perot gets wiped out in the small states, though, which might result in a Clinton majority in the Electoral College. Go figure -- if you wish.   

[Talleyrand]

Option 1 with IRV or run-off

I would just go with Option 1, but if America moves past being a two-party environment, I would support this idea. I also agree that Option 2 would be a huge, undemocratic disaster,

[Roemerista]

Make it less restricted to the popular vote, and allow electors to exercise their judgement in a larger capacity.

[minionofmidas]

Option 1, with Mixed-Member PR for Congress.

Don't reform the electoral college, reform the Presidency. Make it a purely ceremonial post.

For a middling power like Germany or France, it would make sense.  For the world's superpower (or an 'empire', though perhaps the last of its kind), it is a very bad idea.  

I tend to think the world cannot afford having a presidentialist superpower around.