Could a change in the way states allocate their votes in the Electoral College have changed the outcome of the 2012 presidential election? The answer to that question is generating outrage among Democrats over schemes that are currently under consideration in Virginia and some other states. That’s because had every state in the union discarded the winner-take-all rule currently used in all but two and instead employed one in which each Congressional district would be an individual contest, Mitt Romney might have earned a slim victory despite losing the popular vote.
Nebraska and Maine currently divide their votes in this manner giving both major parties a chance to win individual districts. That is each state’s prerogative since there is nothing in the Constitution saying that the winner-take-all rule is sacred. But in 2012, when President Obama won a narrow majority in the popular vote but a decisive victory in the Electoral College, allowing such splits would have created an anomalous outcome since the president’s win was predicated on his sweep of virtually every closely-fought battleground state in which he ran up big vote totals in urban areas while losing rural counties. That’s leading Democrats to call the plan to change the system in Virginia, which Obama won by a razor-thin margin, a “sore loser” scheme that is a GOP effort to subvert democracy.
Even though Republicans in some states have been talking about this issue for years, coming on the heels of their 2012 loss, it’s hard to argue that the sore loser tag doesn’t apply. Indeed, though their plan has its virtues, the idea of changing the rules in order to skew the results a bit more in their favor instead of working on issues and producing candidates that will win on their own merits sounds like exactly the sort of foolish thing Republicans ought to be avoiding as they ponder how to do better in 2016. Nevertheless, though the plan creates some bad optics for the GOP, even its Democratic critics should admit that it is neither crazy nor essentially undemocratic.
The Electoral College already gives an unfair advantage to small states that are always overestimated in Congress since each gets at least one member of the House and two in the Senate (the number of Electoral College votes each state gets is determined by their total of members in the House and Senate). But though the College rarely produces a result at variance with the national popular vote (as it did in 1876 and more recently in the Bush-Gore fiasco in 2000) it does tend to distort most results as it did again in 2012 when it gave Obama a much bigger win than his share of the popular vote would have dictated (332-206 in the College while only 51-47 in the popular). In that sense, opposition to the GOP scheme exposes many Democrats to the charge of hypocrisy since they spent most of the last year carrying on about any possible threat to the one-person, one-vote rule.
Since all Congressional districts are supposed to have approximately the same populations the new system if applied nationwide ought to allow the Electoral College to more closely mirror the popular vote around the country.
Changing the system to allow the votes of more Americans to count in the Electoral College is a move toward more democracy not less. It would also force the parties to abandon a practice of active campaigning only in swing states and force them to fight and to spend money everywhere. That means Democrats would be encouraged to compete in red states in the South and Middle West while Republicans would no longer ignore large blue states like New York and California.
But when applied to some individual states, there’s no question that it would help the GOP. President Obama’s ability to run the table in swing states was the function of his big wins in cities while losing rural districts. Romney won seven of the 11 Congressional Districts in Virginia and 11 of the 16 districts in Ohio while both states and the election.
In our current political environment in which Democrats have a stranglehold on large states such as California, New York and Illinois, the winner-take-all rule gives them a big advantage. It is true that the same change would give them a share of a large red state like Texas that they wouldn’t currently get but they would certainly be the losers in the exchange.
Assuming that elections in the future will be dictated by the politics of our present day is always a mistake. So it would be a mistake for either party to decide its position on the future of the Electoral College based on past votes. In particular, Republicans might want to think about the possible perils of changing the system before 2016 when it is entirely possible that they will be able to nominate a candidate who might win the swing states that Romney lost. Democrats may assume that demography will dictate that they will never again lose states like Virginia, Florida, Pennsylvania or Ohio but the GOP should think twice about taking votes that a candidate like Marco Rubio or Chris Christie might win and giving them to the Democrats.
In principle, there is nothing undemocratic about allocating Electoral College votes by district rather than by states. And Democrats who never complained about Nebraska or Maine having such a system are in no position to claim it is wrong for Virginia to adopt it. But since it might have prevented Obama’s re-election in a way that most Americans would have thought unfair, Republicans should not allow themselves to be seen as working to game the system in such a way as to thwart the will of the majority. If Republicans want to eliminate the unfairness baked into the Electoral College system, they can advocate scrapping it altogether. Anything short of that is not going to do them or the country a bit of good in the long run.
"Opposition to the GOP scheme exposes many Democrats to the charge of hypocrisy since they spent most of the last year carrying on about any possible threat to the one-person, one-vote rule." n nYes, changing the way electoral votes are proportioned would have given Romney the election although he lost the popular vote by more than 3.4 million votes. So if we're really serious about one-person, one-vote principle, we should get rid of the electoral college altogether.
Is it just me, or do the major party names only have meaning for all that they connote?
This is meaningless unless the big states do it. Absent CA, NY, PA and IL doing this, it would be GOP foolishness to do it in TX and the purple OH, FL, and VA.
If "winner take all" is the democratic way, why not give all the congressional seats for a state to the party that wins the most popular votes in the state as a whole, rather than from each congressional district? Allocating electoral votes to the very congressional districts that create the entitlement to each vote is the essence of democracy. n nThe purpose of an electoral college is that it enables a national election that actually produces a result and is not mired in the need to chase down every individual vote in every nook and cranny of the country or the absentee ballot mailbag. Gore's crazy lawsuit in 2000 was looking for more popular votes in congressional districts where he had won a 65% majority. If we turned the presidential election over to a pure popular vote, the Democrats would be looking for extra votes in every corner of Chicago and Los Angeles and other democrat strongholds. The entire nation would be locked into a lawsuit over the election. n
Tying electoral votes to each congressional district means that it lawsuits like Gore’s in 2000 would be rendered impossible. A candidate who won a majority in a district would get no benefit from trying to find more votes there. The possibility of a congressional district being almost evenly split is very small, and a recount would only affect a single congressional district, and a single electoral college vote, and not be worth the effort. We would eliminate a major source of uncertainty in presidential elections. n n
The fact that the national popular vote count might differ from the electoral result is not a problem the system was intended to require candidates to get broad support across regions of the country, not just in a few higher population states. The fact that small states get extra proportionally also intentionally skews the electoral vote toward broad appeal. When the majority of House members are from one party, it does not mean that the sum total of their supporters outweighed the sum total of supporters of the other party. Germany has a parliamentary election system like that. Ours is not. Matching electoral votes to congressional districts means there will be less deadlock in Washington, because a new president will have at least a House majority.
Claiming that the margin of people who voted for Obama over Romney would have their rights impaired by such a system is silly. When I was a voter in California, millions of republican voters were not allowed to have ANY influence on the outcome of the presidential election because we happened to be grouped into a state with a Democrat majority statewide, though with a third of congressional districts going Republican. The current system frustrates and discourages minority parties in every state. Pushing the presidential contest down to the congressional district level will mean that voters can make a difference in the presidential contest, and it will get more people engaged in active politics, which should be a good thing in a democracy. The correlation between the Electoral College and the popular vote will improve greatly, without the litigation risks that a direct popular vote would create. And the need to carry the presidential campaign into ALL the states will make the candidates better campaigners who cannot rely on narrow appeals to particular groups in eight states in order to win the election.
If most states, including NY, CA, TX, and FL, had proportional allocation as Maine and Nebraska do, I guarantee voter turnout would jump because so many would finally think their vote actually mattered. n nOf course, the real problem is the two party lock on presidential candidates, and a truly insane primary process. I recall Virginia's primary ballot access rules were so byzantine that only Romney and Ron Paul were on the ballot. Don't get me started on the caucus states.
States did winner take all with their EC votes to attract candidates to their states to campaign. Back then, a physical campaign in the state was the only way to be heard. Now, with television, email, and internet the winner takes all actually reduces exposure if not a battleground. n nI like the by CD system, just like I enjoy the Washington top 2 for votes, it really eliminates a lot of shannigans that were going on in the primary to spot a weak candidate for the general
The only way this would be fair is if all states do this. If only "purple" states do this (as they are all controlled by Republicans), it would distort the election process. Additionally, we'd have to take another look at gerrymandering. There are dozens of majority minority districts. This pools the Dem votes in fewer districts while giving Republicans comfortable leads elsewhere. This last election, Democrats won over a million more votes than Republicans and yet are still in the minority.