One Person, Three Votes

Back in 2000 I was one of the people defending the electoral system, stating that we’re a Federal Republic and, unless that changes, an equal portion of power needed to be given to the people in smaller states. But I just sat down with my old friend The Spreadsheet and I think I convinced myself that the electoral system needs to be revisited. I'm just going to talk through it, feel free to correct me if I'm wrong...

Since a state’s electoral votes are equal to the number of members the state has in the Senate and the House, and the House congressional districts tend to be drawn by geography and not by population, it seems to me like the weight of a single person’s vote is greatly increased in states where districting is not necessarily indicative of population size.

My first chart (below) looks at the eligible voter population for each state compared to the number of electoral votes for that state.



It looks like the “At Large” states of Wyoming, Alaska, Vermont, North Dakota, South Dakota, Delaware, and Montana have a lot more weight to their votes than the states with more than 1 Representative. DC also has entirely too much weight but I’ll let that one pass because DC doesn’t have any representation in Congress – they should have SOME sort of national advantage. This doesn’t necessarily help either the Republicans or the Democrats, honestly. The color coding of the table corresponds to the current polling data for each state with red as strong McCain, pink as leaning McCain, dark blue as strong Obama, light blue as leaning Obama, and gray as a toss-up. I do find it interesting that the Big-3 Battlegrounds of Pennsylvania, Florida, and Ohio carry three of the four lowest weights per vote. It takes a little over 3.5 people in Pennsylvania to equal one vote in Wyoming!

One thing I did find is that when you weight the votes by the number of people in each state that actually DID vote in 2004 against the electoral votes the situation is downright depressing:



Look at all of that blue on the bottom. What that basically means is that the states towards the bottom have a lot of individuals that are trying to get involved in the democratic process but their voices are being drowned out by the people who are turning out in smaller numbers. Look at all of those red states that have a disgusting 50-60% voter turnout and, as a result, they’re contributing a larger Presidential vote. And Texas – shame on Texas – with 53.7% turn out and 34 electoral votes. Texas should have electoral votes taken away…and California and New York: you’re not doing much better, either.

I don’t know what the exact point of this exercise is. It’s pretty obvious that the “At Large” states have too many electoral votes even though we’re only talking 3 votes. The obvious way to offset that would be to proportionately scale the other states electoral votes upwards since you really can’t take electoral votes away from the At Large states. But once we start doing that we’re basically a straight-up democracy and not a Federal Republic so we may as well go with the popular vote. The only reason to keep it a Federal Republic would be to offer state officials an opportunity to go against the popular vote but in this day and age that’d be career suicide. Blah, blah, blah…

The other issue here is the fact that the Red Majority we’ve seen over the past 8 years is being pushed by states that really don’t even care enough to vote. That’s a shame. Wisconsin, Michigan, Minnesota, Florida, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Oregon, Washington, Illinois, etc are really trying to have their voices heard but their vote doesn’t count as much as Utah, Mississippi, Kansas, South Carolina, etc. When you take into consideration the fact that almost all of the toss-up and leaning states where Bush states last year, there’s not a lot of Blue up top despite the higher voting rates.

Look, bottom line, if a state supplies fewer voters it actually increases the weighting of the state's electoral-per-voter weighting advantage compared to states that supply more voters. All things being equal, it's only the At Large states that have a severe electoral-per-voter weighting advantage. But all things aren't equal, and the people that are trying to participate in the process are getting the shaft. My conclusion - maybe it's time to go to the popular vote. I'm convinced now.

Labels: editorial, politics

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