Electoral College Dropout

A specter from of old is casting its morbid shadow over the realm of polls. I am speaking, of course, of the possibility that one candidate (Barack Obama) will lose the popular vote but win in the Electoral College. Just right now this specter seems to be taking visible form.

Mitt Romney is very slightly ahead in national polls of likely voters. Of the eight polls listed at the Real Clear Politics page, only one shows Obama with a lead (1%). That is also the oldest poll. The remaining seven give Romney a lead between 4% and a tie. Romney's lead is of course within the margin of error in all these polls, but taken together they certainly suggest that he would win the popular vote by at least a hair. Or at least he would if the election were held next Tuesday.

The Electoral College, however, actually determines the winner. Here Obama still enjoys an advantage even if it has been steadily shrinking. Romney is surging in Florida. He is showing slight leads in Virginia, New Hampshire, and Colorado. Obama still enjoys a slight lead in Ohio, which everyone seems to think is the key state in the electoral vote game.

The Real Clear Politics electoral map gives Obama/Biden (solid + likely + leaning) 201 electoral votes. It gives Romney/Ryan 181. That leaves 156 votes in the "toss up" category. RCP is being rather generous in their toss up criteria. If Obama wins Missouri or Romney wins Michigan, that will probably mean a landslide in one direction or the other. The encouraging news for the Romney camp is that more toss up states are shifting red than blue. The discouraging news for Mitt is that the RCP map with no toss ups gives Obama/Biden 294 electoral votes, 24 more than the magic 270.

I am not persuaded by the argument that the electorate has already made up its mind. I think that significant shifts in undecided/independent voters are possible and even likely. If one of the two tickets is four or five points ahead nationally as election day approaches, that ticket will win Ohio and enough of the remaining swing states to add up to an Electoral College victory.

Only if the election is very, very close, indicated by a tie in the national polls, do the state by state numbers become decisive. If the national polls on November2nd are where they are now, we would be in that situation. It is entirely possible that Barack Obama will be reelected while losing the popular vote. There is no reason to expect the opposite scenario.

I am not saying that this is likely, only that it is possible. If it should happen, allow me to pronounce judgment in advance. The rules are the rules. I like the Electoral College and I accept its outcome even if denies victory to the ticket that most voters preferred. I won't grumble about an "unelected President" as many on the opposite side of the aisle did after the 2000 election. I expect that almost all conservatives and most Republicans will do the same. We won't be babies about it.

Comments

[Troy Jones]

I agree. The Electoral College serves many purposes and in the event of a split outcome (and whisker close vote) its most important- concentrating any election fraud accusations to a single or just a few states. Could you imagine an election within a few votes and know Electoral College? Every vote of the 50 million cast could be challenged. It would take decades to resolve a single election.

[Larry Kurtz]

I've got hard eggs by the number, pullets by the score.
Everyday you love Mitt less, each day you love O more....

[Bill Fleming]

Well, it would balance things out, I suppose. A certain karmic justice. I doubt it will come to that but if it does, I hope the SCOTUS stays out of it. BTW do any other countries have an electoral college?

[Ken Blanchard]

Bill: I am less confident than you in my ability to measure karma. I suspect that the Supreme Court will intervene only if a state court first intervenes, as happened in Florida in 2000.

I don't know of anything similar to the Electoral College anywhere else, but rules that give various voting blocks a roll in major institutional decisions are common. The Stormont Assembly in Northern Ireland, for example, allows minorities (Catholics) to block certain key types of legislation.

[toto]

The precariousness of the current state-by-state winner-take-all system of awarding electoral votes is highlighted by the fact that a shift of a few thousand voters in one or two states would have elected the second-place candidate in 4 of the 13 presidential elections since World War II. Near misses are now frequently common. There have been 6 consecutive non-landslide presidential elections (1988, 1992, 1996, 2000, 2004, and 2008). 537 popular votes won Florida and the White House for Bush in 2000 despite Gore’s lead of 537,179 (1,000 times more) popular votes nationwide. A shift of 60,000 voters in Ohio in 2004 would have defeated President Bush despite his nationwide lead of over 3 million votes.

The National Popular Vote bill would change existing state winner-take-all laws that award all of a state’s electoral votes to the candidate who get the most popular votes in each separate state (not mentioned in the U.S. Constitution, but since enacted by 48 states), to a system guaranteeing the majority of Electoral College votes for, and the Presidency to, the candidate getting the most popular votes in the entire United States.

The bill preserves the constitutionally mandated Electoral College and state control of elections. It ensures that every vote is equal, every voter will matter, in every state, in every presidential election, and the candidate with the most votes wins, as in virtually every other election in the country.

Under National Popular Vote, every vote, everywhere, would be politically relevant and equal in every presidential election. Every vote would be included in the state counts and national count. The candidate with the most popular votes in all 50 states and DC would get the 270+ Electoral College votes from the enacting states. That majority of Electoral College votes guarantees the candidate with the most popular votes in all 50 states and DC wins the presidency.

National Popular Vote would give a voice to the minority party voters in each state. Now their votes are counted only for the candidate they did not vote for. Now they don’t matter to their candidate.

And now votes, beyond the one needed to get the most votes in the state, for winning in a state are wasted and don’t matter to candidates. Utah (5 electoral votes) alone generated a margin of 385,000 “wasted” votes for Bush in 2004. 8 small western states, with less than a third of California’s population, provided Bush with a bigger margin (1,283,076) than California provided Kerry (1,235,659).

With National Popular Vote, every vote, everywhere would be counted equally for, and directly assist, the candidate for whom it was cast.

Candidates would need to care about voters across the nation, not just undecided voters in a handful of swing states. The political reality would be that when every vote is equal, the campaign must be run in every part of the country.

The presidential election system that we have today was not designed, anticipated, or favored by the Founding Fathers but, instead, is the product of decades of evolutionary change precipitated by the emergence of political parties and enactment by 48 states of winner-take-all laws, not mentioned, much less endorsed, in the Constitution.

The bill uses the power given to each state by the Founding Fathers in the Constitution to change how they award their electoral votes for President. Historically, virtually all of the major changes in the method of electing the President, including ending the requirement that only men who owned substantial property could vote and 48 current state-by-state winner-take-all laws, have come about by state legislative action.

A survey of South Dakota voters showed 71% overall support for the idea that the President of the United States should be the candidate who receives the most popular votes in all 50 states. Voters were asked:

"How do you think we should elect the President: Should it be the candidate who gets the most votes in all 50 states, or the current Electoral College system?"

By political affiliation, support for a national popular vote was 61% among Republicans, 82% among Democrats, and 77% among others. By gender, support was 83% among women and 59% among men.
By age, support was 73% among 18-29 year olds, 67% among 30-45 year olds, 70% among 46-65 year olds, and 77% for those older than 65.

In Gallup polls since 1944, only about 20% of the public has supported the current system of awarding all of a state's electoral votes to the presidential candidate who receives the most votes in each separate state (with about 70% opposed and about 10% undecided). Support for a national popular vote is strong among Republicans, Democrats, and Independent voters, as well as every demographic group in virtually every state surveyed in recent polls in recent closely divided Battleground states: CO – 68%, FL – 78%, IA 75%, MI – 73%, MO – 70%, NH – 69%, NV – 72%, NM– 76%, NC – 74%, OH – 70%, PA – 78%, VA – 74%, and WI – 71%; in Small states (3 to 5 electoral votes): AK – 70%, DC – 76%, DE – 75%, ID – 77%, ME – 77%, MT – 72%, NE 74%, NH – 69%, NV – 72%, NM – 76%, OK – 81%, RI – 74%, SD – 71%, UT – 70%, VT – 75%, WV – 81%, and WY – 69%; in Southern and Border states: AR – 80%, KY- 80%, MS – 77%, MO – 70%, NC – 74%, OK – 81%, SC – 71%, TN – 83%, VA – 74%, and WV – 81%; and in other states polled: AZ – 67%, CA – 70%, CT – 74%, MA – 73%, MN – 75%, NY – 79%, OR – 76%, and WA – 77%. Americans believe that the candidate who receives the most votes should win.

The bill has passed 31 state legislative chambers in 21 states. The bill has been enacted by 9 jurisdictions possessing 132 electoral votes - 49% of the 270 necessary to go into effect.

NationalPopularVote
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[toto]

The current state-by-state winner-take-all system of awarding electoral votes maximizes the incentive and opportunity for fraud and voter suppression. A very few people can change the national outcome by adding, changing, or suppressing a small number of votes in one closely divided battleground state. With the current system all of a state's electoral votes are awarded to the candidate who receives a bare plurality of the votes in each state. The sheer magnitude of the national popular vote number, compared to individual state vote totals, is much more robust against manipulation.

National Popular Vote would limit the benefits to be gained by fraud or voter suppression. One suppressed vote would be one less vote. One fraudulent vote would only win one vote in the return. In the current electoral system, one fraudulent vote could mean 55 electoral votes, or just enough electoral votes to win the presidency without having the most popular votes in the country.

The closest popular-vote election in American history (in 1960), had a nationwide margin of more than 100,000 popular votes. The closest electoral-vote election in American history (in 2000) was determined by 537 votes, all in one state, when there was a lead of 537,179 (1,000 times more) popular votes nationwide.

For a national popular vote election to be as easy to switch as 2000, it would have to be two hundred times closer than the 1960 election--and, in popular-vote terms, forty times closer than 2000 itself.

Which system offers voter suppressors or fraudulent voters a better shot at success for a smaller effort?

[toto]

The idea that recounts will be likely and messy with National Popular Vote is distracting.

The 2000 presidential election was an artificial crisis created because of Bush's lead of 537 popular votes in Florida. Gore's nationwide lead was 537,179 popular votes (1,000 times larger). Given the miniscule number of votes that are changed by a typical statewide recount (averaging only 274 votes); no one would have requested a recount or disputed the results in 2000 if the national popular vote had controlled the outcome. Indeed, no one (except perhaps almanac writers and trivia buffs) would have cared that one of the candidates happened to have a 537-vote margin in Florida.

Recounts are far more likely in the current system of state-by-state winner-take-all methods.

The possibility of recounts should not even be a consideration in debating the merits of a national popular vote. No one has ever suggested that the possibility of a recount constitutes a valid reason why state governors or U.S. Senators, for example, should not be elected by a popular vote.

The question of recounts comes to mind in connection with presidential elections only because the current system so frequently creates artificial crises and unnecessary disputes.

We do and would vote state by state. Each state manages its own election and is prepared to conduct a recount.

The state-by-state winner-take-all system is not a firewall, but instead causes unnecessary fires.

Given that there is a recount only once in about 160 statewide elections, and given there is a presidential election once every four years, one would expect a recount about once in 640 years with the National Popular Vote. The actual probability of a close national election would be even less than that because recounts are less likely with larger pools of votes.

The average change in the margin of victory as a result of a statewide recount was a mere 296 votes in a 10-year study of 2,884 elections.

No recount would have been warranted in any of the nation’s 56 previous presidential elections if the outcome had been based on the nationwide count.

The common nationwide date for meeting of the Electoral College has been set by federal law as the first Monday after the second Wednesday in December. With both the current system and the National Popular Vote, all counting, recounting, and judicial proceedings must be conducted so as to reach a "final determination" prior to the meeting of the Electoral College.