by Elliott Morss, Morss Global Finance
The American President is chosen by the Electoral College (EC) and not by the actual vote. Should we continue to do this? Why should it matter? Let’s look at the results.
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The numbers from the 2016 election stand out. Clinton’s popular vote count was 65,853,514, or 2,868,686 (4.6%) more than Trump. The EC voting tells a very different story: Trump got 304 while Clinton won only 234.
These results raise two key questions:
- How could this happen, and
- What can and should be done to remedy this problem?
How Could This Happen?
First, it is important to remember why the Electoral College system (EC) was put in place. The founders were concerned that it would be a safeguard against uninformed/uneducated voters. As Alexander Hamilton said: the EC
“…ensured that the office of the President will never fall to the lot of any man who is not in an eminent degree endowed the requisite qualifications.”
Effectively, the EC means the US is not a democracy where every citizen has an equal vote. But there is more here to consider. EC voters are distributed among states in accordance with their House of Representative numbers plus the Senators (2 for each state). If electoral voters were based strictly on Representative numbers, the voters in each state would approximate their population shares. Adding the Senators makes EC voters slightly less representative by favoring the smaller states, but only by a very small amount.
Table 1 shows the actual differences between the EC and population distributions.
Table 1. – Electoral College and Population Numbers by State
The differences are not large. The rapidly growing states of California, Florida and Texas will soon get more EC voters as their share of House of Representative numbers grow. But these numbers are close enough to conclude that the EC vote allocation among states is not the reason for the population/EC vote differences. What does explain these differences?
Winner Take All (WTA)
Beyond the Constitution requiring the EC, most of the power for Presidential elections is left to the states. So the key element here is how individual states chose to allocate their votes. With the exception of Maine and Nebraska, states award EC votes by winner-take-all rather than by vote shares. The reason behind this is each state will have a greater impact in the national election if all their votes go to the winning candidate in their state.
Table 2 shows how this works and the problem with this approach. Suppose we have 3 states with the same number of electoral votes (10). And suppose that in one state, Candidate 1 won by a large margin. And suppose that in states B and C, Candidate 2 won by very small margins.
In this case, candidate A won the popular vote but lost by the EC standard. How and why can this happen? It is because under WTA, significant numbers of State A’s votes for Candidate 2 are lost.
Table 2. – Voting Example
This example helps explain what happened to Clinton in 2016. Table 3 provides data on states that Clinton lost by small numbers. Note that under WTA, all of these EC votes went to Trump even though Clinton only lost these states in toto by a bit more than one million votes.
Table 3. – States That Clinton Lost by Small Numbers
Possible Remedies
a. Constitutional Amendment
Many argue that the EC is anachronistic, and should be replaced by an amendment saying the President should be elected by a one person – one vote system. But getting an amendment enacted would be problematic: Amendments may be proposed either by the Congress with a two-thirds vote in both the House of Representatives and the Senate or by a convention of states called for by two-thirds of the state legislatures. That is probably possible. But to become part of the Constitution, an amendment must be ratified by either – as determined by Congress – the legislatures of three-quarters of the states or state ratifying conventions in three-quarters of the states.
Getting the required 75% states to vote for such an amendment would be very difficult. According to Gallup, 36% of states have a Republican majority. And most Republicans are likely to oppose such an amendment inasmuch as there are fewer Republicans than Democrats in the US.
b. The National Popular Vote Interstate Compact (NPVIC)
The NPVIC is an agreement among a group of U.S. states and the District of Columbia to award all their electoral votes to whichever presidential candidate wins the overall popular vote in the 50 states and the District of Columbia. It becomes effective when states having a majority of EC votes (270) have joined. So far, states with 196 votes have joined.
Table 4. – NPVIC Members
So where might the needed 74 votes come from? Table 5 provides EC votes and party affiliation in the remaining states. The party affiliation comes from Gallup data where SD = Solid Democrat, LD = Leaning Democratic, CO = Competitive, LR = Leaning Republican and SD = Solid Republican.
It is notable that if the competitive (CO) states joined, even without Texas, NPVIC would have 296 votes.
Table 5. – EC Votes and Strength of Party Affiliation
Conclusions
The time for and justification for the Electoral College has passed. It would be difficult to get a Constitutional Amendment enacted. But the NPVIC offers at least a temporary way of moving forward.
Acknowledgement
George Raymond, a friend, provided me with information that interested me in this subject.
