Is America's Bizarre Voting System a Thing of the Past?
Oct, 2008
By Sven E. Feldmann, associate professor, MBS
On November 4 voters in just a handful of American states, rather than all across the United States, determined the world's most powerful president, thanks to an outdated voting method known as the Electoral College system.
Today, eliminating the Electoral College and electing the president directly would require a near-impossible change of the Constitution-but there is a simpler method to overhaul the system, called the National Popular Vote, which has already been adopted in several states.
Under the Electoral College system each state is assigned a set number of electoral votes based on its population and casts all its votes for the majority winner in that state.
In many U.S. states partisan support for either Republicans or Democrats is so lopsided that in these ‘Red' or ‘Blue' states the outcome is virtually predetermined before voting even commences. Only in a handful of swing states such as Florida, Ohio, New Mexico or Wisconsin voters are sufficiently evenly divided so that their vote will decide the next president on election night.
As a result, a large majority of U.S. voters are disenfranchised and have little incentive to seek meaningful information about the candidates or to turn out to vote.
The National Popular Vote (NPV) effectively renders the Electoral College irrelevant. It work as follows: each state, which under the Constitution can regulate the allocation of its electoral votes, adopts a bill that pledges its electoral votes to the winner of the national vote count instead of to the state's majority winner. The law however will only go into effect once enough states have adopted an NVP bill to give them a majority of 270 votes in the Electoral College.
Since these states would control an absolute majority in the Electoral College, their vote for the winner of the national poll would automatically elect him or her president, independent of the distribution of votes in the remaining states.
The result would be a president elected directly by popular vote without formally abolishing the Electoral College or changing the Constitution. Importantly, everyone's vote would count equally, no matter in which state they reside.
The Electoral College system was originally created to enable the election of a president in a time without telecommunication and without national campaigns, and with an eye towards preserving a balance of power between the federal government and the individual states. Today the Electoral College system has few redeeming attributes.
Besides causing voters to have vastly different influence on the election outcome, the Electoral College system may, on rare occasions, also lead to the election of a candidate who did not win the highest vote total. This favours no particular party though.
Consider for example the two most recent elections. In 2000 George W. Bush won-after the Supreme Court famously stopped the vote recount in Florida-by 271 to 266 electoral votes (with one faithless elector abstaining) while trailing the popular vote by more than 500,000 votes.
In 2004, by contrast, Bush was re-elected with 286 to 251 electoral votes and a lead of 3 million popular votes over John Kerry. Had Kerry obtained 120,000 more votes in Ohio, that state's 20 electoral votes would have won him the presidency despite his losing the popular poll. The Electoral College may thus favour either party.
To abolish the anachronistic Electoral College system formally takes an amendment to the U.S. Constitution, requiring a two-thirds majority in both houses of Congress and subsequent ratification by three quarters of all states. This feat is unlikely to be accomplished in the 21st century-unless, of course, the Electoral College is already rendered superfluous once states with a total of 270 electoral votes have adopted an NPV bill.
Four states have already adopted the NPV: Maryland, Hawaii, Illinois and New Jersey. One bill is currently before California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger for final signature. If he signs it, NPV states will hold 105 electoral votes and America will be a big step closer to being a democracy where everyone's vote counts.
