Crazy But Able

David S. Bennahum (I have no idea who he is, but I got the link from kottke) posted a brief piece on abolishing the Electoral College. It’s heavy on statistics like these:

The state with the most electoral leverage, meaning the smallest number of elligible voters per elector, is Wyoming: A “red state” in 2000, and the home of our Vice President. In Wyoming, there are 120,000 eligible voters per electoral voter. That makes it #1.

The state with the highest ratio of elligible voters to electors is Pennsylvania. In PA, there are 436,000 eligible voters per electoral voter. Thus a voter in Wyoming is worth 2.6 times “more” than a voter in Pennsylvania. Who said “one voter, one vote?” More like, “one voter, some kind of vote.”

Seems quite unfair that some schmuck’s vote in Wyoming is going to be “worth more” than mine. But who decides how many electoral votes each state gets? The Constitution, that’s who. In Article II, Section 1, in the second paragraph it says that each state has the same number of electoral votes as it has senators and representatives.

So… why abolish the electoral college when you could just increase the total number of representatives in the house, and re-apportion them based on the current population?

It’s totally within Congress’s ability to do this. Article 1, Section 2: “The actual Enumeration shall be made within three Years after the first Meeting of the Congress of the United States, and within every subsequent Term of ten Years, in such Manner as they shall by Law direct.” That happens every ten years when we do the census, by the way.

So, in 6 years, the house of representatives will meet to reapportion representatives among the states. But they don’t just have to only reapportion based on the census, they can increase the total number of representatives as well. So why not start a campaign to increase the total number of representatives in the US to even out the discrepancies in the Electoral College?

It neatly solves the problem without needing a constitutional amendment. It also preserves the many benefits of the Electoral College. I hear lots of gripes about the EC but I rarely hear people talking about the good aspects about it. Check out the quotes below to see some of the good things that people have to say about the EC before you make up your mind one way or the other.

Dean Esmay:

The electoral college is a very strong force for moderation in Presidential politics. In order to win the Presidency, you cannot concentrate on only getting Christian voters, or white voters, or the votes of everybody in one region. Instead, Presidential candidates are forced to travel the country, pay attention to numerous local issues, and pay more attention to minority interests and minority views than they ever would if they were simply required to get a popular vote majority.

Steven DenBeste:

I think one of the basic strengths of our system compared to those in Europe is what I referred to in this article as a high threshold of noise rejection. The idea is that fringe or extreme political viewpoints cannot significantly influence the system through local dominance in a small area or by having a small number of followers spread around everywhere. It’s structural, and what it means is that we are relatively less vulnerable to extreme political opinions. Which means we can tolerate them. We can tolerate wide expression of extremely strange, even vile, political positions because they won’t make much difference until they are supported by a significant proportion of the electorate nationwide, and generally the weirdest ones will have no chance of ever doing that.

In Europe and in other places where the Parliamentary system is used, and where the system is specifically designed to permit minority political opinions to gain representation in the Parliament, then such small groups can wring serious concessions in exchange for joining a ruling coalition, and may have political influence all out of proportion to their numbers. Some claim this is a good thing, and the Belgian system of nation-wide voting for parties is probably the form most optimized for making sure such groups can get representation in the Parliament.

But whether it’s philosophically desirable to have the widest possible range of political positions represented in the Parliament, as a practical matter what it means is that the Europeans are at all times distinctly nervous about any group which advocates particularly extreme positions, who might only need to gain support from a few percent of the population in order to be assigned MPs. So to avoid that they use content-level censorship of political discourse. It’s illegal in most of Europe to show any Nazi logo or to advocate a resurgence of Nazism; and there are obvious painful memories which explain a lot of that. But one of the practical reasons why is that they fear a new resurgence of Nazism, and it wouldn’t have to become very large before it became politically significant. And in general they engage in a lot of other kinds of content-based censorship (usually based on a general ban on “hate speech”), in hopes of preventing certain kinds of political points of view from gaining enough power to begin to participate in Parliament.

Kim DuToit:

With the population density in the United States as it is today (and as it is in most Western countries), it is clear that under a popular democracy only the viewpoints of city and suburban folk would receive a hearing — and moreover, only those cities and suburbs in the Northeast / Atlantic states, on the West Coast and around the Chicago / Milwaukee / Detroit Midwest metropolitan area.

Any politician seeking office need only campaign pretty much in those three areas to be assured of a popular voting majority — and given the relative homogeneity of the politics in those areas, the United States would be a different country from what it is today.

The Electoral College, therefore, allows each state to pick the man it feels would best represent their interests. The Founding Fathers, being keen students of history and the beneficiaries of a true classical education, knew that simple majority rule led, inevitably, to the imposition of the will of the many upon the few.

Without protection of minority interests, of course, comes civil unrest. And it should also be noted that the views of the majority are not always the correct view, either: and by being tempered by the minority view, such mistakes are likewise delayed, tempered or not implemented at all.

This entry was posted on Friday, October 8th, 2004 at 12:14 pm and is filed under politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.