Electoral College Failures, Past and Present

In a democracy, irrational commands are still less to be feared: for it is almost impossible that the majority of a people, especially if it be a large one, should agree in an irrational design. - Spinoza, Tractacus Theologico-Politicus.

The people may be occasionally surprised and misled by those who abuse their confidence into measures repugnant to their interests and duty, still, if the majority of them can, for ten years together, be duped, and led hoodwinked to the very precipice of treason, by their perfidious guides, … they show themselves unfit for self government. - Harrison Gray Otis and others in a January 1829 letter to John Quincy Adams.

There is frequent enough turnover of parties in the White House to say that the people’s voice is being heard. But is it really? At any given time, about half of the people are displeased with the occupant of the White House. In the 2016 election, it can be fairly said that more than half of the people who voted did not choose the winner.

The Electoral College

The United States elects the president by the indirect method of the electoral college. The number of electors for each state is the same as the number of seats held in the congress. The District of Columbia, which has a non-voting representative in the house and no representation in the senate has three electoral votes, the same as the low population states with one house member.

The electoral college was intended to prevent an uninformed electorate from electing a popular but potentially unqualified candidate for president. In today’s version of the electoral college, marking the box for a candidate chooses a pre-appointed slate of electors who are required to cast their state’s electoral college votes for that candidate.

The creation of the electoral college was a compromise among factions in the constitutional convention. The original plan only worked a few times before it required modification to avoid a repeat of the tied electoral college result in the year 1800. Even as improved with the 12th amendment, the design of the electoral college did not foresee the impact of political parties on the electoral process.

Although it may have been envisioned as a deliberative body, it is not, and probably never was. Electors meet in their separate states, and never deliberate as an entire body. Reading the history of political parties and the electoral college, it is hard to see which one had the greater influence over the other. Did political parties form to exploit the electoral college process? Or did the electoral college process require the formation of parties to ensure a limited number of qualified candidates could be fielded to create a national contest?

The result reached early in our nation’s history is that electors are party loyalists who are bound to vote for their party’s candidate. How this is enforced varies from state to state, as the constitution leaves these details to the states.

It would be political suicide for an elector to vote for someone other than their party’s candidate. Therefore, it is very rare.

The 2016 election

Here are the numbers for the 2016 presidential contest. These are summarized from Wikipedia data available on March 18, 2017.

In addition to the seven “faithless” electors who succeeded in casting a vote for a candidate that they were not bound to, three electors attempted to but were prevented from doing so. That is a record high. But, a mere footnote in that the faithless electors had no impact on the outcome.

How is it possible that the electoral college result could be so far tilted from the popular vote? It’s a combination of simple math and not so simple politics.

Electoral College Math

Let’s start with the simple math, a comparison of extremes. Because of the electoral college, a citizen casting a vote for president in Wyoming has 3.6 times the voting power as someone in California. These states are at the extreme ends of the effect that the electoral college has in amplifying or reducing the effective voting power of voters in each state.

Here’s how the math works out for these two states. The populations are from the 2010 census, which determined the allocation of house seats (and therefore electoral college votes) starting in 2012.

By the constitution, each state has at least one house seat. The remaining 385 seats are allocated proportionally among the states based on population, again as required by the constitution. The math used allocate the house seats is precise, but is not given in detail in the constitution. This is a good example of how a few words can give a clear intention, but requiring a detailed process to be fulfilled.

In this comparison, California, which has the largest state population and the largest number of residents per electoral college vote, is assigned a voter amplification of 1.0 (i.e. no amplification). In the electoral college, a voter in California has the least representation of among voters in all states. Compared to California, a voter in Wyoming has 3.6 times the representation in the electoral college: 678,945 / 189,433 = 3.6. States with smaller populations are more represented in the electoral college. This is not an accident. It follows from the house and senate make up of the congress, given that each state has two senators and at least one house member.

The chart below shows the electoral college voter amplification for the 15 states with the lowest populations (2010 census) including the District of Columbia. These jurisdictions together comprise about 5% of national population, but are allocated 10% of the electoral college votes.

The states are shown left to right from smallest to largest population. The lower (yellow) line shows the cumulative population as a percentage of the national population. The upper (green) line shows the cumulative electoral college vote as a percentage of the total 538. The red and blue markers indicate the electoral college relative voting power (amplification) in the 2016 election: red for a Republican party victory and the blue for a Democratic party victory.

The chart shows that both parties have an equal share of these high voting power states. It is the same when considering the outcome 2016 voting for all 50 states and the District of Columbia. Among all states and the District of Columbia the Democratic party scored one extra electoral college vote than the Republican party due to electoral college voter amplification. That’s nearly an even split of electoral college amplification benefit between the two parties.

That is considering the population of each state, not the actual number of voters.

Turnout, turnout, turnout

Regardless of voter turnout, each state casts its allocated number of electoral college votes. It is this aspect of the electoral college that can cause it to not represent the will of the people. If, regardless of voter turnout, the result in each state generally matches the sentiments of its eligible voters, the electoral college is probably working as it was intended.

Does the popular vote in each state represent the sentiments of its eligible voters? Why do some people not vote? Can every citizen wishing to cast a vote do so? How to measure the sentiment of people who do not vote? After an election, do the opinions and preferences of non-voters matter and voters on the losing side matter? Is the original intent of electing the president through the electoral college obsolete? Did the electoral college ever work as intended?

Elections leading up to the tied electoral college of 1800

Under the first electoral college system put in place by the constitution, the electors simply cast two votes for candidates, with at least one vote cast for someone not from the elector’s state. The electors did not indicate which vote was for president, and which was for vice president. This system allowed the electors to potentially favor a candidate from their state, while also creating a national contest by requiring them the cast a vote for a candidate not from their state.

In the first system, the candidate receiving the most electoral college votes won the presidency, the candidate with the second largest vote tally won the vice presidency. Electors at that time, and still today, meet in their own states, and send the ballots to congress, to be officially counted later.

An aspect of the first scheme, which today is unimaginable, is that political opponents could be elected to the office of president and vice president.

In the first presidential election, 1788, George Washington was chosen by unanimous vote of the electoral college. Due to Washington’s popularity, there was no doubt about the outcome in advance of the election. What was not known was who would be elected vice president, as candidates at that time did not run on a joint ticket. Electors cast votes for 11 other candidates, with John Adams receiving the most votes among them.

The first US census was conducted in 1790, and determined the allocation of electoral college votes for the 1792 election. Like today’s composition of the electoral college, individual voters in small states had more representation than voters in large states. In 1792, voters in Georgia had 3.7 times more electoral college voting power than voters in Virginia, similar to today’s ratio for Wyoming and California. George Washington was elected to a second term by unanimous vote of the electoral college, receiving 132 votes. John Adams won re-election as vice president.

The first contested presidential election was in 1796. John Adams won the electoral college vote. Thomas Jefferson, his political opponent, won the second most votes, and was elected vice president.

The electoral college tie of 1800

In 1800 the presidential contest was between Thomas Jefferson and John Adams. Aaron Burr ran as Jefferson’s vice president, a joint ticket that the electoral college was not originally designed to handle. To successfully elect Jefferson as president and Burr as vice president, one of the electors was supposed to withhold a vote for Burr, to make Jefferson the clear winner, and Burr the runner up. However, no vote was withheld, so the election was tied. According to the constitution, the House of Representative resolved the election, after 32 rounds of voting.

While the electoral college never meets as single deliberating body, arranging to withhold a vote in 1800, however that was done, was something like deliberation. Thus, on perhaps the one occasion when the electoral college was to work as a deliberative body, it failed utterly at the task.

The electoral college never worked as intended

There have been many proposals to alter or eliminate the electoral college. It would be interesting to crunch the numbers from the 2016 election, relative to such schemes. But it seems likely that only direct election by national popular vote could have resulted in a Clinton victory in 2016.

From generally espoused principles of democracy, it’s difficult to argue that the electoral college makes a better choice when it does not reflect the popular vote. There is no deliberation or choice exercised by the electoral college.

In the first two elections for president, the electoral college was successful only because of the overwhelming popularity of George Washington. In the third election the victors for president and vice president were political opponents. The fourth election resulted in an electoral college tie which led to a constitutional crisis and subsequent amendment to the constitution that required the electors to cast votes explicitly for president and vice president.

The fact that the electoral college failed so early in its history might indicate that the founders, collectively, did not have much insight as to how the electoral college would work. Whatever process they imagined would play out to insulate the selection of the president from a possibly uninformed electorate was quickly hijacked by political parties to remove any possible deliberation from the electoral college process.

Until the 2016 election the control that the major parties had in designating the slate of electors for each state may have performed the desired electoral college role, by limiting the field of candidates. The essential intended role of the electoral college, making the right choice, devolved to the major political parties in that they narrow the field of candidates to qualified persons. If all candidates are thus qualified for the job, the electoral college can make the right choice, even though in practice it has no choice.

Amplifying differences

The numerical effect of the electoral college can amplify, and even reverse the actual voter sentiment of the nation. Victors may cite the number of states they carried, or even the number of electoral college votes, as if these numbers represent the true will of the people. A victorious Donald Trump was not even content with this when, on November 27, 2016 he claimed without offering any substance that Hillary Clinton only won the popular vote due to “millions of people who voted illegally”.

Counting votes that were cast for third party candidates, 54% of voters supported someone other than Donald Trump. Rather than find some humility in his 11 million vote deficit, the President would rather believe is it not real. At best, his baseless claim of voter fraud is a misdirection.

Another problem

The way the House of Representatives is constituted also provides a means for political parties to exploit the advantages they hold in each state. The party that controls its state legislature, even by slim margins, typically exploits the house redistricting process to maximize the number of seats it holds in the congress. This is clear from the fact that the party in power holds a greater proportion of seats in the house, compared to the percentage of the electorate that voted for them. The party in power can also enact election laws that affect the turnout in its favor, for example new voter ID requirements, and reducing early voting opportunities.

Over-representing victory

Politicians and their surrogates love a mandate. By the simple act of winning an election, a politician does have a mandate to govern. See the dictionary definition. But often the claim of a mandate suggests an electoral supremacy, something more than what it actually is. Here are some recent quotes.

What Donald Trump just pulled off was an enormous political feat… [He] just earned a mandate. - Paul Ryan, November 9, 2016.

This election was not close. It was not a squeaker. There is a mandate there, and there is a mandate for his 100-day agenda, as well. - Kellyanne Conway, November 13, 2016.

We truly believe that our president-elect has secured a mandate for leadership. - Mike Pence, December 6, 2016.

All of these statements are consistent with the outcome of the election, but only because of the peculiar institution of the electoral college. Other than that, claims like these are in direct contradiction to what an overwhelming majority of voters intended. We can’t indict the process by which Donald Trump’s election occurred, at least in terms of the constitution and law. But we can fault the winners for over-stating the extent of the support they actually have.