The Electoral College

Frankly, I don’t know if it makes sense any more. To be best of my knowledge, we are the only country in the world that uses this type of process to elect a president.

The Electoral College (EC) is our indirect way of electing the President and Vice President. Each state and DC has one electoral vote for each federal district (I’m in Georgia’s 1st District) plus one for each senator. At this time it takes 270 votes to win, meaning that the EC has 538 voters. If you deduct 100 senators and DC’s 3 votes, that leaves 435 votes, equal to the number of representatives in Congress.

It’s commonly thought that the reason for the Electoral College was for small states to have a say in who becomes president. They don’t. The real problem with this system is that all but two states have a winner take all system. Why? To block any third party candidate from gaining public exposure. It’s all about two sides of the same coin… Republican or Democrat.

The winner take all process, means that the voting plurality (most counted votes in each state) dictates how all of that state’s electoral voters vote. As most states voters are predictable, only a few states determine each presidential election.

At this time, they are Colorado, Florida, Iowa, Michigan, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Mexico, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Wisconsin. Of these, the largest number of EC voters are Florida, Pennsylvania, Ohio and Michigan. Guess where all of the lucrative advertising revenue goes?

At the end of this article, you’ll see how I think that the system can be improved by keeping the Electoral College system, but changing it to make it fairer. It isn’t fair. The chances of amending the Constitution to a plurality system, or popular vote is slim. Very slim as it works to the advantage of the two parties. They don’t want a third party messing things up. There’s only room for two at the top.

When I looked for definitive information on the process, I concluded that we need to look at using the popular vote, instead of the Electoral College to elect the president for a number of reasons.

As written above, the Electoral College is a group of people representing each state, totaling 538 that votes to elect the President and Vice President every four years. It has a number of electors equal to its total Congressional representation, plus three for DC. So in Georgia, we have thirteen districts (before the recent redistricting) and two senators, so fifteen votes in all. As a state’s population increases it will slowly get more electoral votes as will the others, particularly Florida. And as all states have two senators, the effective number of voter population weighted votes per EC vote is about four hundred thousand.

As you can see the most populous states have the most electoral votes since they have the most districts each with about 400,000 voters. It’s all based on voting population.

The first problem that I see is that states are always jockeying for having their Primary either first or near first, so they’ll exert an influence over voters in other states when they have their Primaries at a later time.

That can create a bias.

The second problem is that most states have a distinct Republican or Democrat bias. Georgia is dependably Republican, so its Electoral College representatives will almost certainly vote for the Republican candidate. Although voters are almost equally voting Democrat or Republican, the EC votes are always Republican as more districts in Georgia are Republican and winner takes all.

That also means that the presidential candidates may not even visit all of the states as they are either a sure thing or a lost cause depending on affiliation, but will spend much of their time in states that don’t have a particular bias, known as swing states.

It’s not only time that’s spent there, but a huge amount of media revenue spent to sway the voters in those states. Georgia doesn’t get much advertising revenue as we are a sure thing.

Third and most important, most states have laws so that the winner takes all the electoral votes in that state, effectively blocking third party candidates messing up a sure thing. So much for representation. The system has been Gerrymandered even up to the presidential level.

So, to summarize if the President and Vice President was elected by a plurality of the votes – who got the most counted votes I think that the elections would be fairer or at least take out a layer of bureaucracy.

Let’s look again at how states game the system and the fix.

As I wrote, at the moment, forty-eight states and DC have a winner take all system. If 50.00001% vote Republican across each of these states, then all the electoral votes in those states will be for the Republican candidate and vice versa.

I think it fairer to do away with the winner take all method, and just divide the electoral votes by district. My district, Georgia’s 11th is heavily Republican so that delegate would vote Republican. Sanford Bishop’s 2nd District votes Democrat, so that 2nd District would vote Democrat. So rather than a popular vote for president, each district becomes in essence an electoral delegate that represents the plurality of the voters in that district. It will be a step closer to the popular vote concept, but without the need for a Constitutional Amendment.