The Best Defense for the Electoral College is Stunningly Flimsy.
Since you’re someone who reads about the Electoral College in your spare time, I’m sure you’ve heard a defense of it that goes like this:
“Eliminating the Electoral College would concentrate influence in high-population areas, drowning out voters in smaller states. The Electoral College makes sure candidates don’t ignore less populous states to focus just on larger vote-rich cities. Voters in all fifty states should pick the president, not just voters in New York and L.A.”
— Person With Opinions, 2019
I’m not pushing to eliminate the Electoral College. But if the “small-state/rural voter” argument is the best proponents have, that’s a bad sign for the viability of the Electoral College.
The Electoral College creates more “wasted votes” than a popular system — A LOT MORE.
Simply put, the Electoral College already does what the “small-state/rural-voter” argument warns against: It discounts the votes of entire regions and incentivizes candidates to focus only on a few specific places. The only difference: Compared to a popular vote system, the Electoral College devalues votes (especially rural votes) on a state-by-state level, as opposed to a national level, multiplying the severity of the problem.
Compared to a popular vote system, the Electoral College creates more “wasted votes,” the actual political science term, by creating dozens of “safe” states where insurmountable vote surpluses (for the state winner) or deficits (for the state loser) eliminate the value of millions of votes — often in the rural, low-population areas, which defenders argue the Electoral College supposedly protects.
Here’s how:
Wasted Votes
A “wasted vote,” is a vote cast for (1) a losing candidate, or (2) a winning candidate but in excess of what the candidate needed to win. By awarding electoral votes on a state-by-state, winner-take-all basis, the Electoral College (“EC”) creates MILLIONS more wasted votes than a popular vote (“PV”) system. The more races there are (50 state races versus one national race), the more chances there are for votes to become “wasted votes” in a huge surplus for the winner or a dead-on-arrival deficit for the loser.
The 2016 Election’s Millions of Wasted Surplus Votes.
If 2016 had been a popular vote election, the over 2.8 million vote difference between the two candidates would result in 2.8 million wasted surplus votes— every vote above what was needed to win adds no value for the winning candidate and is therefore “wasted.”
But the 2016 Election wasn’t based on the popular vote. Across just the states Clinton won, her cumulative margin was +11,014,644 votes. In other words, throw away 11 million votes in the blue states, and you still get the exact same outcome, with the same allocation of electoral votes. Similarly, across just the states Trump won, his cumulative margin was +8,605,491 votes. In other words, throw away 8.5 million Trump votes in the red states, and he still gets the same number of electoral votes.
California and New York — millions of wasted rural votes.
In California alone, Clinton beat Trump by a staggering 4,269,978 votes — 61.6% of the statewide vote compared to 32.8% of the statewide vote. In New York, Clinton beat Trump by 1,736,590 votes — 58.8% of the statewide vote compared to 37.5% of the statewide vote.
For those who argue that the Electoral College preserves the value of rural voters… see if you can tell where those Trump votes in New York and California came from.
As the county-level maps show, the millions of wasted Republican votes come from the more rural counties of northern New York and California. These are precisely the type of rural votes the EC is said to value, but in just these two states, the EC produces nearly 8 MILLION wasted deficit votes for Trump. Put in perspective, these 8 million Trump votes in just California and New York make up over 10% of all of Trump’s votes nationally. That means 1 in 10 Trump votes were guaranteed to be wasted deficit votes — overwhelmed by the predictably Democratic voters in the massive urban centers of those states.
Because safe states (and wasted votes) are predicable, candidates disregard voters in safe states and focus on swing states.
Because California and New York vote solidly Democratic in national elections, there was never a question that Clinton would win all the electoral votes from these states. When candidates can count on millions of wasted votes and predict where they will come from, it affects how they campaign.
In 2016, about 2/3 of the campaign events took place in just SIX swing states, while California and Texas — which hold 20% of the country’s people — had only one event each. Why invest resource to recruit voters that won’t matter in “safe” states?
In other words, the value of attracting one additional voter in a popular vote system is constant no matter where the voter lives — one more vote in Wyoming is as valuable as one more vote in Massachusetts, regardless of how the rest of the voters in the state vote. By contrast, the value of persuading one additional voter in the Electoral College system depends entirely on where that person lives — which for voters IN MOST STATES reduces the value of attracting that additional voter to zero.
Despite making for exciting Election Night TV coverage, I’ve never heard a process-based justification for why weighing the marginal importance of a swing state voter over that of a “safe” state voter is a positive democratic outcome — as opposed to the equal weight each vote would get if we simply determined the winner through the popular vote.
Where does that leave us?
To be clear, I’m not clamoring to get rid of the Electoral College. Despite its flaws, most of the time it reflects the popular vote outcome — recent history excluded, of course. But the primary reason is a practical one: Changing the electoral system in such a drastic way would require passing a constitutional amendment, and the odds of that ever happening are pretty slim.
But if we’re stuck with the Electoral College for the foreseeable future, can we at least stop pretending like it’s the only thing preserving the voice of rural voters? The facts show otherwise.
