4 Comments to 'The Popular Vote in CA'
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The Popular Vote in CA
Posted By avi
Followup:
The PBS show NOW will reportedly soon (tomorrow) be covering issues of voting rights in various states and the push underway by the GOP (with help from the DOJ) to rewrite the rules and throw even more poor and disenfranchised voters off the rolls.
Previously:
Popular vote gets thumbs up in Calif. - Yahoo! News
So if California approves this, and New York, Texas, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Florida follow, we could actually see increasing democratization (small D) of the Presidential election process. The measure, if passed by a conservative Governator, kicks in after other states (totaling 270 electoral votes) jump on board. I’m hoping the biggest states will do so first, since that’ll make the biggest impact in the process.
Republicans are against the measure, they say, because it undermines the Constitution. There’s only just a slight credibility gap there. They may be confusing "democratization" with "Democrat-ization." In practice, I think this might help Republicans as much as it hurts them, if they can get over their fear of accountability to voters.
If California gives all 55 votes to the next Democrat, for example, that’s 55 lost to the GOP. If the GOP can swing even 10 of those their way, that could swing a close election overall. I’m guessing they could easily get 20 out of 55 with a popular candidate. Unless they field another Reagan, they lose them all.
The reason I mentioned Florida and Ohio, and the reason this provision is really so controversial, I believe, is that such an improved system could also undermine voting games done in those states in particular. If you can get 51% in those states, that’s 47 electoral votes. Fifty-one percent is what you’d go for if you were rigging votes or bouncing legitimate voters–just enough to win, but not enough to get challenged. And that’s what I believe we saw in the last two elections. Switching to a popular vote would require vote rigging to go to the extreme to get those kind of results, and that would be much easier to spot. If they took the 51% strategy national, they’d have to pull off this sort of coup (literally) in all 50 states for it to work.
Of course, the downside to the popular vote is that it further diminishes the role of states as viable political entities, beyond mere middlemen. Some libertarians yearn for the days when states appointed Senators in the legislature, rather than holding direct elections. The increasing federalization of power has meant more concentration in Washington, and theoretically more opportunities for abuse. Still, direct election of Senators didn’t stop Ted Stevens from getting his state money for his Bridge to Nowhere (the bridge itself was officially cut, but the money wasn’t). So I’m not sure abuse is any more or less under a more federalized system. The main issue is still accountability, and we’re still woefully lacking on that front.
More on the Colorado version of this: http://www.usatoday.com/news/politicselections/state/colorado/2004-08-16-colo-electoral_x.htm
Aug 31st, 2006
Interesting; California and Colorado’s bills have the same goal — moving closer to a pure popular vote — but they go about it in different ways. California’s seems like a much bolder move.
After the 2000 election, I found this article linked to from discussions about the merits of the electoral college. It makes a mathematical argument in favor of the electoral college that I think is pretty interesting. If a candidate I favored had lost the popular vote but won the electoral vote, I would probably be citing that article to anyone who argued that it was unfair, so I feel like I ought to point to it even when a candidate I hate wins in the same way.
I don’t know, Ted. I just read the article and I think I understand the logic, if not the underlying equations (not shown). The baseball analogy is poor, for starters. The World Series is designed to get viewer attention, not decide which team gets more runs or even which team is better overall.
In the case of the real election math, the claim is that we have less voting power in cases where the bias for one candidate over the other is more than, say, 55/45. But in that case, if say, Wyoming’s votes tip the overall election either way, are we all better off? That’s good for Wyoming, as they get more power, but bad for the rest of us who have an election decided based on pandering to their local issues.
Candidates currently spend their time on the likely Wyomings (the close calls) and ignore the states they’re likely to fully win or lose. That’s not good for most of us, especially in the solid states, and it make it more polarizing, not less, because polarized states mean less work for the campaigns. There’s no work to be done. And they’ll pick more polarizing issues to improve their odds.
And it’s the 51/49 elections I’m most worried about, because that’s where any fraudsterhas more power than any individual voter.
Perhaps the question is, is switching to a purely popular vote the best way to combat ballot fraud? Ideally, I think, better ballot verification would be the way to prevent fraud, and then we could evaluate the relative merits of the electoral college and the popular vote more objectively.
I pointed out that article because a lot of people (not you, necessarily) think that the electoral college is intrinsically a bad idea because it can go against the popular vote. But as I’m sure you know, the electoral college is one approach to combating the general problem of democracy, the tyranny of the majority. The electoral college prevents one side’s overwhelming majority in one part of the country from making the other side’s slimmer majority elsewhere irrelevant. The comparison to the World Series is useful inasmuch as the World Series is something familiar to a lot of people. (And the best-of-seven playoff format is not unique to the World Series.) I agree that it’d have been nice if the article had included more math.
Various forms of government have been proposed to retain the benefits of democracy and avoid the tyranny of the majority, but all have their weaknesses. If we as a country decide to switch to a popular vote, I hope it’s for the right reasons.
Since each state gets 2 EC votes regardless of population (one per senator, and then one for each congressperson), the system gives some more power to the states with lower population. So going to direct elections would shift some power from smaller states.
But it’s not much power to or from individual people. Within each smaller state, the majority could just as easily override the minority, so the assumption is that states vote in bloc, which I don’t think is true. I’d argue that the senate already gives a lot of power to the smaller states, who get as much of a vote as any.
If you really want to prevent the tyranny of the majority, the best way to do that is move up from a simple majority. If the winner of a Presidential election required 60% or 66% of the overall vote before a run-off, it would do much more than the electoral college could ever do for fairness, and also help mitigate the 51% fraud issue I mentioned (for which better ballots are the best answer).