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Electoral Math Against Tyranny

Several years ago, either Jerry Kindall or Dean Esmay got me to read this 1996 Discover magazine article, Math Against Tyranny, about the US Electoral College. After the close vote in 2000, lots of people - particularly progressives - are calling again for the abolition of the system, preferring direct national elections to state-by-state contests. In this article, Will Hively explains how MIT physicist Alan Natapoff proved that the Electoral College - or any districting option - actually increases every voter's power in a national election.

It's behind a subscription firewall, and if you don't subscribe to Discover, you'll have to pay $1 to read it, but it is so worth the buck. Now, in 1996, Natapoff couldn't have anticipated the incredibly close 2000 election, and his results show that if the electorate is very closely divided, a national election might be better - but that's so rare that it shouldn't be national policy. (It also neglects that the real controversy in 2000 wasn't the Electoral College as much as that shenanigans awarded Florida's electoral votes to Bush, when every reasonable measurement and count shows that more people attempted to vote for Gore.)

Here are some excerpts to pry that buck out of you:

The more Natapoff looked into the nitty-gritty of real elections, the more parallels he found with another American institution that stirs up wild passions in the populace. The same logic that governs our electoral system, he saw, also applies to many sports--which Americans do, intuitively, understand. In baseball's World Series, for example, the team that scores the most runs overall is like a candidate who gets the most votes. But to become champion, that team must win the most games. In 1960, during a World Series as nail-bitingly close as that year's presidential battle between Kennedy and Nixon, the New York Yankees, with the awesome slugging combination of Mickey Mantle, Roger Maris, and Bill Moose Skowron, scored more than twice as many total runs as the Pittsburgh Pirates, 55 to 27. Yet the Yankees lost the series, four games to three. Even Natapoff, who grew up in the shadow of Yankee Stadium, conceded that Pittsburgh deserved to win. Nobody walked away saying it was unfair, he says.

Runs must be grouped in a way that wins games, just as popular votes must be grouped in a way that wins states. The Yankees won three blowouts (16-3, 10-0, 12-0), but they couldn't come up with the runs they needed in the other four games, which were close. And that's exactly how Cleveland lost the series of 1888, Natapoff continues. Grover Cleveland. He lost the five largest states by a close margin, though he carried Texas, which was a thinly populated state then, by a large margin. So he scored more runs, but he lost the five biggies. And that was fair, too. In sports, we accept that a true champion should be more consistent than the 1960 Yankees. A champion should be able to win at least some of the tough, close contests by every means available--bunting, stealing, brilliant pitching, dazzling plays in the field--and not just smack home runs against second-best pitchers. A presidential candidate worthy of office, by the same logic, should have broad appeal across the whole nation, and not just play strongly on a single issue to isolated blocs of voters.

[...]

Why worry how easily one vote can turn an election, so long as each voter has equal power? One person, one vote--that's all the math anyone needs to know in a simple, direct election. Natapoff agrees that voters should have equal power. The idea, he says, is to give every voter the largest equal share of national voting power possible. Here's a classic example of equal voting power: under a tyranny, everyone's power is equal to zero. Clearly, equality alone is not enough. In a democracy, individuals become less vulnerable to tyranny as their voting power increases.

James Madison, chief architect of our nation's electoral college, wanted to protect each citizen against the most insidious tyranny that arises in democracies: the massed power of fellow citizens banded together in a dominant bloc. As Madison explained in The Federalist Papers (Number X), "a well-constructed Union must, above all else, break and control the violence of faction, especially the superior force of an ... overbearing majority." In any democracy, a majority's power threatens minorities. It threatens their rights, their property, and sometimes their lives.

A well-designed electoral system might include obstacles to thwart an overbearing majority. But direct, national voting has none. Under raw voting, a candidate has every incentive to woo only the largest bloc-- say, Serbs in Yugoslavia. If a Serb party wins national power, minorities have no prospect of throwing them out; 49 percent will never beat 51 percent. Knowing this, the majority can do as it pleases (lacking other effective checks and balances). But in a districted election, no one becomes president without winning a large number of districts, or states - say, two of the following three: Serbia, Bosnia, and Croatia. Candidates thus have an incentive to campaign for non-Serb votes in at least some of those states and to tone down extreme positions--in short, to make elections less risky events for the losers. The result, as George Wallace used to say, may often be a race without a dime's worth of difference between two main candidates, which he viewed as a weakness but others view as a strength of our system.

[...]

Natapoff concedes that the Madisonian system does contain within it one small, unavoidable paradox. Every once in a while, if we use districting to jack up individual voting power, we'll have an electoral anomaly--a loser like Harrison will nudge out a slightly more popular Cleveland. He sees those anomalies, as well as the more frequent close calls, not as defects but as signs that the system is working. It is protecting individual voting power by preserving the threat that small numbers of votes in this or that district can turn the election. We were blinded by its minor vices, he says. All that happens is someone with fewer votes gets elected, temporarily. What doesn't happen may be far more important. In 1888, victorious Republicans didn't celebrate by jailing or killing Democrats, and Democrats didn't find Harrison so intolerable that they took up arms. Cleveland came back to win four years later, beating Harrison under the same rules as before. The republic survived.

The article doesn't address one key part of electoral math I'd like to see treated with more depth. The Electoral College grants one elector to each state for each of its members of Congress. That's one for each representative and senator, plus three electors for Washington DC, for a total of 538 votes. In essence, every state gets two electoral votes just for being a state, which throws off the purity of districting by population discussed in the article.

In the 2000 election, Bush won (or was awarded) 30 states for 271 electoral votes. Gore won 20 states plus DC for 266 electoral votes (one DC elector abstained from the presidential vote to protest the Florida debacle). If you remove the 102 electors that had nothing to do with population-determined districts, the Electoral College would have 436 electors, and the winning candidate would require 219 votes to avoid sending the race to the House of Representatives. (Plurality isn't enough - constitutionally, the presidential winner must have the majority of electoral votes.)

In 2000, under those rules, Bush would have had 211 electors, and Gore would have had 224.

This is what people mean when they talk about the bias towards smaller states in the Electoral College. It's not necessarily that the candidate who wins Oklahoma shouldn't get all seven of Oklahoma's electoral votes - it's that he should get five votes, just like the candidate who wins California should get 52 votes instead of 54. The "senatorial" electoral voters give California 4% more votes than it would have by population, but they give Oklahoma 28% more electoral votes, and both Wyoming and DC get 66% more electoral votes than population would decree.

I'd love to know how this effects the actual voting power. Natapoff's findings make it clear that even in 2000, the "districted" method of forcing candidates to win individual states gives everyone more power than one giant national vote tally would, but I really do wonder how adding two more votes to every state, regardless of population, throws off the math.

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