Doing the math: Electoral College or Popular Vote
My last posts on the electoral college value sparked a good debate with some of my friends on social media. Most agreed with the reasoning: The college serves (among other things) to “mute down” (read: to lessen, not to quiet) the influence of larger population centers while uplifting, if ever so slightly in most cases, the voices of the small and remote minority. There are those who hold onto the belief that this is still flawed, and 1 vote should count for 1 vote, no matter where or by whom it was cast. So, let’s take a look at that more closely.
If you and your shift of co-workers (say, 10 in all) want to go out for lunch, how is that decision reached? Let’s assume two choices have bubbled to the surface: Mexican or Barbeque. 6 want Mexican; 4 want BBQ. Mexican wins. Simple, binary choice, simple majority, and really no extenuating factors. 1 vote for each, all weighed equally. Much like Congressmen and Senators today. Each senator represents 1/100th of the nation, while each congressman represents 1/435th of the nation. Each parcel they represent is relatively small and has a finite number of issues to be represented. The majority vote wins – 1 vote per elector.
Now let’s change the game a bit. Perhaps your whole company wants to go to lunch, and there are 1,000 of you. Putting aside the shear table size needed for a moment, let’s look at how that voting would work. The dimensions have changed, so voting just became more complex. Let’s say there are still two choices: Mexican and BBQ; but there are also concerns from a small minority over food allergies, gluten, lactose, and vegetarian needs. But there are also those who want to support local eateries, while others want to go to a national chain. And still there are others who want to walk to a nearby place, while others don’t mind driving. This then brings in the anti-fossil-fuel group, pitted against the big truck drivers, followed closely by the inevitable Prius drivers who try to straddle the fence in the conversation. But despite all of those different dimensions, the real challenge is that 600 people work in the Call Center, while 100 work in the warehouse, 100 work in Finance and Admin, 100 work in Sales, and 100 work in the Repair team. Basically, the major population group is the Call Center. What they want potentially drives the entire vote, period. Stay with me…
Interesting fact: The Call Center has a strong preference for Mexican food. It appears they immigrated from the East Coast, where everybody knows the Mexican food is horrible. They now binge-eat salsa at every opportunity.
In order to not have one group (the Call Center) always drive the vote, the company instituted a system whereby voting has been adjusted to allow for slightly stronger voices for the minority teams; otherwise they would never (yes, never) be heard. They would eat Mexican forever. As a result, the Call Center votes are weighted at 0.9, and the other much, much smaller teams are weighted at 1.1. The idea was simple: If every vote counted equally, the larger Customer Care group would always drive the outcome; the other voices, while they carried equal weight, were spread out and diluted among 4 groups and therefore their concerns and needs were otherwise ignored.
So, what was the outcome of this move? Well, a straight department-line vote where the Call Center voted one way and everyone else voted the other way would still yield the same outcome. The count would be closer, however, yielding an “electoral” count of 540-440, Mexican still wins. But – if the BBQ choice was for Texas BBQ instead of Kansas BBQ, then some of the Call Center folks would shift over to the other side. In fact, they would only need 68 defections (instead of 101) to the BBQ side to push the vote to a 501-479, and BBQ wins. But the important theory here is still critical to keep in mind: The system was designed deliberately to ensure smaller voices would never be buried and ignored in favor of a larger group.
Herein lies the electoral system we have today. The President must gain support from all sectors of our society. A straight-up, equally-weighted vote would yield only one outcome: Population centers in 7, and possibly up to 10 states would garner all the election attention, all the focus on their issues, and the rest of the nation would be almost completely ignored. Colorado ranks 23rd on that list, for those of you who still think this is okay. We would never – never – be seriously heard. Places like Wyoming, with serious issues they share with Colorado around Oil and Gas, tourism, and massive National Parks and protected lands, would get zero say in anything. They rank dead last.
And by the way – those same states that would control rankings in a popular vote are the same states that hold the most electoral votes. If we looked at electoral weightage, however, Wyoming actually rises to the top – with each vote weighing 2.9 instead of 1. They are in a group of 6 states and the District of Columbia that all have weightage above 2.0… but before anyone gets upset about that, note that they also only represent a combined total of 3 million votes in a sea of 161 million registered voters (1.8%). But their voices are slightly elevated. Colorado is 39th on that list, with a weightage of .933 instead of 1.
Conclusions in all of this: First, yes, in a non-electoral system, Colorado would rise to 22nd in terms of number of registered voters. However, Colorado would still be far, far away from enough voters (2.9 million) for candidates to care about stopping by. And under the Polis-signed law where Colorado gives away its electoral votes to the majority winner, Colorado drops to dead last in the rankings. Our vote, under this law, makes absolutely no difference in who gets our electoral support. If we vote 99% against someone and they still win by 1 vote nationwide, our electoral votes would go to them. Period. The only saving grace in this new law currently is that it doesn’t take effect until states representing 270 electoral votes join in. To date 184 votes are now committed, and 154 are in legislative processes. This will effectively kill the electoral college. Think hard, folks. This is a very, very big mistake.
