How Does the Electoral College Work and Is It Fair
npr.org
npr.org
In my opinion the best system for US presidential elections would either be a nationwide instant-runoff election or (if the electoral college couldn’t be replaced) a state-by-state single transferable vote election that proportionally elected Electoral College electors.
An instant runoff election would let voters put Johnson or Stein as their first preference and put Clinton or Trump as their second or third preference. It completely eliminates the problem of spoilers. The counting of votes might take a bit longer (perhaps a day or two if done manually), but needing to know the result within a matter of hours isn’t a requirement.
However, I've become less enamoured with it. People don't understand it. It's used in London for the mayoral election, and people just get confused - they'll tell me they are putting the same party as their first AND second choice.
In fact, judging from the mayoral election, it wouldn't change much - the two main parties still end up getting the lion share of the first round of voting, which implies that the vast majority of people are loyal to those parties (a bit like football teams) and aren't voting for them out of tactical necessity.
I'd still go for instant runoff in a heartbeat, but it's not the panacea I thought it was.
There is a well known phenomenon in Australia where voters in Tasmania will use preferences more often than voters in mainland states (Australia’s Senate uses STV with semi-optional preferences). This is almost certainly because Tasmania uses the same system in other elections, so voters are used to it and know how to use preferences.
Approval voting is easy to explain and does not have theoretical problems of instant runoff voting. In approval voting, voters answer YES/NO for all candidates. Candidates with most YES win.
Approval voting suffers from most of the same problems as plurality voting - a candidate can still be elected despite not being approved or preferred by a majority.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JtKAScORevQ
>a candidate can still be elected despite not being approved or preferred by a majority.
Only if there are no candidates preferred by a majority, in which case no voting system can produce a result people are happy with. The only way a ranked system could avoid this is by forcing people to choose between options they hate, and calling that a majority, which doesn't seem much better than letting someone with 30% approval win because it was the most. In fact, there's no reason you couldn't add a majority victory criterion to approval voting.
Direct election isn't a solution, as implementing mob rule is prone to inspiring civil war. Electoral College is better geared toward preserving liberty, an imperative in our culture.
The electoral college is useless in preserving "liberty"
> Electoral College is better geared toward preserving liberty, an imperative in our culture.
Less populous states are still greatly outweighed. Wyoming is very unlikely to ever determine a presidential election result.
Even then, if a single president can ruin the idea of federalism, then that is more a sign that the president is too powerful.
> Direct election isn't a solution, as implementing mob rule is prone to inspiring civil war.
US presidential elections have already inspired one civil war.
Wyoming determined the presidential result in 2000. Doesn't seem that unlikely to me.
On the other hand, a big swing state like Florida matters for candidates. Clinton can win Florida and then afford to lose several smaller swing states. Trump has to win Florida to have any chance.
To put it simply: if enough states join the compact such that their combined electoral votes sum to 270 or more, all states in the compact become bound to put all of their electoral votes toward the winner of the national popular vote.
This circumvents the messy Constitutional amendment process.
This isn't some pipe dream legislation - 165 electoral votes are already part of the compact (surprisingly, including California, the state with the most electoral votes).
It seems most people can get behind this... while the assenting states skew quite liberal, a majority of Democrats, Republicans, and independents are all in favor of a national popular vote, according to Wikipedia.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Popular_Vote_Intersta...
Support for a national popular vote is strong among Republicans, Democrats, and Independent voters, as well as every demographic group in every state surveyed recently. In the 41 red, blue, and purple states surveyed, overall support has been in the 67-81% range - in rural states, in small states, in Southern and border states, in big states, and in other states polled.
Most Americans don't ultimately care whether their presidential candidate wins or loses in their state or district . . . they care whether he/she wins the White House. Voters want to know, that no matter where they live, even if they were on the losing side, their vote actually was equally counted and mattered to their candidate. Most Americans think it is wrong that the candidate with the most popular votes can lose. We don't allow this in any other election in our representative republic.
The National Popular Vote bill was approved this year by a unanimous bipartisan House committee vote in both Georgia (16 electoral votes) and Missouri (10). The bill has passed 34 state legislative chambers in 23 rural, small, medium, large, Democratic, Republican and purple states with 261 electoral votes, including one house in Arizona (11), Arkansas (6), Maine (4), Michigan (16), Nevada (6), New Mexico (5), North Carolina (15), and Oklahoma (7), and both houses in Colorado (9). The bill has been enacted by 11 small, medium, and large jurisdictions with 165 electoral votes – 61% of the way to guaranteeing the presidency to the candidate with the most national popular votes.
NationalPopularVote
This issue is really all about systems in general be they computer or social. As things scale bigger, representative indirection becomes MORE important, not anachronistic as the article suggests. Said representation helps contain complexity and provides for a simpler interface.
And that's what the electoral college does. It simplifies things. It allows states to take care of their own election details. The central government doesn't have to much micromanage the details of every state. Their primary concern is who gets to that 270 electoral vote threshold. The fed level hopefully doesn't get too wrapped up in details of how ballots are cast or how votes are counted.
And yes, I concede that it's not necessarily "fair" and that there are edge cases that are unfortunate. But it is a reasonably stable and well-engineered system all things considered.
I always thought this system was overly complex and did not adequately respect the views of the people, but now in the year of Trump, it increasingly seems like a wise idea lol.
While immediate aftermath would (IMO) not go beyond riots and endless turmoil in all kinds of media, next elections would probably become completely unhinged, with even more extreme radicalisation of voters
Whether the electoral college could do that would be mostly irrelevant - they would be protecting exactly what Trump is saying he is out to destroy - the establishment
I am not a US citizen so thinking about who I'd vote for just pure mental exercise. All I can say that to me the "false equivalency" is not false. They are both extremely bad candidates. I am convinced that if Clinton wins, she will be on par with Reagan or Thatcher - it will take years to even understand how badly they fucked the world up and even longer to unfuck if, if it is even possible
Trump, on the other hand, he might be obnoxious but bearable, or he might cause a nuclear war. Nobody knows
Fun times
As for your characterizations of Clinton and Trump, let me say I disagree. Someone who looked at Tiananmen Square and openly cheered the "strength" used in putting down pro-democracy protesters, and indeed continues to praise strongmen everywhere as models of leadership, is someone whose values are fundamentally incompatible with leading a democracy. Why that is less objectionable than a generic center-left candidate who is a bit too cozy with monied interests is beyond me.
The problem is Clinton, kind of like Trup will say anything that is expected of her at that moment and it means pretty much nothing. She might hold the kids and listen and nod and then nothing will ever change.
And let's not forget in just how many stinking shits she was mixed in (Sure, she was never nailed down, but how often does it happen anyway to the top ones?) And I am not even talking about the stupid fucking emails
She's just a different kind of garbage, slightly more palatable to Trump
- If it's meant to stop the mob from selecting the wrong person, it's not working. Most people would find it unacceptable to vote against what the voters voted for, so in that sense it's largely ceremonial.
- Most states are closer to 50-50 at each election than 100-0. Yet all the electors have to "vote" for the marginal winner.
- You might as well have a Parliamentary system like in Europe if you don't vote directly. Vote for MPs, the MPs pick one among them to be PM. That way you at least know whoever is elected can govern.
Arguably, one can say that the electoral college decouples electing the head of state from possible corruption from an entrenched parliament while reaping the benefits [?] of not having them elected by the people directly. Realistically it means nothing, especially when states mandate that all of their electors vote for one candidate.
What I really don't about the EC is that policy becomes dictated by less than a dozen "swing states". Who cares about Massachusetts or Mississippi when Ohio and Florida are angry about something?
Every candidate. If they don't stand somewhere between Massachusetts and the swing states or Mississippi and the swing states, they aren't even going to be on the ballot.
If it were a purely popular vote, candidates would only visit particular urban centers instead of particular states. It would be just as arbitrary and unbalanced, just in a different way.
Getting rid of the EC would mean that candidates have to pander to voting blocs more. This would likely empower the rural population.
What's the difference between a 'voting bloc' and a 'special interest'? Is the pandering to farmers in the form of more ethanol subsidies and below-market-rate crop insurance?
That vision sounds like there would be more power to lobbyists and less power for local political groups. That's a sideways move at best.
And every vote should be equal. One man one vote. Not a sideways move in any way.
They aren't compelled to. One of the electors from WA says they won't vote if Clinton wins. It's pretty unprecedented, however.
And, "no one faithful to our history can deny that the plan originally contemplated what is implicit in its text -- that electors would be free agents, to exercise an independent and nonpartisan judgment as to the men best qualified for the Nation's highest offices."
In practice, electors don't violate those promises unless the promise turns out not to matter. Sometimes an elector will chose to show off by choosing some other candidate to vote for from his promised choice, but always only after checking that it won't affect the final result. Parties pick people that are proven loyal enough over time to be depended on.
There are various systems in Europe.
* England (the UK?) for instance has local elections in a given area with a first past the post winner.
* In Italy, traditionally, you simply voted for a party, which selected the people who would go to parliament if it got X% of the vote, so you kind of know who you were getting.
Both those systems have problems of their own. In Italy, you'd occasionally get a small party with, say, 10% of the vote that would 'ally' with some party that got 45%. The 'alliance' mostly meant the small party extracting as much as it possibly could from the large party, far out of proportion with its vote, until things get out of hand and the whole thing crumbled.
Fundamentally, if people can't agree, it's hard to make a system where things get done.
But in Europe, most of which has a multiparty indirect system (UK/Germany/Scandi/Spain), you have a government formed from a coalition of parties that doesn't have a majority against it. And you still have a semblance of voting for a particular leader, even though you're not actually. You know pretty well who will be your country's head if you vote for a particular party, at least until they resign.
The problem of small parties is normally dealt with by having a lower limit. For instance in Denmark and Sweden there's a 2/4% minimum proportion. That way you need some support to be represented, though of course a 10% voting bloc can still swing itself around like it's 20%. That's hard to quantify anyway, because it's a matter of how much they value various policies.
If you look at the US at the moment, you have a President that people voted for, who basically can't pass the laws that he promised everyone. You have ridiculous things like filibusters, where you can abuse the rules if you can't get what you want. You have seats that are safe in the election, but contested in the primaries. You have all sorts of issues about who is funding the parties. Children in school can see it's ridiculous.
Time to try a few new things. Proportional representation is just one thing, obviously nothing is guaranteed. Will be hard though, with the current system.
Wider use of this system would probably drive the pundits and talking heads insane, because then that calculus for getting to 270 votes would become much more complicated.
The calculus should not be easy to solve.
Obama, for instance, would not have won in 2008 or 2012.
Two hundred seventy one electors—a majority—voted against what the voters voted for in 2000, choosing president Dubya. So that doesn't seem to be much of a problem.
I don't know enough about the US to understand why it's accepted. It's a blatant disabling of democracy.
In this way it is much like the United Nations.
The UN does not pick its secretary general by a popular vote of the entire planet.
The point of the electoral college is to prevent an absolute extreme candidate who may vow to turn this into a dictatorship or do away with our democracy. It's not meant to stop the will of the people from say voting a Brexit like vote. This has proven to be one of the best, most robust democratic processes in the world. It has withstood togh times and good times alike.
Let's just accept this as something that aint broke.
We have already changed one type of election from representative to direct democracy in the case of national senators, who used to be elected by state legislatures. I personally don't know if I would consider it a successful change.
And the senators are still almost all millionaires and celebrities while billions in campaign cash still determines who can make a run at office.
So the change we're tried hasn't worked to democratize anything and has disastrous side effects. It's not an encouraging sign for abolishing the Electoral College.
No winner take all nonsense. That preserves these two-party binary choices.
Now if you want to abolish the states and just have one federal government you'd have a point, but that's a whole different issue.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrow%27s_impossibility_theore...
"Gridlock" can also be a feature for those who do not want to see one party have the power to do whatever they want. For instance, some Republicans are happy to see Obama get blocked at every turn just as some Democrats were happy to see GWB obstructed. It does seem like it's going farther and farther, with calls to block any supreme court nominations by Hillary, but gridlock in and of itself is something you occasionally get in a system with checks and balances.
And I don't think anyone is advocating copying the Italien governmental system?
Well, two candidates have a possibility of winning. The nature of first-past-the-post elections means that Gary Johnson or Jill Stein can still affect the outcome if their votes change the result.
Is it? At the start of the election there were approximately 20+ presidential candidates, with around half having a reasonable chance of being elected. Four major candidates (Sanders, Trump, Stein, Johnson) were essentially unaffiliated with the major parties, though two ran for the respective party nomination.
And even though two parties dominate Congress, members are much more undisciplined when it comes to voting along party lines than in PR-based systems. Hell, have the Republicans don't even support their nominee. American democracy is messy but vibrant.
The word "fair" here is typically used to in the context of there being an unambiguous "winner". i.e. someone that everyone can agree won the most votes, or is most representative of the votes as cast.
You can change that definition slightly, to "a fair vote is where everyone can agree that the process used to choose the winner is unambiguous, and that there is a clear winner."
The method for this kind of "fair" vote is to to count all votes as cast. Then, pick one voter at random. That vote determines the winner. This is a "probability" method of picking winners, not a "counting" method.
This is arguably "fair" in that each candidate has a probability of winning in direct relation to the votes they received. Each voter has their vote counted identically to all other voters.
It has other benefits. There are no "safe" areas which can be ignored, because the candidate is assured of getting sufficient votes to win. Instead, every incremental vote is an incremental increase in the probability of the candidate getting elected.
The "counting votes" problem has similar issues to share splits in companies. If a company has 3 share holders (49%, 49%, and 2%), and requires 50%+1 votes for consensus, each share holder has an equal amount of power. This is arguably an imbalance with respect to the shares they purchased.
In the probability method of picking winners, each voter has exactly the same power, which is arguable the most "fair".
Kirk is a good pick for a "counter-example" to ... math. It's not real.
There are all kinds of systems that have positive and negative aspects, but none of them are perfect.
I wasn't claiming that Kirk was a good example of math. I used it as an example of how changing the requirements can lead to a different solution.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrow%27s_impossibility_theore...
The real action is supposed to be at the state level. If that were restored, it would again make sense for the President to need to win states instead of a national popular vote.
Funny that the article points out the circus of 2000 with the endless Florida recount, especially after everybody went after Trump for not saying that he will respect the outcome of the election. I guess that's what you need to be in politics: the ability to forget what you did a few years ago to be able to blame your opponent for doing the same thing.
The ability to claim two completely different things (i.e. saying a very close vote is a reason for a recount vs "if I loose it's due to cheating") are the same thing is also very helpful.
We were talking about recounting a county or two of votes. The election wasn't under contest. Gore conceded when it was clear what the count was. People are going after Trump because it's (widely assumed based on his own words and lack of qualification and historic understanding) worrying that he won't accept a clear outcome.
Wallace: But, sir, there is a tradition in this country, in fact, one of the prides of this country is the peaceful transition of power and no matter how hard fought a campaign is that at the end of the campaign, that the loser concedes to the winner. Not saying you're necessarily going to be the loser or the winner, but that the loser concedes to the winner and the country comes together in part for the good of the country. Are you saying you're not prepared now to commit to that principle?
Trump: What I’m saying is that I will tell you at the time. I'll keep you in suspense, okay?
(search "one last question" on http://www.politico.com/story/2016/10/full-transcript-third-... to see the full exchange)
What you are doing is taking the weakest argument people might make about those statements. The Florida recount in 2000 was triggered simply by the close outcome of the vote there. There literally isn't a final result until the recount has been done. The recount didn't require anybody to question the results of the election, there wasn't a result at the time it started.
Going to back to the exchange between Wallace and Trump, part of the question asked was do you make the same commitment that you'll absolutely accept the result of the election. Wallace isn't asking Trump if he will exercise all available legal options in determining the result of the election, he is asking if Trump will concede after that process has played out. Trump starts his answer with I will look at it at the time. I’m not looking at anything now, I'll look at it at the time.
I think there is some legitimate room to argue that the presentation I make depends on parsing the language too closely, and that Trump is speaking more broadly about playing the process out, but it's a tactical mistake for him to do that, the nuanced answer about using the full extent of the legal process and accepting it is stronger than the grandstanding (his campaign started saying this immediately after the debate and he more or less said it in the following days...).
I'd like to see all primaries held on the same day.
9% of voters selected Clinton or Trump in the primaries. That's all it took.
Does either major party endorse such a change? I have only heard it from minor parties...