In Defense of the Electoral College

This is something I've been thinking about for quite a while.  For a long time I thought the electoral college was an excellent idea, even though many around me thought it perverted the popular vote to make it meaningless.  The basic point of the electoral college, they say, is so that the big states can't dwarf the little states and make them meaningless in national elections.  But more and more lately, the views I was hearing from friends, family, and experts on the internet an on TV were convincing me that the electoral college had to go.  What we have now is the two major candidates for President campaigning in a handful of mid-size and smaller states, and it doesn't matter what happens in New York, Texas, or California, where a combined 82+ million people live (which is more than 25% of the population of the entire country.)  Okay, you can make a strong argument that Florida is a big state, and they are campaigning there.  But overall, the swing states mean that candidates spend an inordinate amount of time on a small amount of people.  I have been really on the fence lately about the system that we have, and whether it is the best one.

But let me try to provide a cogent argument that explains why the electoral college is something that needs to stay.  We live in a nation of 50 states.  (You're with me so far, I know.)  Each of these states is not just an arbitrary abstract political entity (well, they are that too...) but a government with its own set of laws and taxes.  These laws and taxes have real effects on real people.  If laws and taxes are such in one state, to discourage something like gambling, but they are legal in another state, peoples' daily activities differ based on this in an important way.  Put simply, the incentive structure for what we spend our time doing to make a living is different in each state.  And we all have to make a living.  (Unless we're the 47% who just mooch, but I digress...)  It is easier to see this if we make the differences between states stand out more.  If I create a hypothetical state where they've decided to take a more communal approach to society, and have high tax rates, high regulation, and high wealth redistribution, that's up to them.  And it works pretty well, with a few problems.  We'll call this State A.  Now, in State B, they've decided (and it doesn't really matter at this point whether we think they've decided correctly or not) that people should take maximum responsibility for themselves, and this will lead to the best outcomes for all.  After all, when people have an ownership stake in their house, their life, their education, etc., and the buck stops with them, they realize they can't coast along and get taken care of by others.  Everyone tries to be responsible, and self-reliant.  And it works pretty well, with a few problems.

So now we have an election for President of the United States (notice how states are in the name of the country, not by accident), and people have to decide what they think is going to be best for the country and for them.  Well, for someone in a particular state, their incentive structures, and the way their government handles problems might be completely different from another state.  State A and State B have different decision matrices.  If a policy the potential President has will conflict with their well-being, they have the right to speak up and say so.  If they think the federal policy will hinder their state policy, they have a right to try to defend their way of life.  They might even have some insights into things that the candidate might not have, because people from State A or State B actually live there and know what life is like.

Let's now consider what would happen if we just had a popular vote across the entire nation.  The candidates could spend their time appealing to whatever the policies they thought would get them votes in big population centers.  Okay, this is not so different than the most common argument for the electoral college.  But the popular vote would allow any given candidate to ignore up to 49% of the population (or more, if we only required a plurality-- that is, for them to get the most votes out of any of the candidates, even if it was less than 50%) and just tailor his or her platform, and really truly ignore everyone else.  His or her policies could decimate the systems set up by up to half of the population in the country, because he or she wouldn't be required to care about what happened as long as they got their votes wherever they could get them.  Cut disaster relief for blizzards?  Done!-- there aren't any in California, Texas, or Florida (well, not on a disaster relief scale, anyway.)  Increase taxes so we can double the number of police officers in the country?  Done!-- it doesn't matter that your state has all the police it needs and doesn't want higher taxes.  You might have a business that is set up to respond to a certain need that exists only in your state, and federal policy might not take this into account.  You have the right to have your vote heard.  Or your state government might have set up a system to respond to a different need, and the federal policy might interfere with this, and you should be able to say "Hey now, wait a second, this isn't such a good idea, and we know why!".  It is because not only do people know what the special economic impacts on them will be, but they might also have some insights from living in a place that has a way of life, an incentive system, that wouldn't be available to those living outside the state.

So, you might be saying, that's what there is now.  It doesn't matter what happens in California or New York and the candidates can ignore them.  That's not true.  Can the candidate try to ignore some of the people within each state?  Yes.  But not all of the people within a state.  And the stances the candidate takes have to be amenable to the majority of people within these states.  Okay, the candidate can still ignore certain states, thinking they're not going to vote for him/her anyway, because their views are just incompatible.  Yes, 'tis possible.  But the electoral college requires the Presidential candidate to be accountable to people in every state, because they are making decisions based on different combinations of laws and economic truths.  This is the fundamental fairness of the electoral college.

Now, do I think it's perfect?  No.  The real problem, some of you might say, is that the electoral college overrepresents some states and underrepresents others.  And you'd be completely correct.  Because of our representation system, Wyoming gets 3 votes for about 500,000 people, or one vote per 165,000 people, while California gets 55 votes for 37 million people, or one vote per  670,000 people.  So a California voter's opinion counts only 1/4th as much as someone from Wyoming.  But this representation problem can be handled separately from the electors-by-state issue.  What is the most appropriate level of representation?  That's for another time.  Completely proportional to population?-- maybe, but maybe not.  I tend to think that states should get a little bonus just for being a state, because that's the constitution under which people changed the course of their lives to found their states.  To have laws and taxes the way they wanted, the opportunity to develop a society that operates in a certain way. But I don't think the bonus should be nearly as big as it is.  Remember, population growth tends to be exponential, so California gains a lot more people just for having the same birth rate as Wyoming, not due to any difference in policy.  So should California keep gaining influence over Wyoming?  I think that's unfair too.

There is a lot of wisdom in the electoral college.  It requires a federal leader to take into account a wider range of opinions and points of view, and economic and legislative systems than he/she would if we just had a popular vote.  And that's a good thing.