First installment in kdpeterson.net's series, "Gutting the Old Website for Content". First published at OCF, 12 Nov 2000.
Third Party Success Through the Electoral College
Summary
By adopting proportional selection of electors, we can eliminate the "wasted vote problem" and reduce the likelihood of a mismatch between the popular vote and the final winner.
Preface
For a while now, I've been toying with the idea of replacing our current election system with a version where we would randomly select, say, 1% of the registered voters to vote in the next election, and give them six months notice to actually learn about the issues. A lot of people I talk to tell me they don't like it because it's not democratic or some such. The reason I like the general idea is because it's really not worth the trouble to figure out whose opinions you like better for something like state assembly, where the news coverage stinks, and the candidates may not even bother publishing much information.
Recently, in the wake of the chance that Bush may win the election while losing the popular vote, and the obvious knee-jerk reaction (which would never succeed anyway) of eliminating the electoral college, I got to wondering why we had the electoral college at all. So I go to the source, and check out the Federalist No. 68. In it, I find hints of reasoning similar to the above. Hamilton's vision of the electoral college was for a number of people to be selected directly from the populace, who then gather and discuss who would be the best person for the job. "A small number of persons, selected by their fellow-citizens from the general mass, will be most likely to possess the information and discernment requisite to so complicated an investigation."
This, of course, bears little resemblance to the current system of a bunch of people who have already decided who they will vote for, and who will all vote for the same person, getting together to write out some forms and be done with it. What went wrong?
The Idea
The first idea I had was that allowing proportional allotment of the electors would prevent the kind of fights now going on in Florida. Since both candidates got near 50% of the vote, they would both end up with near half of the electors, and it's less likely that they would need to fight to the bitter end for that last one or two electors.
Then I started thinking about the details of how to do a "proportional" system. In Maine and Nebraska, the only states that split the electors, whoever wins the popular vote in the state gets the two votes corresponding to the senators, and whoever wins each congressional district wins that elector. It's better than nothing, and at least makes sense, but this still means that third parties have no power.
Consider the California results:
| Gore: | 53.7% |
| Bush: | 41.5% |
| Nader: | 3.9% |
| Other: | .9% |
California has 54 electoral votes. This election, they will all go to Gore. I don't have data for the presidential race by district, but we have 20 Republican representatives and 32 Democrats now, so it's a good guess that using a system like Maine or Nebraska we would get a breakdown similar to this. This clearly better represents the will of the people than does giving them all to Gore. But what about Nader? He received more than 2/54 of the vote in California, but doesn't get a single elector. If we give each candidate a number of electors equal to the percentage of the vote they won times 54, rounded down, we would get the following breakdown:
