A lot has already been said about the 2016 US Presidential Election. It was hateful. It was sexist. It was divisive. It was social media vs news media vs fake news media. It was populism vs “establishment-ism”. And many more things. As different as this election was from previous elections, it was also similar to many elections — the strategic campaigning to net the most Electoral College votes.
For simplicity and brevity, the President of the United States is not decided directly by popular votes — that is whoever gets the most votes, is elected president. Instead, there is the Electoral College, comprising of 538 total electoral votes divided among the 50 US states and the District of Columbia. Each state is allotted a certain number of electoral votes. For each state, the candidate who receives the most votes, is then awarded that state’s electoral votes. [There are some technicalities, but this is out of scope for this article.]
From Wikipedia here is how the Electoral College votes were distributed.
One of the complaints is that Hillary Clinton received the most popular votes of all candidates, yet still lost the election. In this way, the “will of the people” was not reflected and as a result there are calls for abolishing the Electoral College. On the other hand, defenders of the system say that the Electoral College was not a sudden revelation, and that Hillary Clinton’s campaign failed to focus on the “correct” states. And so it goes.
Other criticisms are that as an unintended(?) consequence of the electoral system, campaigning tends to get focused on “swing” states — states that are not high probability Democrat or Republican leaning. What this leads to is a “reduced dimensionality” in the voting system in that not every vote counts and not every state counts. For example, votes for a Republican candidate in California, which for a long while has voted Democrat, actually don’t matter and never will matter short of a major social upheaval; Republican votes in California have a weight of zero. Texas works similarly but at the expense of Democrat candidate votes.
We can argue that since the President is elected via a winner-take-all system, eventually one set of votes won’t matter. But does it need to be multiple stages of winner-take-all?
One thing that has puzzled me is why, on a state-by-state basis, the electoral votes have to be winner-take-all. What if electoral votes were distributed based on the proportion of votes each candidate received in a given state?
Here’s a proposed revision using Michigan, a key swing state where Donald Trump won by roughly 11,000 votes, as an example. Below is the vote distribution for Michigan as of 12/3/2016 as given on Wikipedia.
| Party | Votes | Percentage |
|---|---|---|
| Republican | 2,279,543 | 47.50% |
| Democrat | 2,268,839 | 47.27% |
| Other Independent | 250,902 | 5.23% |
Michigan commands 16 electoral votes, all of which went to the Republican candidate. I propose that instead of winner-take-all at the state level, electoral votes should be proportionately distributed. Since, we would probably want to keep the votes as integral values, I would suggest that candidates receive the greatest integer less than or equal to the product of the total electoral votes that are possible and the proportion of popular votes they received with the “unaccounted” votes going to the candidate who won the state’s popular vote. In equation speak this means that Donald Trump receives
$$\frac{2279543}{4799284}\cdot 16 = 7.5996102752 \mbox{ electoral votes before rounding down}$$
Hillary Clinton receives
$$\frac{2268839}{4799284}\cdot 16 = 7.5639249521 \mbox{ electoral votes before rounding down}$$
and the independent parties [for sake of this example, I am lumping all third-party candidates into one category: “independent”] receive the remaining 0.8364647727 electoral votes before rounding down.
That was the proportional distribution. Next, we round down [greatest integer less than or equal to …]. This means that Donald Trump receives 7 electoral votes, Hillary Clinton receives 7 electoral votes, and the third-parties in the aggregate receive 0 electoral votes. This tallies to a total of 14 electoral votes, leaving 2 votes unaccounted for. Since Donald Trump received the most popular votes, he receives the remaining 2 electoral votes. The final breakdown then gives Donald Trump 9 electoral votes and Hillary Clinton 7 electoral votes.
If we apply this reasoning on a state-by-state basis for the whole country, we see a different split of the Electoral College. In this version, Hillary Clinton gets 268 votes, Donald Trump gets 266, and the third parties get a combined 4 votes, with Gary Johnson getting 2 electoral votes (TX and CA), Jill Stein getting 1 (CA), and Evan McMullin getting 1 (UT).
Here is how the votes would break up by state in the format of “Democrat (Blue) / Republican (Red) / Other (Green)” for the three numbers that appear on each state.
What’s interesting here is that no candidate gets the majority 270 electoral votes, which means that a secondary process is needed to declare a winner. Fortunately, we have rules in place for such a situation.
But what’s even more interesting and important is that now, there is a real incentive for every individual to vote in their state — namely, every vote for a candidate helps to secure a little bit more of the electoral votes available. Currently, and as an example, if I am a Democrat voting in Alabama, my vote is effectively useless, since 62% voted Republican. However, with a proportional distribution of the electoral votes, as a Democrat in Alabama, I know that my vote will do something positive for the candidate that I want to support. Similarly, if I vote Republican in California, my vote as it stands does absolutely nothing. And as mentioned above, short of a major social upheaval, my vote will never do anything in California. However, with a proportional distribution of electoral votes, all 55 votes won’t automatically go to Democrats. Heck, we can see that 2 actually went to third party candidates.
Campaigning now becomes a completely different game. Candidates can’t simply ignore their “safe” states, nor will the election have to focus exclusively on a few swing states. States like Florida won’t be 58 point moves. Now they’ll be at best 4 to 6 vote swings. There is a little more stability.
Of course, polling becomes much more difficult and much more important. Each state matters. As I said earlier, the current system is low-dimensional. We don’t really have 50 states (and DC) in the election process.
To be clear, the modified map I gave above is an exercise to see how the votes would have panned out if we applied a proportional allocation of the electoral votes, a posteriori. I think that the voter engagement would be much higher in each state solely because each vote does something positive for the voter’s candidate. Vermont, for example, is 3/0/0 in favor of Democrats with a 56% / 30% / 14% split among Democrats / Republicans / Other voters. How many Democrat voters simply didn’t bother to vote because they knew that their state would go their way? The same question can be asked of Republicans in Republican strongholds. And how many voters didn’t bother because they knew that their state wouldn’t go their way?
Finally, some math speculation. Emphasis on speculation.
Why Wasn’t It This Way To Begin With?
I’ve wondered why a proportional distribution of electoral votes wasn’t the system to start with. To me (naturally), it makes the most amount of sense and is far more fair than the current set up of state-by-state winner-take-all. Then it dawned on me. This was a system set in place well before our high precision calculators. Heck for the better part of the 20th century, banks and financial institutions calculated compounded interest on a 360-day year, because the math was “nicer” than 365. The former has a lot of good divisors [2,3,4,5,6,8,9,10,12, etc.], whereas with 365 we’re kind of stuck in the mud with [5 and 73].
So, similarly, I can imagine that in the 19th century, doing this calculation by hand was very tedious.
$$\frac{2279543}{4799284}\cdot 16 = 7.5996102752$$
Of course, it can be done and there would have been mathematicians then who would have done this. But why bother with this brain damage when a far simpler solution that is transparent to the overwhelming majority of voters is to simply have winner-take-all on a state-by-state basis? The math is much simpler — which pile is larger? Whoever has the larger pile wins.
Anyway, there is a larger question to ask — should we or shouldn’t we simply move to a popular vote, winner-take-all election? There is great debate on this matter, but in the meanwhile, I feel that the proportional distribution of electoral votes is a strong compromise between proponents and opponents of the Electoral College. It will, by and large, reflect the popular vote with a much smaller risk of “inverted” elections like that in 2000 or in 2016. Every vote in every state will matter equally [but nationally, some votes will still mean more than others because the population count to electoral vote ratio is not uniform across all states].
Your thoughts? Should we distribute the electoral votes proportionally?
[edit: The always-helpful Colin Beveridge (@icecolbeveridge) points me to D’Hondt’s Method, which is a method for proportionally dividing votes. Here’s Colin’s article.]
[edit 3/21/2019: As I’m seeing this post start to trend in the wake of comments by Elizabeth Warren, keep this in mind: this was written in 2016 as mostly a musing and thought exercise about “what if we did it this way” … I’m not writing a book here. It’s a blog post and there is obviously a tremendous amount of nuance here. No system is perfect and even the straight national popular vote will have its unintended consequences. We’re a high-dimensional society and the more we keep thinking that the vote system winner should make decisions, the more fractured we will become. While statistically, a 51-49 win is a crushing victory when we have 100 million+ votes, 49% of the population is not to be “ignored” or somehow marginalized. So long as the winner (by majority or by electoral college chicanery) thinks they have a mandate, the more fucked we will be. Take your anger elsewhere and work on the reform you are seeking.]