Is This Fair?

or fully get rid of it

 

The number of electoral votes is equal to the total number of members of Congress the state has. California has 55 because it has two senators and 53 representatives; Wyoming has 3 because it has two senators and one representative. That senators are not allocated proportionately is why small states have more electoral votes per capita.

 

Then, if you allotted EC votes according to reps and held senators out, then it would be proportional?

 

Not exactly, I guess, because maybe Wyoming's one representative for the whole state represents fewer total people than a representative who covers 1/53 of California. But it'd be closer to proportional.

 

The sad thing is, is that it is just as "fair" as the voting in Congress. The people in the little states have more of a say in the laws that are passed then the people in big states

 

The can still count votes by state, which in turn does it by county anyway. There shouldn't be any need for a recount unless someone's vote isn't counted or counted properly, which is exactly the case now. Regardless of whether or not recounting a state will change who wins via today's electoral college system, I would still want my vote recounted if I knew it was counted improperly in the first place.

 

The number of representatives is proportional to the population while all states have 2 senators regardless of population. Thus if electoral votes were based simply on the number of representatives (not representatives + senators), then the electoral votes would be much more proportional to population than it is currently.

In this election, we know that Bush won 286 electoral votes while Kerry won 252 electoral votes. We also know that Bush won 31 states while Kerry won 20 states and DC.

So it is easy to calculate that if electoral votes were proportional (meaning only number of representatives) then Bush would have obtained 286-2*31 = 224. Kerry would have won 252-20*2 = 212. In this election, it would not have made a difference but you can see that Bush is helped out much more than Kerry since Bush tends to win lots of small states so gets a lot more of the "extra", "non-population" based EVs. It is also, of course, easy to see that if EVs were number of representatives only, the campaign strategy would be different and there are easily many scenarios where Kerry would lose in the present EV scheme but would win with a state's EV=representative only scheme.

 

You could have the electoral votes be based on a congressional district by congressional district basis instead of state-by-state basis. Actually Maine and Nebraska use this system. There was also a state constitutional amendment in Colorado to apportion the EVs proportionally rather than winner-take-all. However, this amendment failed by a large margin.

Personally I would prefer to get rid of the electoral college entirely. I see no reason for it at all.

 

The reason for the EC and for each state having 2 senators is to keep the nation from being controlled by the whims of 5-10 states. Would anyone care what the people of Montana thought if they had 1 electoral vote and one member of congress. It is a way to keep people in lower population states from being marginalized. The country already turns on what the urban population thinks, just look at the county by county map here. Some people don't think the rest of the country should be controlled by California and New England.

re: a swing of 200,000 votes in Ohio giving the election to Kerry, the election was actually closer as a percentage of population in Wisconsin and New Hampshire, so it was closer to being an electoral blowout for Bush than it was a squeaker victory for Kerry.

This country really just might be too big. It is obvious that we are already living in basically 2 nations, but we could divide it up further than that. If we divided it into 5 countries: New England, the Great Lakes, the West Coast, the Midwest, and the South, everyone would probably be much happier with their elected officials.

 

I've heard this argument before but fail to see how the EC solves this problem instead of exacerbating it. Consider that under the EC, Kerry and Bush essentially campaign in 5-6 states and ignore the rest of the country because they are EC locks. Kerry doesn't campaign in the South, since losing 100% or losing by 51% makes no difference while Bush doesn't campaign in the Northeast. In essence much of the country is marginalized in the EC system. It reduces what is supposed to be a national campaign into a 5-6 state campaign. OTOH, if it was by popular vote, then Kerry would see a need to campaign in the South and Bush would definitely see a need to campaign in the Northeast.

As for Montana, Alaska, etc, under the present EC system, nobody campaigns or pays attention to these states right now anyway since they have few EC and are locked up. OTOH in a popular vote system, it makes a huge difference for Bush whether he loses CA 80-20 or 60-40.

 

I agree. One has to change the Constitution, and some in the small states may feel that having two senators is not enough power for them.