By: John C. Lesher
It’s well past the 2020 election of and the Associated Press and other media have proclaimed Joe Biden the President-elect by a popular vote margin of about 6 million ballots. That’s ostensibly a big win for Biden, but because we elect a single office, the Presidency, by using an Electoral College, the win for Biden was actually quite close. We don’t have one election for the Presidency—we have 51, and the cumulative results of those 51 elections do not necessarily correlate with the raw vote tabulation. The President-elect’s win could have been turned into a defeat if as few as 100,000 votes were selectively distributed among a handful of states, such as Pennsylvania, Arizona, Georgia and Nevada. In this system, all votes are not equal. Because of this dichotomy between the closeness of the Electoral College vote and the much wider margin of the 2020 popular vote tally, many are calling for the abolition of the Electoral College.
At the risk of oversimplification, the pro and con of the popular vote issue breaks down to two relatively straightforward positions: first, why keep the Electoral College when seeming fairness tells us to dump an anachronistic system and let the people decide, or, second, the Electoral college system isn’t perfect, but it works just fine because it preserves the balance of powers the founders sought. In truth, the potential unintended consequences of a switch to popular voting for the Presidency are not widely understood. The old adage “be careful what you wish for because you just might get it” applies here.
From a practical standpoint, switching from the Electoral College to a popular vote majority is not as easy as it sounds. It requires either a constitutional amendment or a state-by-state revamping of each state’s rules regarding the allocation of electoral votes. The constitutional amendment path will be very difficult, perhaps impossible.
As of the 2010 Census, three states (California, Texas and Florida) have large populations and they seat 116 of the 435 Members of the Federal House of Representatives. That’s almost 27% of the voting power in that chamber. Since seats in the House of Representatives are apportioned to the states every 10 years based on the Census Bureau’s resident population statistics, it is logical to assume that those three states also have roughly 27% of America’s voters. Preliminary indications are that the collective voting population in California, Texas and Florida will approach 28 or 29% after the 2020 census numbers are fully tabulated.
For a constitutional amendment eliminating the Electoral College to pass, 38 of our 50 state legislatures must ratify the proposal, but the demographic math doesn’t add up to passage. Seven states currently have population so low that they receive only one seat in the House; four others have only two seats and three have three. As noted, California, Texas and Florida currently have 27% of House seats and approximately that same percentage of the voting population. The 14 states having low representation and voting populations are just the opposite: 24 House seats out of 435 (5.5%) and a similarly small proportion of the nation’s registered voters.
In a national voting system where every vote is equal to every other, California, Texas and Florida will receive inordinate consideration during Presidential campaigns. Amassing Electoral College votes by small margins of victory in a few key states will no longer be a strategy. Raw national vote totals will be the objective and California, Texas and Florida are where those votes will be found. They, and a few other large population states, will be the subject of fawning attention from Presidential incumbents and hopefuls, with promises presumably being made for the “pork” that gets distributed in Presidential budget submissions. The 14 small states noted will be excluded from this feeding frenzy.
Why would any of those 14 small population states ever vote for a constitutional amendment potentially giving so much power, money and attention to California, Texas and Florida? My first sense is that the will of the electorate demands a popular vote standard for presidential elections, but my second sense is that the politicians who run our low population state governments will have deep reservations about approving a switch to aggregate popular voting by means of amendment ratification. It won’t happen.
That leaves advocates with the state-by-state option by which retains the Electoral Collage, but which becomes the equivalent of a popular vote election. In this system our individual state legislatures change their allocation rules so that 100% of the electoral votes within a state’s control are no longer given entirely to the presidential candidate garnering the most votes within that state. Proportionate allocation is the presumed solution: if candidate A gets 55% of the vote within a state and candidate B 45%, A gets 55% of the electoral college votes allocated to that state and B gets 45%. The obvious problems are how to handle fractional votes and the effort needed to get a critical mass of states plus the District of Columbia to act in some semblance of unity. If popular vote election for the presidency is deemed to be a desired goal, it will take an enormous dedication on the part of the electorate to get our legislators to act en masse on this issue.
The process for a change to popular Presidential voting is relatively simple to understand, but have we thought this through? Do we really want the concentration of power in favor of large population states which will happen if popular voting for the Presidency is adopted? Popular voting has intuitive appeal to fairness and logic, but the real-world problem of the unequal distribution of political power brings us back to the 1780’s and the Constitutional Convention, where small states rebelled in fear of being overwhelmed by larger states. The compromise was a Senate of equal seating, regardless of the population of a given state. Popular voting for the Presidency will bring us back to the same arguments and fears.
Let’s slow down and talk this through. There are upsides and downsides to this issue and the downsides in particular have not been fully evaluated. Rushing into a “solution” without proper deliberation and an understanding of the true scope of the consequences is a very bad idea.