Dropping Out of the Electoral College

By Steven Hill and Rob Richie, TomPaine.com. Posted June 29, 2004.

Every presidential election matters, but 2004 has particular significance. Re-election of George W. Bush with the return of Republican majorities in the U.S. Senate and House could tip the ideological balance of the Supreme Court and federal courts for a generation. It could trigger a wave of Democratic retirements in the House that might cement Republican domination on Capitol Hill for decades. It could unleash a wave of hard-right policy initiatives.

So everyone should be involved, right? In a democracy, it's one person, one vote?

There's just one problem: that's not the way we elect the president. We cling to a thoroughly outmoded Electoral College that divides us along regional lines, undercuts accountability, dampens voter participation and can undermine legitimacy when the electoral vote trumps the national popular vote. As the bumper sticker notes, Democrats have to RE-defeat Bush this year because the Electoral College denied Al Gore's popular vote advantage of a half-million votes in 2000.

Instead of a simple national election, we hold 51 separate contests in the states and the District of Columbia, with each state having a number of electoral votes equal to its number of U.S. Senators and House members (ranging from three electoral votes in the states with the fewest people to 55 electoral votes in California). This arrangement awards more electoral votes per capita to low population states which tend to be conservative, giving Republican candidates an unfair advantage. It's like having a foot race where one side starts10 yards ahead of the other.

A presidential candidate needs to receive the highest number of votes in the right combination of states to win a majority of the Electoral College vote.The perverse incentives created by this method are painfully obvious from this year's campaign – most states already are effectively ignored by the candidates and groups seeking to mobilize voters because in a competitive national race, most states are dominated by one party or the other. Most campaign focus and energy – and increasingly, even the candidates' messages for how they plan to govern – are pitched to undecided swing voters in the key battleground states. If you feel like your issues and concerns are being ignored, chances are it's because you live in the wrong state and/or are not part of the faceless slice of undecided swing voters.

The Electoral College's democratic deficit is compounded by the use of plurality elections – the candidate with the most votes wins 100 percent of the electoral votes from that state, even if less than a majority. Plurality elections mean that a popular majority can be fractured by the presence of a third party candidate. Far more than any ballot corruption in Florida, Al Gore was hurt by the nearly hundred thousand voters in Florida who supported Ralph Nader.

Rob Richie is executive director of the Center for Voting and Democracy. Steven Hill is the Center's senior analyst and author of Fixing Elections: The Failure of America's Winner Take All Politics.

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