election correction

[calimac]

Here's a little calculation I was able to do in a jiffy by plugging an existing table into an Excel spreadsheet and adding a few calculation columns.

In reply to the fact that Clinton received more votes than Trump, supporters of the latter have suggested that the Founding Fathers set up the Electoral College deliberately to favor candidates with wider geographic support.

That's not as strong an argument as it may seem, given that Clinton carried 21 states (including D.C.) and Trump 30; although Clinton's majority can be accounted for by a couple of large states, it's not as if her winning areas were limited to a couple enclaves.

Nevertheless, it's a stronger argument than the ones the Republicans used to offer, where they would present a US county outline map colored in by which candidate won which county. The vast expanses of red couldn't hide the fact that most of those vast expanses were pretty empty. Square miles don't get a vote.

But geographic spread per se was not the Founding Fathers' intent. What they were trying to do was preserve the interests of small states, which they had to do because they were operating in a forum where each state, regardless of population, had one vote. Like, say, giving slave-holders extra seats in both Congress and the Electoral College on account of the non-citizen slaves they held, treating Delaware as equal to Pennsylvania or New York has not held up over time as one of the Founders' wiser plans. (And I can't help cheekily noting that, if we were to return to the Continental Congress era one vote per state system, Clinton won 9 of the original 13.)

But even if we allow the extra weight that the Electoral College gives to smaller states, the unit rule "winner take all" voting system was not the Founders' intent. The Constitution specifies no method by which electors are to be chosen, and in the early days states used a wide variety, of which state-wide vote was one of the less common. Somewhat more frequent, if popular vote was used at all, was to divide the state into districts, each one choosing one elector. (The current Maine-Nebraska system, with two statewide and the others chosen by congressional district, was not used.)

It occurred to me that an idealized approximation of this, and a way to test the theory that geographic spread is important, would be to run a notional electoral college in which the electors in each state were assigned to approximate as closely as possible the popular vote percentage in that state. That would still give the small states extra weight, but it would be an honest reflection of the actual vote in the states, thus testing what the geographic spread actually is, not just a notional take-all winner in each state.

So I multiplied each candidate's percentage of the popular vote by the number of electors in that state, assigned each candidate the closest whole number of electors for the result, and if there was one left over, assigned it to the candidate with the largest remainder.

First I should note that the US is purple. Except for DC which remained 3 Clinton, every state had at least one vote for Clinton and one for Trump. Even West Virginia, which voted only 26.5% Clinton, that share would come to 1.32 of the 5 electoral votes, so she gets 1 vote in my count.

Interestingly, the result came out as an exact tie: 261 votes each for Clinton and Trump. There were 14 votes for Gary Johnson, and one each for McMullin (Utah) and Stein (California). If you adjust it to just the two-party vote, the 16 third-party electors divide up 8 and 8, and it's still a tie.

So it helps Trump, but not quite enough. You'd need some other system, or a tie-spli8tter, to give him an outright victory this way. That geographic spread is not as powerful an argument as his supporters think.

Comments

[whswhs.livejournal.com]

Actually, I did a calculation along those lines not long ago. What I came up with was that if you subtract the two bonus votes for each state regardless of size, Trump loses 60 votes and Clinton 42, leaving 244 to 157; that still gives Trump a majority. So changing the part of the Electoral College that requires a constitutional amendment wouldn't have made much difference. On the other hand, assigning votes proportionally gave me 253 for Trump and 261 for Clinton, which would have been a majority for Clinton; but I got 22 votes for other candidates, mainly but not only Johnson, which would have sent the election to the House and Senate. So winner-takes-all, which is the part of the electoral college that the state legislatures are explicitly authorized to change, would have taken away much more of Trump's margin, but not enough for an outright Clinton win. (Your results could be more accurate than mine; I did the calculations mentally, and I'm not sure if you did.)

Politically, doing away with the two bonus votes is impossible; not only does it have to pass both houses of Congress, but thirty-eight states have to ratify, which necessarily includes a lot of the smaller states that have net gains from the current system. But I think winner-take-all might be nearly as hard. Consider, say, California, whose 55 votes went to Clinton. By my estimate, proportional voting would have given 34 to Clinton and 17 to Trump. I can't see why the Democratic majority in the state legislature would favor that. Likewise in the other direction for Texas. Maybe some of the states in the middle might take that step, but I can't believe that all of them would.

There's a different point that I've seen and checked, though: Clinton's majority in the national popular vote was 2.9 million, but her majority in California was 4.3 million. A straight national popular vote would be about as clear as you could want a case of one big state's vote overriding the preferences of all the other states put together. (Checking Florida, New York, and Texas, I see that that's not true for any of them.) That really is one of the things the Founders wanted to avoid; it's why they added the Senate to the legislative branch.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

I did my calculations mathematically, using a spreadsheet to convert percentages of the popular vote in each state to proportions of the assigned electoral vote, and then rounding them off to nearest whole numbers, assigning leftovers to the candidate with the largest remainders.

My whole interest was in doing this proportionally, since a widespread unit rule "winner take all" was not the Founders' idea, and I wanted to see what would happen if you reconciled the Founders' idea of giving small states extra weight (the "bonus" votes) with proportional vote within that weight. My point was not to consider whether it was politically practically possible to do this, but to see how the country actually voted, within the constraints of the thumb the Founders placed on the scales.

Doing exactly the same calculation without the "bonus" votes gives me Clinton 216, Trump 207, others 13, a Clinton plurality. Since Clinton got a plurality of the popular vote, that's no surprise. I haven't worked out what would happen if you converted that to a 2-party vote, but I suspect a small Clinton majority.

I disagree with your claim that the Founders wanted to avoid "one big state's vote overriding the preferences of all the other states put together." First off, though you have carefully phrased this to avoid claiming that every one of the other states was in the other column, it still sounds that way. Second, that is not what the Founders did. Instead of prohibiting one state to override the preferences of the rest of the nation, they gave the smaller states extra weight in the vote. California today has 10.2% of the electoral vote. In the original Constitutional assignment, Virginia had 12 of 91 or 13.2%. So that's bigger clout than California has today. There was absolutely no prohibition against Virginia combining with a large minority of the other states to overcome a majority vote within the combined vote of all the other states.

[whswhs.livejournal.com]

Of course, if you do both the elimination of the bonus votes and the shift to proportionality rather than winner-take-all, it's no surprise that you end up with a Clinton majority; those are the two big factors in making the electoral and popular vote different (and we agree, I think, that the bonus votes were less significant). What i was doing was keeping the bonus votes and going to proportionality; I thought that was what you described doing as well.

It would be interesting, but more complex, to take out the bonus votes, recalculate the rest proportionally, and then put the bonus votes back in, with each state going for the candidate favored statewide. By your figures, that looks like Clinton 258, Trump 267, others 13, but rounding differences might modify that.

The Founders actually seem to have faced the fear of the small states that two or three big states would gang up on the rest of them. The bonus votes setup seems to have aimed to make that harder generally, not by a "prohibition" approach but by a "handicapping" approach.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

"What i was doing was keeping the bonus votes and going to proportionality; I thought that was what you described doing as well."

That was what I was doing. What I described in the 3rd paragraph of the previous comment was a different calculation, without the bonus votes.

The fear of the small states that you describe is exactly what I was referring to by the phrase "giving the small states extra weight." We're not in disagreement about what the Founders intended in regards to that. But the original discussion referred to the spectacle of one large state, California, tipping the balance of the popular vote to Clinton over Trump, and you suggested that the Founders would have been opposed to the entire concept of one large state overriding the preference of the rest of the states as a group. Of course it can only do so if a fair number among the other states do agree with it, and I think it's clear the Founders were NOT opposed to that concept.

[voidampersand.livejournal.com]

A lot of those people in California who voted for Clinton originally came from conservative states that voted for Trump. You can flee to a liberal enclave, but it only increases the voting power of the conservative neighbors you thought you got away from.

I can think of one possibly good reason for maintaining the Electoral College in this day and age. No wait. Never mind. I can't.

[whswhs.livejournal.com]

I don't see any argument for getting rid of it. If you have a unitary state, where there's one big pool of voters, then the results will always go by the majority of the total popular vote. But if you have a federal state, where there are multiple pools of voters, then your algorithm for combining those pools into a final result will sometimes give different outcomes than a unitary state would get—unless what you have is just a federal shell over a unitary architecture. So the demand that the popular vote should be decisive in every case is a demand to override the constitutional choice of some states to adopt a federal structure. That's not just the United States, but Australia, Canada, Germany, and Switzerland, at least.

And it seems to me that, at a bare minimum, federal states are not less legitimate than unitary states.

I'd also point out that the cultural differences between the states are no less deep now than they were in the late eighteenth century. So the desire of many states for a shield against being controlled by the majorities in other states doesn't lack foundation. After all, back before the Supreme Court stepped in, I wasn't in favor of states that allowed same-sex marriage being compelled to abolish it by the votes of people in Texas and Florida.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

You are fudging the difference between voting for the federal government and home rule within the states. Nothing about a popular vote for President would require states to have identical laws on local matters.

Parliamentary countries have no electoral college, but while Canada allows a bonus in parliamentary seats to small provinces roughly equivalent to that which the US Electoral College does for small states (votes are worth up to 3 1/2 times as much in the Electoral College, about 3 times as much in the Canadian House of Commons), in Australia the differential is much smaller, no more than 1 1/2 times.

[whswhs.livejournal.com]

You could say that parliamentary countries have no electoral college, certainly, but by definition the head of government in such countries is not directly elected by popular vote, but chosen indirectly by an elected body. That body just happens to be the same as the national legislature. And if the rules for how many representatives a region gets aren't based purely on proportionality to the size of its population, you're going to have heads of government who didn't have a majority of the popular vote; it's just not made as visible as it is in the United States. So any argument that the election of Trump is illegitimate because he didn't get a majority of the popular vote, or that the Electoral College is illegitimate because it doesn't always follow the popular vote, invalidates those particular parliamentary systems and their choices of heads of government just as much.

Or, conversely, if they're still acceptable despite sometimes not strictly following the popular vote, then the overrepresentation of small states in the Electoral College doesn't make it unacceptable either. And that seems to be the commonest protest that's made against results like the election of Trump: "He didn't get a majority of the popular vote, but he's the president, and that's obviously wrong and unfair" (or "He didn't get a majority of the popular vote, so he's not really the president"). Certainly there are other arguments that could be made, but they're much less commonly advanced.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

I didn't write this post to claim that losing the popular vote makes Trump an illegitimate president. (That is only one stone in a larger argument. W. didn't have Trump's other demerits.) I wrote it to claim that the argument offered by Trump's supporters, that the Founders intended winners to have larger geographic spreads, while not totally invalid, is less valid than they think. And the argument that California providing the entire margin of Clinton's popular vote victory somehow invalidates that is completely invalid.

And I brought up Canada and Australia to point out that, while Canada has a heavy small-province bonus as the US does, Australia doesn't. (And, by the way, while Ontario and Quebec together have 62% of the Canadian population, they still have 59% of the parliamentary seats, so the small-province bonus doesn't prevent Central Canada, if united, from totally ruling.)

Of course the legislature in a parliamentary system choosing the PM works the same way as the Electoral College choosing a legislature. I just pointed out that it's not actually an electoral college to ward off hyper-literal objections that they're not actually the same thing. So instead, I get a hyper-literal objection that they work the same way. I can't win, I really can't.

[whswhs.livejournal.com]

I apologize for diverting your discussion, and inducing you to take part in doing so. I thought of just stopping my comment at "I don't see any argument for getting rid of it," and felt that it would be more polite to show some of how I got there; but that led us down some long side paths. And I was actually more interested in your calculations, as I thought of taking the same approach just days before.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

I don't object to discussions being diverted in the course of comments. What I object to is being criticized for things I did not say.

[whswhs.livejournal.com]

Well, in that case, please note that I started this subthread off with a reply to the statement "I can think of one possibly good reason for maintaining the Electoral College in this day and age. No wait. Never mind. I can't," made not by you but by voidampersand.

As for "things you did not say," note that you said to me, in a different subthread, "First off, though you have carefully phrased this to avoid claiming that every one of the other states was in the other column, it still sounds that way." That is, after explicitly acknowledging that I had not asserted something, you went on to say that it sounded as if I had. So I don't think you can reasonably object if I address something that might be taken as an implication of what you had said. I thought you had probably not claimed that parliamentary systems of weighted representation were radically different from the Electoral College, but your opening statement still sounded that way, so I thought the surest way to set that point to rest was to address it explicitly.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

To respond to this would require getting more meta-argumentative than I have patience for. So I'll just say that you've quite misunderstood me, apologize for my own lack of clarity that contributed to that, and drop the subject.

[mneme]

I think a vote to push all states to a "proportional division of electors + remainder goes to the winner" system would a be a -lot- more feasable, politically.

The thing is, it's very obvious that proportional vote is fairer. California's majority voters are stealing electors from the 30% minority; Ohio's 49% plurality stole votes from the remaining 51% of voters. But it's also pretty obvious that a state doing this unilaterally is just giving away its voting power; Maine and Nebraska do it by district, sure, but there's history there.

In general, when I bring up going to straight popularity, I get a -lot- of pushback, and some of it is sensible; small state rights, election packing, recount costs, etc.

When I bring up banishing Winner Takes All, I mostly get people who don't agree changing the subject or aguiring about NPVIC some more. Oh, or "you're just sore because you lost." I -don't- get people claiming it's fairer to stick with WTA.

So while it requires either legislating from the bench or a constituional amendment (or a 50 state compact, but at that point the amendment is much easier) to do proportional electors across the board, it's -politically- more feasable than any other electoral college reform I can think of.