Should We Change How the President Is Elected?
Care2 Causes
Should We Change How the President Is Elected?
Robin Marty
For most of the country, the presidential election is a straight-forward affair. Every four years, people go out and cast votes for their favored candidate, the votes are counted, and the candidate with the most votes in that state gets all of the electoral votes for the state. How many votes that means depends on how many people live in that state, and is equal to the number of representatives you have in Congress (one vote for each House member and one for each of a state’s two senators). It’s an imperfect system, no doubt, but for the most part it works, since only in four elections has the person elected president via the electoral college not won the popular vote (and only once since 1888).
Modern elections, however, are all about gumming up the system. First it was gerrymandering House districts to make it easier for Republicans to win more seats in Congress, even if more votes overall are cast for Democrats. Then it was the spate of “voter protection” laws that really made it harder for traditional Democratic voters to cast ballots, and the narrowing of early voting assistance so that less votes could be cast overall.
Now a new fight is brewing over in Nebraska, where instead of a winner take all electoral vote system, the state broke up the vote into congressional districts, saying it was more representative of the overall will of the voters. After a few cycles of this, however, they want to return to the original plan. Why? Because the congressional divide let one vote go to a Democrat.
“The state’s Republican leadership is not being shy about why they would like this bill to pass,” reports Think Progress’s Ian Millhiser. http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2015/02/02/3617907/nebraska-republicans-plan-make-easier-elect-gop-president-good/ “‘It’s obvious that the majority of citizens of the state of Nebraska are Republicans,’ state Republican Party chairman J.L. Spray told the New York Times. ‘They want to have the maximum voice in the Electoral College.’”
While Nebraska Republicans want to go back to all the state, all one candidate, not everyone thinks that is the best idea. Bryan Fischer of the American Family Association argues that instead of Nebraska (and Maine, the one other state that breaks up its electoral votes) emulating the rest of the country, the other states should all take a page out of their book and divvy their electoral college votes by district, too.
“Voters outside major population centers today are virtually disenfranchised by the current arrangement,” explains Fischer. “Voters in eastern Washington, for instance, know full well that the outcome of the electoral college vote will be determined by the vote in the major population centers of Seattle and King County. They know their vote, while it will be counted, is largely symbolic. But if EC votes are awarded by congressional district, suddenly voters in eastern Washington, whose districts lie wholly outside the state’s urban centers, have a voice and a vote that counts.”
Sure, Fischer’s way would ensure that “everyone had a voice and vote that counts,” but is it really more fair? As Fischer himself notes, the system gives the same disproportionate advantage to rural and non-urban communities as they already receive in the House, where a smaller number of actual voters are then represented by a larger number of lawmakers, in comparison to the Senate where each state is equally represented. When that disproportionate voter representation occurs and rural (and often more conservative) districts get even bigger voices, that almost always means Republicans will be receiving more power.
Fischer claims that’s not really his intent, of course. Yet as he plays with his psuedo-Congressional district electoral college, he notes that had it been in effect in 2012, Mitt Romney would now be the president, because he would have won more congressional districts than President Barack Obama. Of course, what he glosses over is that Romney over all lost the popular vote by over 2.5 million votes. In other words, in Fischer’s scenario, a presidential candidate less people voted for winning the White House would somehow better represent the will of people than the one who actually received more votes.
If Fischer and those like him really believe that all votes should count and that a politician should have to appeal to everyone, they should be advocating for an actual popular vote. But that would mean weakening the power of those rural, low population density voters who already have disproportion say in our election system. Since those are the ones keeping Republicans in power, I doubt there will be any sort of electoral college change anytime soon.
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