5 Bad Ideas Humanity Is Sticking With Out of Habit - #6: The Electoral College - 4/25/11
So I wrote an article for Cracked.com - 5 Bad Ideas Humanity Is Sticking With Out of Habit. It's done 1.2 million views already since it came out Thursday... not half bad! Also 1800 comments, and hardly any calling me gay!

For brevity, the editors left off 2 of the original 7 Bad Ideas I had originally written... so I figured I'd post them here, one now, one later this week. Like bonus content, for anyone nice enough to track their way back from Cracked to my actual site. Like all the examples, these two things DO sort of work in their current forms... but I learned a lot about how they got that way in the first place, and how they could be better. Enjoy!

#5. The Electoral College

When the Founding Fathers sat down to bang out a government, they were looking at a nation that:
- was composed of thirteen small and large States who were very protective of their power and suspicious of any central national government.
- had only 4 million people, scattered over a thousand miles barely connected by transportation or communication; meaning that national campaigns were impractical, even if they had been thought desirable...
- believed that political parties and campaigning were troublesome, if not downright evil

And so they came up with the Electoral College. And there was much rejoicing.

Problem is, none of these factors really apply anymore (except maybe the one about political parties being evil).

Today, the U.S. is much more of a centralized federal body than it was back in the day when states were fighting each other over slavery.


If the Unites States was designing a new Electoral system today, it seems unlikely we'd do it this way, for a few reasons.

WHY IT'S INEFFICIENT

Votes aren't equal. Did you know the vote of a person in Wyoming is worth more than three times the vote of a person in California? Since every state gets two Electoral votes for their two Senators, regardless of size, each vote in Wyoming is equal to

3 Electoral Votes / 564,000 people = .00000532268 Electoral Votes

And a vote in California is equal to

55 Electoral Votes / 37,354,000 = .00000147453 Electoral Votes

If you do the math, a California guy's vote is thus worth just a little more than one-fourth of a Wyoming guy's vote.


Of course, no politician actually cares about Wyoming's 3 electoral votes, since the Electoral college also makes it pointless to pay attention to anyone in a state with less than 8 or 9 Electoral votes. Or, like half of them. So either a Wyoming vote is worth way more, or it's worth nothing… either way, it's not exactly the democratic "All Votes Are Equal" thing we were going for.

But it shouldn't matter, right? Shouldn't the president who wins the most states also win the most popular votes? Usually, yes. Except for the four times it hasn't.

So almost 10% of the time, there's been a president that the majority of Americans didn't want to elect? That sounds even less democratic. Proponents of the Electoral College would argue that this is just how the system is supposed to work, and that these presidents did fine, although it's interesting to note that ranking-wise, three out of four of them were below average presidents, with Quincy Adams (18th out of 42) faring better than, Rutherford B. Hayes (25th), Benjamin Harrison (33rd) and George W. Bush (34th) in the eyes of political historians.

Would we have been better off with Andrew Jackson, Samuel Tilden, Grover Cleveland, and Al Gore? Maybe: Jackson and Cleveland actually were presidents (in other years), and were ranked 8th and 19th. Although Gore's been a bit of a wet blanket on our whole "gleefully polluting the earth" plan.

There's also the issue of discouraging voter turnout (since the only places votes really matter is in the few hard-fought swing states), and the strange rule that Electoral voters don't have to - and sometimes don't - vote for who they're supposed to, though most states consequently fine them, give them a misdemeanor, and/or kick them out of their seat.

WHY IT CONTINUES TO HANG AROUND

Defenders of the Electoral College argue that a purely popular election would focus too much on major cities (though New York, LA, and Houston/Dallas/San Antonio are already pretty important to winning an election in the current system). Despite their objections, there have been hundreds of attempts to revise/throw out the Electoral college, which are usually shot down by bureaucracy and/or small states wanting to hold onto their power.

Designing an election system took long enough the first time. The Electoral College has worked pretty well for 200 rapidly-changing years... why bother fixing it?

America doesn't have any problems, right?

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