November 28, 2007
A New Yorker’s Objection to the Electoral College V Posted by Alexander Burns at 08:45 PM EST I am hesitant to reply to Mr. Gordon’s latest post, as I don’t want to belabor this issue too much. I also don’t particularly want to respond to sarcasm. But there are a couple issues that I feel are worth clarifying. Mr. Gordon says that my last post was “taking advantage of [his] careless choice of states, which is good for scoring college debate team points but not so good for finding the truth. Idaho and Vermont are both solidly in one camp. . . . But there are plenty of small states that tend to move back and forth between parties: New Mexico, Nevada, Delaware etc.” Mr. Gordon might find this hard to believe, but my last post was not just intended to highlight his carelessness; I actually made a broader assertion than he suggests, and it’s one that happens to be backed up by data. I wrote: “Presidential elections are fought in big, politically divided states like Ohio, Pennsylvania, Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Florida. The practical impact of the Electoral College isn’t to favor small states; it’s to favor certain kinds of big states.” Delaware, Nevada, and New Mexico clearly do benefit, to at least some small degree, from having the Electoral College in place, and I never said otherwise. But the big winners from the Electoral College are the large states that happen to be politically divided. Allow me to offer some factual evidence (this tends to be a good strategy for college debaters and courageous truth-seekers alike). Between April 1 and September 30, 2004, $333.4 million was spent on presidential campaign advertising. The top five states where that money was spent were Ohio (17.9 percent), Florida (17.1), Pennsylvania (12.3), Michigan (6.7), and Wisconsin (5.8). That totals 59.8 percent of presidential campaign advertising during the period, to a set of states that contain something like 20 percent of the country’s population. If television advertising is a reliable indicator of where a campaign is sending its resources, and I believe it is, then clearly large, competitive states benefit from our system of subdividing the national electorate far more than the great majority of small states. Now, it may be that Mr. Gordon and I have an irreconcilable difference of opinion (surprise!). He would rather have our current system, which somewhat favors small states, strongly advantages big, politically divided states, and disadvantages ideologically homogeneous states of all sizes. In contrast, I’d prefer a system that leaves some small states behind—Delaware, most likely, with its special Delaware issues—but puts places like Oklahoma, Georgia, and Massachusetts back on the table. I’m obviously quite convinced of my position, and Mr. Gordon of his, and unless he’s surprisingly convinced by the data above, I expect things will stay that way. I have two other, less lengthy clarifications to conclude with. First, Mr. Gordon says that the Electoral College results in 1876 and 2000 were “clear enough” that Al Gore and Samuel Tilden didn’t have any objective reason to complain. Actually, the 1876 election saw an enormous controversy about the Electoral College after three Southern states sent multiple slates of electors to Congress. The resulting imbroglio makes the resolution of the 2000 election look brief and civil by comparison, and the election fight only ended when a special commission decided, by an 8–7 vote, to give the contested electoral votes to Rutherford B. Hayes. Despite Tilden’s three-point margin in the popular vote, this Electoral College fiasco denied him the Presidency. As for the 2000 election, we all know that history. If you think the Electoral College provided useful clarity in these circumstances, I have a profession to suggest to you. Finally, Mr. Gordon asks how I can be so certain that the outcome of the 2000 election would have been a clear victory for Gore if we had just been going by the popular vote. “A mere 544,683 votes, a little over 10,000 per state, separated Al Gore and George Bush, out of 101,463,105 cast,” he writes. “I imagine the Republicans would have fought just as ferociously and screamed fraud just as loudly over the country as the Democrats did in Florida.” I find this an implausible scenario. Finding an extra 10,000 votes per state would have been a totally impossible feat—the typical difference after a recount is no more than a few dozen, or at most a few hundred votes. In 2000, the Democrats were fighting for some 500 votes in Florida. That’s a close margin by any standard. But imagine if we hadn’t had the Electoral College, and George Bush had gone on television in November 2000 to declare, “If authorities miscounted 10,000 votes per state it would have changed the outcome.” He might as well have told America that if his grandmother had wheels she’d be a bicycle. It would have been hugely embarrassing for Republicans. The congressional GOP would probably have made President Gore’s life miserable, but I very much doubt they would have tolerated a 50-state scavenger hunt for votes. I’m not a fan of counterfactuals, but this seems like a pretty open-and-shut case.
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