by Sophie Haworth
Firstly, and arguably the greatest problem, is that the winner of the most Electoral College votes (and thus the newly elected President) is not always the same as the popular vote winner, who arguably should be the next President, having won the most votes. This happened most recently with Hillary Clinton in the 2016 Presidential election, where she won three million more votes (2% more) than her adversary, Donald Trump, who won the Electoral College by 77 votes and thus became President. This disproportionately affects Democratic candidates, whose votes’ values are often subject to deflation in larger states (this will be touched on later), directly contributing to the fact that the last four candidates to win the Presidency but lose the popular vote were all Republicans. These incongruent results are down to the ‘winner-takes-all’ system, present in all states bar Maine and Nebraska, which requires the candidate to win a simple plurality in their State to win all of their Electoral College votes. For voters whose candidates lost, even by a small margin, this effectively means that their votes have been wasted, which in turn can lower participation by the electorate.
Former Presidential candidate, Scott Walker, said in 2015 that “The nation as a whole is not going to elect the next president. Twelve states are”. He was right - many US States have clear party alignment, which focuses the Presidential election on the twelve most marginal states. For example Louisiana is consistently Republican, whilst California is consistently Democratic. Due to the ‘winner-takes-all’ system, these States with clear and reliable partisan majorities are often neglected during campaigning, as their Electoral College votes are all but guaranteed for a candidate. Notorious swing states, such as Florida, often take up big chunks of campaigning time, with 71 visits made to the state during the 2016 Presidential election cycle, far more than the majority of other states. In 2016, the National Popular Vote reported that “94% of 2016 Presidential Campaign [visits were] in just 12 closely divided states”. This leads to voters in ‘safe’ states becoming disengaged, and consistently falling below the national average voting turnout (i.e. turnout in safe red state Oklahoma was only 55%), and the relative influence of swing state voters being far higher than safe states’ votes. In short, it creates vast inequality in influence and in attention during Presidential elections.
Another fundamental problem lies in the way in which Electoral College votes are allocated. Each state gets their number of representatives from the House plus their number of Senate representatives (each state gets two), meaning that the minimum number of Electoral College votes is three, and the maximum is 55 (California - 53 House of Representatives votes + 2 Senators). Though this system may seem fair at face value, as it is directly tied to their Congressional representation, the system devalues some votes and inflates others. The most obvious example of this is the comparison between Wyoming (three electoral votes) versus California: one Electoral College vote in Wyoming represents just 193,000 people, whilst one in California represents over 700,000 people. This clearly gives different weight to these voters’ decisions, which makes the Electoral College a wholly unfair system.
Finally, ‘faithless electors’ are worth mentioning. The system, as well as flawed, is wholly archaic. A ‘faithless elector’ is an Electoral College voter who does not vote for the candidate they are obliged to vote for (by convention) in their state. Though some states, such as Oklahoma, void these votes and penalise the electors, there are occasions when such faithless votes still occur. For example, ten faithless votes were cast in the 2016 Presidential election, with one going to Native American activist Faith Spotted Eagle, and Hawaii casting one to former Presidential candidate Bernie Sanders. Despite having little (if any) effect on the outcome, the presence and possibility of such an override of popular democracy is a worrying feature of the Electoral College system.
Overall, the problems set out demonstrate the various flaws of the antiquated Electoral College system. The disproportionate representation of voters and the vote inflation/devaluation experienced by many voters undermines the very principle of democracy it is meant to facilitate. Replacing a direct democratic vote such as the Electoral College is far simpler than replacing an electoral system like First-Past-The-Post in the UK, as it does not raise the issues of minority government and direct representation. However, whether an increasingly partisan America will be able/willing to overturn this traditional system through a Constitutional amendment is yet to be seen.
Sources:
Where have Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton spent their time? - CBS News
94% of 2016 Presidential Campaign Was in Just 12 Closely Divided States | National Popular Vote
2020 Presidential Election: voter turnout rate U.S. 2020 | Statista
The Electoral College, explained - YouTube
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