By WILLIAM C. MEAD
Los Alamos
The 2024 Presidential election is a critical one in the life of our country, for several reasons: the outcome will lead to considerable chaos and possibly violence, no matter who wins. For example, if Trump wins, he has promised mass deportations of illegal aliens and severe punishments for election workers that he considers to have “cheated”. If Harris wins, Trump has already planted seeds for contesting the election and his rhetoric might inspire violence from “MAGA” supporters—possibly worse than January 6th.
Sadly, this election will occur under the rules of our 230-years-old election system, which is heavily biased. Not biased in the way Trump claims, but rather biased in favor of former slave states and smaller states. If that’s old news to you, I ask you one question: “When are we going to do something about it?” It’s already too late to affect 2024.
Here are a few facts to remind us how important it is to do something about it:
Four candidates in US history have won the popular vote and lost the Presidency in the Electoral College (EC). In the past 30 years, the GOP has won the popular vote only once, but has held the office of President for 3 terms. That’s 12 years out of 30!
The weighting in the EC is very unbalanced. The ratio of population (per 1000) to EC seats varies from 193 for Wyoming to over 700 for Texas, Florida, and California. That means one vote in Wyoming counts as about 4X as heavily in the EC as one vote in the least-represented states. If you believe that “one person, one vote” is the best way to operate a democracy, this is a travesty.
As if that were not enough bias, 48 states assign their electors via winner-takes-all. This means that if candidate A has one more vote than candidate B, ALL the state’s electors are pledged to candidate A. That results in ~50% of the state’s voters being disenfranchised. In real terms, the EC result can lead to an election being “won” by a small plurality of voters (I recall that the 2016 election was tilted by about 80,000 votes in the battleground states. Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by 2.5%, while in the EC, she lost by 57% to Donald Trump.
The electoral system is hard to change. It is embedded in the Constitution.
One effort to change things without a constitutional amendment is the “National Popular Vote” movement. That organization has been trying to arrange enough states to agree to pledge their electors to the popular vote winner, no matter who wins in that state. Many states have agreed in principle. However, the agreements have no effect unless states totaling more than 270 EC votes sign up. As you might expect, the agreements are not approved by enough states to take effect.
Another approach (that I have not seen pushed) would be for the states to abandon winner-take-all and instead allocate electors fractionally according to the state’s popular vote. This approach could also encounter opposition, because the over-represented states will not give up their privilege.
The third approach is, of course, to amend the Constitution. That is nearly doomed, unless there is a huge amount of public pressure. An amendment requires a 2/3 vote in the Senate (which is even more strongly biased towards small states) plus approval of 3/4 of the states’ legislatures. That is a very steep barrier.
How many elections must we live through with our antiquated and biased electoral system?
Population (per1000) per elector chart. Courtesy/William Mead