The Electoral College doesn’t have to be “let’s keep it” or “let’s deep six it” binary discussion. We can’t get rid of it without a Constitutional Amendment, and that ain’t happening. It’s just not.
Since we’re going to be stuck with it, we should see what is wrong with it and maybe what we could do to make it right. And the fact is, there’s nothing particularly wrong with the electoral college. It could easily be made right.
First, what’s wrong
The Reapportionment Act of 1929 codified a system for designating which states got which electoral votes, and how many total votes there would be. It set up the votes as equal to each state’s Congressional representation, one for each senator and member of the House; and it put a ceiling on the total number of EC votes
There is always going to be some imbalance since all states, regardless of size, have 2 senators. But that’s only one imbalance per state. Where are the other discrepancies?
The discrepancy is the fact that there are a fixed number of members of the House no matter what has happened to our population. In the 530s in 1961, and 538 today. Yet our population has zoomed since then. In fact, it was 531 electoral votes way back in 1932, and only increased with the addition of Hawaii, Alaska, and DC.
From a voting perspective, let’s take a look at two examples that show what this means in the real world.
In 1950, the population of California was about 10.5 million. In 2015, California’s population was about 39 million. (All my number are rounded off.). In the presidential election of 1950, California had 32 electors. In 2016, as we all know too well, California has 55 electors. Sounds huge: an increase of 23 electors. It’s not an increase at all.
What these numbers mean is that in the 1950 election, CA had one vote in the electoral college for every 477,000 people. In the 2016 election, CA had one vote for every 709,000 people.
Now let’s take North Dakota. ND in 1950 had a population of about 619,000, and 4 electors. In 2015, there were 757,000 people and 3 electors. So in 1950, ND had one electoral vote for every 154,000. In 2016 it has one vote for every 252,000.
Both CA and ND electoral votes have been diluted, but a person in CA only counts for about one third of someone in North Dakota.
If California people counted the exact same as people in North Dakota, California would not have 55 electoral votes — they’d have 154 electoral votes.
You’d see the same type of discrepancy, with differing numbers, if you compare many of our states. For example, Wyoming has 3 electoral votes with a population of 549,000. The District of Columbia has 3 electoral votes with a population of 672,000, almost 15% more than Wyoming — but no representation in Congress!
Put another way:
1) The electoral college has remained relatively unchanged for the past umpteen years, while at the same time our population has zoomed. In 1930 the US population was 123 million, whereas in 2010 our population was 309 million.
In 1932, there were 531 electoral votes, and we only have 538 now, after adding several states and the District of Columbia.
2) The apportionment of EC votes is totally screwed up.
What we should do (recognizing we’re stuck with the Electoral College)
1) Repeal the Reapportionment Act of 1929.
Replace it with a law that:
2) Uncouples the Electoral College from the number of members of Congress; and
3) Creates a separate unit of population by which each state’s EV count is determined. It could be, for instance, one electoral vote for each 300,000 of the state’s population.
We can propose this legislation now. The Rs will not consider it. But we can keep it all written up and ready, and one day, one day, we can get it done.