Electoral woes and votes

Like everyone else in my bubble, I’ve been angrily obsessing about the outcome of the US Presidential election for the last two weeks. I’d like to say that I’ve been channelling that obsession into action, but so far I’ve mostly been reading and hoping (and being disappointed). And trying to parse all the “explanations” for Trump’s election.

Mostly, it’s been about what the Democrats did wrong (imperfect Hillary, ignoring the white working class, not visiting Wisconsin, too much identity politics), and what the Republicans did right (imperfect Trump, dog whistles, focusing on economics and security).

But there has been an ongoing strain of purely procedural complaint: that the system is rigged, but (ironically?) in favour of Republicans. In fact, this is manifestly true: liberals (Democrats) are more concentrated — mostly in cities — than conservatives (Republicans) who are spread more evenly and dominate in rural areas. And the asymmetry is more true for the sticky ideologies than the fungible party affiliations, especially when “liberal” encompasses a whole raft of social issues rather than just left-wing economics. This has been exacerbated by a few decades of gerrymandering. So the House of Representatives, in particular, tilts Republican most of the time. And the Senate, with its non-proportional representation of two per state, regardless of size, favours those spread-out Republicans, too (although party dominance of the Senate is less of a stranglehold for the Republicans than that of the House).

But one further complaint that I’ve heard several times is that the Electoral College is rigged, above and beyond those reasons for Republican dominance of the House and Senate: as we know, Clinton has won the popular vote, by more than 1.5 million as of this writing — in fact, my own California absentee ballot has yet to be counted. The usual argument goes like this: the number of electoral votes allocated to a state is the sum of the number of members of congress (proportional to the population) and the number of senators (two), giving a total of five hundred and thirty-eight. For the most populous states, the addition of two electoral votes doesn’t make much of a difference. New Jersey, for example, has 12 representatives, and 14 electoral votes, about a 15% difference; for California it’s only about 4%. But the least populous states (North and South Dakota, Montana, Wyoming, Alaska) have only one congressperson each, but three electoral votes, increasing the share relative to population by a factor of 3 (i.e., 300%). In a Presidential election, the power of a Wyoming voter is more than three times that of a Californian.

This is all true, too. But it isn’t why Trump won the election. If you changed the electoral college to allocate votes equal to the number of congressional representatives alone (i.e., subtract two from each state), Trump would have won 245 to 191 (compared to the real result of 306 to 232).1 As a further check, since even the representative count is slightly skewed in favour of small states (since even the least populous state has at least one), I did another version where the electoral vote allocation is exactly proportional to the 2010 census numbers, but it gives the same result. (Contact me if you would like to see the numbers I use.)

Is the problem (I admit I am very narrowly defining “problem” as “responsible for Trump’s election”, not the more general one of fairness!), therefore, not the skew in vote allocation, but instead the winner-take-all results in each state? Maine and Nebraska already allocate their two “Senatorial” electoral votes to the statewide winner, and one vote for the winner of each congressional district, and there have been proposals to expand this nationally. Again, this wouldn’t solve the “problem”. Although I haven’t crunched the numbers myself, it appears that ticket-splitting (voting different parties for President and Congress) is relatively low. Since the Republicans retained control of Congress, their electoral votes under this system would be similar to their congressional majority of 239 to 194 (their are a few results outstanding), and would only get worse if we retain the two Senatorial votes per state. Indeed, with this system, Romney would have won in 2012.

So the “problem” really does go back to the very different geographical distribution of Democrats and Republicans. Almost any system which segregates electoral votes by location (especially if subjected to gerrymandering) will favour the more widely dispersed party. So perhaps the solution is to just to use nationwide popular voting for Presidential elections. This would also eliminate the importance of a small number of swing states and therefore require more national campaigning. (It could be enacted by a Constitutional amendment, or a scheme like the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact.) Alas, it ain’t gonna happen.

I have assumed Trump wins Michigan, and I have allocated all of Maine to Clinton and all of Nebraska to Trump; see below. ↩︎