From now until this country falls apart, we can rest assured that every two years, there will be a long and agonizing discussion on the use of the filibuster in the Senate and that every four years, there will be an even more long and agonizing discussion of the Electoral College.  This is just one of those things that we, as Americans, have to deal with.  The original installation for this year's EC navel-gazing began with The National Popular Vote. Under this scheme, once there were enough states to have an EV total of 271, they would all agree to assign their EV's to whomever won the popular vote.  It was an interesting side-step around having to dismantle the Electoral College, and took advantage of the fact that the Constitution allows each state to decide how they will assign their electors.

Full disclosure: I'm in favor of the EC, but there's only a small part of this post that's about justifying it.

There's more...

Without rehashing whether or not the EC is a good thing, I'd like to address this nifty proposal from the Brittannica Blog:

There is a simple solution to the problems created by the Electoral College. The elections of 1876, 1888, and 2000 – elections in which the popular vote winner lost the election were all close, decided by five Electoral College votes or less. But if the winner of the national popular vote were awarded eleven Electoral votes on a winner-take-all basis, the extra eleven votes (twice the five-vote-margin plus one for good measure) would assure that the popular vote victor would also win the Electoral College vote and become President. The eleven would be too few to “nationalize” presidential elections, and the same dynamics that keep the two-party system intact would prevail.

The additional eleven votes is twice the Electoral votes plus one of the Electoral votes would have settled the disputed elections of 1800, 1876, 1888, and 2000 in favor of the popular vote winner. The eleven extra votes would not have settled the election of 1824, but that presidential race had six major candidates. In fact, the example of 1824 indicates the problem of electing a president if a multiparty system were adopted in the United States.

Let's see how this would have affected the elections:

2004:

Eleven extra votes would have given Bush an even stronger mandate, but not have altered the outcome of the election.

2000:

Now, this is an election in which having an eleven handy-dandy electoral bonus points would have made a massive difference. Or would it?

Unaddressed in the proposal is whether or not the total electoral vote count is increased to reflect the new eleven votes.  In other words, are you still being graded on a scale of one to five hundred and thirty-eight or are you being graded on a scale of one to fundred and forty-nine?  In the case of the former, Gore wins by getting a higher count than Bush (revised to 277).  In the case of the latter, Gore still wins by crossing the new bar of 275.

Obviously, the appearance of eleven additional votes, whether or not they are bonus points, would have a massive effect on t he electoral map.  Because those eleven points would have been in play during the election, the entire strategy would have been different - or maybe not.  Let's look at that 2000 table again, this time, with a row for margins:

The popular vote margin was less than 1% of the total number of votes that each received. In theory, either candidate could have run the same strategy, then, and the eleven bonus points would have tipped it to  Gore.

What makes this an interesting scenario to consider is that it heightens the importance of every single state, big or small. It wouldn't be enough for the GOP to win Texas or the Democrats to win CA - they'd still have a strategic incentive to maximize turnout in every state, every county and every precinct.  This means that we would see any number of states in which campaigns no longer go dark.

In my opinion, this is a good thing.  The more that campaigns are given incentives to increase turnout, the more that they'll do it.   Increasing turnout means increasing participation, which increases the mandate, the perceived legitimacy of the government, etc.  And, more importantly, the national popular vote finally has some tangible, as well as moral, significance.

Dirty D

(All charts produced using Open Office Calc)