In the wake of President Donald Trump’s victory in the Electoral College despite losing the national popular vote – the second time in five elections that this occurred – many people have proposed eliminating the Electoral College and electing the president directly by popular vote. This is both unwise and unnecessary.
The Electoral College elects the president under the Constitution. The Electoral College is designed to spread power among the states, so each state is assigned Electoral College votes equal to the number of U.S. senators and representatives in the state. As a result, each state gets at least three Electoral College votes (four in New Hampshire).
The real problem is that state Electoral College votes are awarded on a winner-take-all basis and not proportionately. Almost every state (except Maine and Nebraska) gives all of its Electoral College votes to the candidate who wins the most votes in the state, whether that person wins 90% of the vote or 45%. If the Electoral College votes in each state were allocated proportionately (for example, New Hampshire’s votes would have been split evenly between Trump and Clinton in 2016), the Electoral College would retain its key role of distributing power among the states and would more closely reflect the collective will of all the voters. This system would also make every state a “battleground state” and encourage candidates to reach out to all voters.
The result of proportional allocation of Electoral College votes in 2016 would have been the election of Hilary Clinton with 270 Electoral College votes to 268 for Donald Trump. These Electoral College votes equate to 50.19% for Clinton and 49.81% for Trump. Ignoring independent and third-party candidates, the national popular vote shares in 2016 were 51.01% for Clinton and 48.99% for Trump.
An additional reform to improve the Electoral College system would be to increase the size of the House of Representatives. This would reduce the distortive impact of giving each state at least three votes regardless of size, as our system does now.
The current system arbitrarily fixes the number of representatives at 435 (first set in 1911 based on the 1910 Census) and then uses complex math to allocate the representatives among the states but with at least one in each state. If the average congressional district size were restored to the 1911 level (about 210,000), the House of Representatives would have 1,473 members. Even I don’t want to do that.
A simple, fair and easy-to-understand method would be to set the base district size at the smallest population of any state. Using 2010 Census numbers, this method would result in 541 representatives. Alaska, North Dakota, South Dakota, Vermont and Wyoming would each have one representative, and California would have 66 representatives. (New Hampshire would still have two representatives.) There would be 644 total Electoral College votes compared to 538 today.
By increasing the size of the House of Representatives and awarding each state’s Electoral College votes in proportion to the votes won, we can achieve a result that comes closer to the overall popular vote than has occurred in recent elections. Allocating 644 Electoral College votes proportionally in each state, the 2016 results would have been 328 Electoral College votes for Clinton (50.93%), and 316 Electoral College votes for Trump (49.07%) – very close to the split in the popular vote, which was 51.01% for Clinton and 48.99% for Trump.
Whether we choose to increase the size of the House of Representatives or not, allocating Electoral College votes proportionally more clearly reflects the will of the voters while retaining the state-level power and authority of the Electoral College. That is the right balance of individual and state power in our federal system.
(Paul Burkett lives in Bow.)