Electoral College Math: Not all votes are equal

By Seth Borenstein

AP Sci­ence Writer

WASHINGTON (AP) — When it comes to elect­ing the pres­i­dent, not all votes are cre­ated equal. And chances are yours will count less than those of a select few.

For exam­ple, the vote of Dave Smith in Sheri­dan, Wyo., counts almost 3 1/2 times as much math­e­mat­i­cally as those of his wife’s aunts in north­east­ern Ohio.

Why? Elec­toral Col­lege math.

A sta­tis­ti­cal analy­sis of the state-by-state voting-eligible pop­u­la­tion by The Asso­ci­ated Press shows that Wyoming has 139,000 eli­gi­ble vot­ers — those 18 and over, U.S. cit­i­zens and non-felons — for every pres­i­den­tial elec­tor cho­sen in the state. In Ohio, it’s almost 476,000 per elec­tor, and it’s nearly 478,000 in neigh­bor­ing Pennsylvania.

But there’s math­e­mat­i­cal weight and then there’s the real­ity of polit­i­cal power in a sys­tem where the pres­i­dent is decided not by the national pop­u­lar vote but by an 18th cen­tury polit­i­cal com­pro­mise: the Elec­toral College.

Smith fig­ures his vote in solid Repub­li­can Wyoming really doesn’t count that much because it’s a sure Mitt Rom­ney state. The same could be said for bal­lots cast in solid Demo­c­ra­tic states like New York or Ver­mont. In Ohio, one of the biggest bat­tle­ground states, Smith’s rel­a­tives are bom­barded with polit­i­cal ads. In Wyoming, Smith says, “the can­di­dates don’t care about my vote because we only see elec­tion com­mer­cials from out-of-state TV stations.”

The nine bat­tle­ground states where Rom­ney and Barack Obama are spend­ing a lot of time and money — Ohio, Florida, Vir­ginia, Col­orado, New Hamp­shire, Iowa, Nevada, North Car­olina and Wis­con­sin — have 44.1 mil­lion peo­ple eli­gi­ble to vote. That’s only 20.7 per­cent of the nation’s 212.6 mil­lion eli­gi­ble vot­ers. So nearly 4 of 5 eli­gi­ble vot­ers are pretty much being ignored by the two campaigns.

When you com­bine voter-to-elector com­par­isons and bat­tle­ground state pop­u­la­tions, there are clear win­ners and losers in the upcom­ing election.

More than half the nation’s eli­gi­ble vot­ers live in states that are losers in both cat­e­gories. Their states are not closely con­tested and have above-average ratios of vot­ers to elec­tors. This is true for peo­ple in 14 states with 51 per­cent of the nation’s eli­gi­ble vot­ers: Cal­i­for­nia, New York, Texas, Illi­nois, Michi­gan, Geor­gia, New Jer­sey, Mass­a­chu­setts, Indi­ana, Ten­nessee, Mis­souri, Mary­land, Louisiana and Ken­tucky. Their votes count the least.

The biggest win­ners in the sys­tem, those whose votes count the most, live in just four states: Col­orado, New Hamp­shire, Iowa and Nevada. They have low voter-to-elector ratios and are in bat­tle­ground states. Only 4 per­cent of the nation’s eli­gi­ble vot­ers — 1 in 25 — live in those states.

It’s all dic­tated by the U.S. Con­sti­tu­tion, which set up the Elec­toral Col­lege. The num­ber of elec­tors each state gets depends on the size of its con­gres­sional del­e­ga­tion. Even the least pop­u­lated states — like Wyoming — get a min­i­mum of three, mean­ing more crowded states get less proportionally.

If the nation’s Elec­toral Col­lege votes were appor­tioned in a strict one-person, one-vote man­ner, each state would get one elec­tor for every 395,000 eli­gi­ble vot­ers. Some 156 mil­lion vot­ers live in the 20 states that have a larger ratio than that aver­age: That’s 73 per­cent — nearly 3 out of 4.

And for most peo­ple, it’s even more unrep­re­sen­ta­tive. About 58 per­cent of the nation’s eli­gi­ble vot­ing pop­u­la­tion lives in states with voter-to-elector ratios three times as large as Wyoming’s. In other words, Dave Smith’s vot­ing power is about equal to three of his wife’s aunts and uncles in Ohio, and most peo­ple in the nation are on the aunt-and-uncle side of that unbal­anced equation.

“It’s a ter­ri­ble sys­tem; it’s the most unde­mo­c­ra­tic way of elect­ing a chief exec­u­tive in the world, ” said Paul Finkel­man, a law pro­fes­sor at Albany Law School who teaches this year at Duke Uni­ver­sity. “There’s no other elec­toral sys­tem in the world where the per­son with the most votes doesn’t win.”

The sta­tis­ti­cal analy­sis uses voter eli­gi­bil­ity fig­ures for 2010 cal­cu­lated by polit­i­cal sci­ence pro­fes­sor Michael McDon­ald at George Mason Uni­ver­sity. McDon­ald is a leader in the field of voter turnout.

For­mer Sen. Alan Simp­son of Wyoming defends the Elec­toral Col­lege sys­tem for pro­tect­ing small states in elec­tions, which oth­er­wise might be over­run by big city cam­paign­ing: “Once you get rid of the Elec­toral Col­lege, the elec­tion will be con­ducted in New York and San Francisco.”

Sure it gives small states more power, but at what price? asks Dou­glas Amy, a polit­i­cal sci­ence pro­fes­sor at Mount Holyoke Col­lege in Mass­a­chu­setts: “This clearly vio­lates that basic demo­c­ra­tic prin­ci­ple of one per­son, one vote. Indeed, many con­sti­tu­tional schol­ars point out that this unfair arrange­ment would almost cer­tainly be declared uncon­sti­tu­tional by the Supreme Court on those grounds if it were not actu­ally in the Constitution.”

Arti­cle 2 of the Con­sti­tu­tion says pres­i­dents are voted on by elec­tors (it doesn’t men­tion the word col­lege) with each state hav­ing a num­ber equal to its U.S. sen­a­tors and rep­re­sen­ta­tives. While rep­re­sen­ta­tives are allo­cated among the states pro­por­tional by pop­u­la­tion, sen­a­tors are not. Every state gets two. So Wyoming has 0.2 per­cent of the nation’s voting-eligible pop­u­la­tion but almost 0.6 per­cent of the Elec­toral Col­lege. And since the num­ber of elec­tors is lim­ited to 538, some states get less proportionately.

Adding to this, most states have an all-or-nothing approach to the Elec­toral Col­lege. A can­di­date can win a state by just a hand­ful of votes but get all the elec­tors. That hap­pened in 2000, when George W. Bush, after much dis­pute, won Florida by 537 votes out of about 6 mil­lion and got all 27 elec­toral votes. He won the pres­i­den­tial elec­tion but lost the national pop­u­lar vote that year.

That elec­tion led some states to sign a com­pact promis­ing to give their elec­toral votes to the national pop­u­lar vote win­ner. But that com­pact would go into effect only if and when states with the 270 major­ity of elec­toral votes signed on. So far nine states with 132 elec­toral votes have signed, all pre­dom­i­nantly Demo­c­ra­tic states.

Because of the 2000 elec­tion, con­ser­v­a­tives and Repub­li­cans tend to feel that chang­ing the Elec­toral Col­lege would hurt them, George Mason’s McDon­ald said, and after their big vic­to­ries in 2010, the pop­u­lar vote com­pact move­ment stalled. But that analy­sis may not nec­es­sar­ily be true, he added. McDon­ald said before recent opin­ion polls started to break for Obama there seemed to be a pos­si­bil­ity that he could win the elec­toral vote and lose the pop­u­lar vote because of weak turnout — but still enough to win — in tra­di­tion­ally Demo­c­ra­tic states like New York and California.

For­mer Stan­ford Uni­ver­sity com­puter sci­en­tist John Koza, who heads National Pop­u­lar Vote, which is behind the elec­toral reform com­pact, said Demo­c­rat John Kerry would have won the Elec­toral Col­lege in 2004 while Repub­li­can Bush won the pop­u­lar vote, if only 60,000 Bush votes in Ohio had changed to Kerry votes.

His­tory shows that can­di­dates have won the pres­i­dency but not the pop­u­lar vote four times, and in each case it was the Demo­c­rat who got the most votes but lost the pres­i­dency: 1824, 1876, 1888 and 2000.

The Asso­ci­ated Press analy­sis sug­gests that in this year’s elec­tion, the cur­rent sys­tem seems to ben­e­fit Rom­ney. The AP re-apportioned elec­toral votes based on voting-eligible pop­u­la­tion and not con­gres­sional del­e­ga­tions, so that, for exam­ple, Wyoming and the Dis­trict of Colum­bia would have only one elec­tor instead of three, and Cal­i­for­nia would have 58 instead of 55.

Based on polling, states strongly in the Rom­ney camp have 191 elec­toral votes in the cur­rent sys­tem but would have only 178 if the elec­toral votes were allo­cated based on voting-eligible pop­u­la­tion. Based on sim­i­lar polling, Obama would ben­e­fit by about five elec­toral votes if elec­tors were appor­tioned by that pop­u­la­tion. The nine bat­tle­ground states would gain even more sway, jump­ing from 110 elec­toral votes to 118.

That would com­pound the per­ceived prob­lem of a shrink­ing num­ber of bat­tle­ground states being all that mat­tered in the elec­tion, leav­ing the over­whelm­ing major­ity of states stand­ing around as “spec­ta­tor states,” Koza said.

John McGin­nis, a pro­fes­sor of con­sti­tu­tional law at North­west­ern Uni­ver­sity, defends the cur­rent Elec­toral Col­lege, argu­ing that while the math­e­mat­ics of elec­toral pro­por­tion­ate cal­cu­la­tions is cor­rect, the con­clu­sion that it over-represents small states is not. Larger states still have more sway because they have more elec­toral votes, he said.

Fur­ther, the his­tor­i­cal agree­ment to give each state two sen­a­tors regard­less of their pop­u­la­tion and to base elec­toral votes on con­gres­sional del­e­ga­tion rather than pop­u­la­tion “was an essen­tial com­pro­mise” when framers were draft­ing the Con­sti­tu­tion, McGin­nis said. With­out that com­pro­mise, there might not have been a Con­sti­tu­tion or nation, he said.

But Finkel­man said his read­ing of his­tory is that the com­pro­mise wasn’t about power between small and large states as much as it was about power of slave-holding states. He said James Madi­son wanted direct pop­u­lar elec­tion of the pres­i­dent, but because African-American slaves wouldn’t count, that would give more power to the North. So the framers came up with a com­pro­mise to count each slave as three-fifths of a per­son for rep­re­sen­ta­tion in Con­gress and pres­i­den­tial elec­tions, he said.

Elec­toral Col­lege sup­porter McGin­nis said the empha­sis on bat­tle­ground states is actu­ally good because they are rep­re­sen­ta­tive of the coun­try. But he acknowl­edges as an Illi­nois res­i­dent, “I real­ize when I vote here it’s com­pletely irrelevant.”

Posted by AP News on Oct 8 2012. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.