February 15, 2004
Electoral College Notes
I've written before that I like the basic intent of the Electoral College and how it tries to represent region as well as population.It's the implementation that I don't like - each state being winner-take-all, with the national winner requiring a majority rather than a plurality. It's what makes third-party presidential runs such a threat to our democracy.
I've thought a better version would be to proportionally award EVs for each state by the percentage support each candidate gets, and allow fractional EVs, and allow a plurality of the total to determine the nominee. It doesn't get rid of the spoiler problem, but it does then mean that we can use preference voting, like Condorcet, to find the winner of each state.
However, I just thought of a problem with that. There is no solid way to determine proportional support for each candidate, that I know of, using preference voting like IRV or Condorcet. You can determine 1st place, 2nd place, etc, but you can't determine what percentage of support each candidate got.
So hrm. I'm stuck again.