Hunting The Muse

Apportionment And The Electoral College

Regular readers of this site might know of my nuanced opinions regarding vote reform and the Electoral College. I'm not one of those people that believes that the Electoral College should simply be disbanded, because there's something about the logic behind the E.C. that I find consistent with the basic approach behind the U.S. Government.

Basically, each state is given an Electoral Vote for each Representative and Senator that the state has. Much in the same way that Congress is a compromise between popular representation (Representatives) and regional representation (Senators), the Electoral College weights the popular vote by the region the vote comes from.

I agree with that general approach. I think our national interests deserve to be represented, and our interests are not just reflected by our population, but by the geographical environment of our resources. If a vast area of the United States doesn't have much population, I don't have a problem with that population being given a bit more voting power to represent the interests of that area, and of the culture that the area creates.

That said, the way we are choosing to reflect that weighting is pretty messed up. One way in which it is messed up is the winner-take-all of our elections. For each region, 51% gets everything, and 49% gets nothing. The thought is that on a grand scale, these various wins and losses cancel out, and to a large degree, they do. (The other flaw of winner-take-all is that if there is a consistent voting bloc that is always below 50% in any region, they will always be unrepresented.)

The other way in which this is messed up, which I haven't explored much yet, is in this whole subject of apportionment.

This whole subject is kind of dense, and it's easy to take a tangent and discuss gerrymandering, but what I'm referring to in particular is how we decide how many Electoral Votes each state has. What affects the number of Electoral Votes is how many Representatives a state has (each state will always have two Senators).

The number of Representatives is figured by the census we have every ten years - that requirement is actually in our Constitution. This site has all the details.

The main question about apportionment is the balance of power between Senators and Representatives. And what makes it all so maddening is that this is one of those silly examples where there's no longer any valid rationale behind the technique we have now.

Basically what happened is that there used to be far less representatives in the House than the 435 we have now. The government set the House at 435 members in 1941, and it hasn't changed since.

It's basically the story of two warring percentages.

First is the number of voters per representative. There are definitely good reasons to keep this consistent when you're dealing with popular representation. Right now there's an average of almost 650,000 voters per representative, when it used to be far less.

But the second percentage is the number of representatives per Senator. As more representatives are added to the picture, the Senators don't increase in number. This means that as the number of representatives increase, the Electoral College becomes more and more reflective of the popular vote, since those two extra Senatorial EVs count for less and less in the ratio over time.

I came across this study which is a fascinating exploration of the 2000 election. It shows that the result of the 2000 election depended on the size of the House of Representatives. If we had had the exact same vote in every state, but the the House of Representatives had had 492 Reps instead of 435 Reps, Gore would have won.

If we had kept the same ratio of voters/rep that we had had in 1941, then we would have over 800 Reps in the House, and Gore would have won the election easily. This is the main point of the paper. The implication is that as time goes on, election results are going to be less representative of the popular vote than it would have been had we not fixed the House size in 1941. Less and less over time.

But it's interesting because that isn't really the raw deal that it sounds like it is. It overlooks the second percentage - the number of representatives per Senator. There are good reasons to not allow that number to degrade over time, at least not in terms of voting power. I don't know the the reasons behind the 1941 agreement, but much of it could very well be because they didn't want states to lose their Senatorial weight in the Electoral College.

The paper shows a really interesting graph showing how Gore becomes more and more likely of winning as the size of the House increases, which seems very odd at first because it seems like the size of the House is really the only determinating factor. But it's not as exciting as that - the only reason that graph works is because the Electoral College vote went one way and the popular vote went the other way in 2000. As the House increases and the Senate remains the same size, the simple explanation is just that the Electoral Vote count will become more and more reflective of the popular vote. And Gore won the popular vote. So it doesn't really point out anything all that revolutionary.

There's a good reason for keeping the number of Senators at 100 - it's a nice round number, and we don't exactly want the Senate to become even more unwieldy. And a Senator's power is not actually going to decrease as the House increases in size - it actually would probably be the average House member that would have less public recognition due to the added numbers. But, in terms of Electoral College voting power, there's good reason to protect that ratio. So how do we protect it, while also letting the House expand? What's the way to compromise between both warring percentages?

One thing is that you could keep the 4.35:1 ratio of Rep EVs to Senatorial EVs, but then allow the number of Reps to expand again. One way I can think of is to concede that every state is allowed to have at least one representative, so award one representative to the smallest state in the Union - Wyoming - and then use its population as the number of voters per rep. Apply it to the rest of the nation to get the number of Representatives. According to the 2000 census, that would be around 568 Reps instead of 435. Then we apply the 4.35:1 ratio - we'd still keep 100 senators, but we'd add in another 2.6 Senatorial EVs to each state.

People that argue about the Electoral College have to be careful about how many different arguments they are conflating. It's a very complex issue. The issue of how many representatives we have is different than the issue of how important the popular vote should be. There's very good reason to support there being more representatives even without changing the tension between the popular-weight and regional-weight of the Electoral College.

Update: I guess I'm not done analyzing this one yet, due to this quote from this article:

When [the Senate] was set up, there was a nine-to-one imbalance in voting population between the largest state, Virginia, and the smallest, Delaware. (Counting slaves, Virginia's edge increased to 12 to 1.) Now it's nearly 70 to 1 (California versus Wyoming), making the Senate our own equivalent of the United Nations General Assembly as a forum for overrepresented small states.

They're actually arguing that the Senate itself gives too much relative power to the small states compared to the early days, but does that also carry into the Electoral College? Hmmm...

Posted by Curt at November 26, 2004 09:37 PM