No, Abolishing Electoral College Won't Mean that CA and NY Decide the Presidency

On Sunday, we had a member of the League of Women Voters talk about Abolishing the Electoral College.  The League, which is non partisan, has been advocating the abolishment of the Electoral College since 1970.

But here’s a common myth that you often hear when this topic is raised.

    

A closer look at the numbers to see how it would actually play out in an election by national popular vote, reveals something different.

Let’s say, for the sake of this example, that every state in the union voted 60-percent to 40-percent for the same candidate. An absolute landslide, an unbelievably strong preference for one candidate. And let’s see how many states it would take to get us over the 50% threshold to victory if we elected the president by the national popular vote total, going in order from the largest states down to the smallest.

California has the most voters, and 60% of its voters would represent 7-percent of the national total.

Next is Texas, so we’ll add it to the total. Remember, in this example we have 60% of voters choosing the same candidate in every state, so we’re seeing how long it would take for that candidate to get more than 50% of the votes.

We add Florida. Then New York.  Next we add Pennsylvania. And Illinois. And we’re still not even halfway there. Let’s add a half dozen more states and see where we get.  In fact, it would take the votes of 27 states to get us over the 50% threshold even in this incredibly lopsided scenario. 

 

In reality, of course, California and Texas might go for different candidates, in essence cancelling each other out. And the margins of victory would likely be much smaller in many of these states. Which means that it would take even more states’ voters to get us to 51%.

You can do this same exercise for cities, by the way. The ten largest cities in the country only make up about 10 percent of the vote. If the largest 100 cities all voted unanimously for the same candidate, it would still only get us to 30% of the vote total, nowhere near the 51% needed to win. And this top 100 list includes cities like Laredo, TX and Spokane, WA. These are cities with populations in the 200,000’s.

It is simply mathematically impossible for an election by popular vote to be determined by just the largest states or the largest cities. 

 

The fact is that direct election by popular vote would ensure that every person is equally represented, regardless of where they live. Voters from swing states would count just the same as voters from non-swing states. Voters from the city would count just the same as voters from the country. A California Republican’s vote would count just the same as a California Democrat’s.

The fact is that we no longer would be voting  by state, but by person. THIS is what the framers intended when they unanimously agreed with James Madison’s statement that the “President is to act for the people, not for the States.”

Information for this post has come from the League of Women Voters. More information can be viewed at the Wilmette Chapter website.