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Tuesday, Mar 19, 2024
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Commentary Making the Electoral College work for California

The confusion, accusations, and counter-accusations of the 2000 presidential election revived the call to abolish the Electoral College. Some polls indicate 61 percent of the people want direct election of the president.

It won’t happen. There is, however, a possible reform and California is uniquely positioned to lead that reform.

The Electoral College is the constitutional method that ensures we choose our chief executive in the same way we choose our federal Legislature. Congress is divided into two houses that are elected by the people of the 50 states.

Every state elects two senators regardless of the size of the state. California has two senators, while New England, which has 41 percent of our population, elects 12 senators. Nevertheless, the Senate will remain as is.

Representatives in the 435-member House of Representatives are allocated to the states every 10 years based on population with the proviso that each state have at least one representative. After this year’s census, the average size of a House district within a state is 647,000 people.

Even here there are anomalies. Four states have less than this average albeit in three cases only marginally less.

The larger discrepancy is caused by the fact that House districts do not cut across state lines, which means that the allocation by state is rounded. One of many discrepancies is that Rhode Island has only 146,000 more people than Montana, but Rhode Island has two representatives while Montana has only one. There are other similar anomalies, but the House will remain the House.

The College

The Electoral College is the group of people who elect the president. It is chosen by the states, which get votes based on its representation in Congress. No state can have less than three votes, since they all have two senators and at least one representative.

In addition, the 23rd Amendment allocates three electoral votes to the District of Columbia. In the 2000 election, we relearned that the candidate who gets the most total votes can lose the Electoral College vote and therefore lose the presidency. The Electoral College will remain in place.

All three institutions can be undemocratic. The Senate and the Electoral College are obvious, but it can also be true of the House. In 1998, the Republican Party lost seats in the House to the Democratic Party. The Republican candidates actually won 300,000 more total votes than the Democratic Party candidates. In a direct democracy, as in many parliamentary systems, the Republicans would have gained seats. No one claimed the Republicans won the popular vote, because you cannot win what is not contested.

‘The People’s House’

The presidency is the only office every American votes for, so some people think it should reflect the direct will of the people. The House , also known as “The People’s House” , is an even closer track of the people, no one is recommending a parliamentary alternative.

We can change the Senate, the House or the Electoral College only by amending the Constitution. An amendment requires two-thirds of the House and of the Senate and three-quarters of the states’ approval. The conventional wisdom is that as many as half the states would oppose abolishing the Electoral College.

With continued population shifts, that number will grow. States previously considered large are now realizing they are medium or even small, and they are in regions of diminishing importance (e.g. Massachusetts and Connecticut). There would be no reason for a presidential candidate to pay any attention to many of these states.

The opposite unfortunately also is true. In some circumstances the Electoral College allows candidates to ignore large states. In practical terms, that happened to California in the last election and it may be our fate again under a variety of circumstances. Our strength is our weakness.

California now has 55 electoral votes, or 20 percent of the total needed to win the presidency. It also is very expensive to compete for these votes. Coalitions that do not include California are actually easier to assemble, as we saw 2000.

Growth No Help

Our growth is no help. While we gained one electoral vote in this year’s census, the states that voted with us in the last election lost seven votes.

We can find ourselves on the losing end a variety of ideological and regional coalitions. The slow growth states might line up against us across what we now see as party lines. Party alignment in California is very volatile. It was only a few years ago that California was a Republican stronghold. Perceptive Democrats recognize their current advantage could also be fleeting. Nationally, African-Americans are 12 percent of the population and faithful Democrats, but African-Americans are only 7 percent of the California population.

Much has been made of the Hispanic voters in California, but like any immigrant group, they tend to shift party allegiance over time; California is approaching the tipping point where new arrivals are outvoted even within their own group.

It also cannot be comforting to Democrats that the world’s largest Hispanic electorate just voted in a man who is more conservative than George W. Bush , a fellow named Vicente Fox.

One Reform Works

There is a reform that will require presidential candidates to pay attention to California and allow us to work with alternative national coalitions.

We can follow the examples of Maine and Nebraska. Instead of the statewide winner taking all the electoral votes, the state winner gets only the two votes that correspond to the two Senate votes.

The remainder of votes are awarded to the winner of each congressional district. This means the electoral vote exactly maps the votes for the House and Senate.

It has the advantage of increasing the leverage of every vote in the same way a vote for a congressman has more leverage than a vote for senator. That is even more true in our state where a vote for senator means much less than a comparable Senate vote in Vermont.

Allocating electoral votes this way has the dual advantage of being more akin to direct democracy and of bringing more attention to California in presidential elections. It will be worth the investment for all political parties to campaign here.

With 53 votes outside the statewide total, California is a huge cache of potential votes for either party. They will not be able to ignore us. Just as we have influence in both parties in the House no matter which party has a majority of our state delegation, we will have influence with a president of either party. We can have our cake and eat it too.

Our proposition system in California can make this change before the next presidential election. We can’t change the Electoral College, but we can make it work for us.

McSwain is a Cardiff businessman.

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