Title: Transcript: How the Electoral College works
Course: US Election 2012 - Leuphana Copy > Section: The electoral system

Video Transcript: How the Electoral College Works
http://blog.cgpgrey.com/the-electoral-college/

Ah, Election Day, when Americans everywhere cast their ballot for the next President of the United States.

Except, not really. Americans don’t directly vote for president.

So, what’s happening on election day then? It’s a bit complicated because of something called the Electoral College.

To keep things simple for now, think of the Electoral College as a collection of the 538 votes that determine who the President of the United States will be.

Why 538?

Because that’s the number of Senators 100 plus the number of Representatives, 438 in Congress. Why are there 438 Representatives in Congress?

Stop asking so many question right now we’re trying to keep this simple:

These 538 votes in the Electoral College aren’t given to the citizens directly, but are instead divided among the states.

So how does the Electoral College give out the votes?

Each state, no matter how populous or not, gets three votes to start. The remaining votes are given out roughly in proportion to the population of the state. The more people the state has, the more votes it gets.

Here is a map of the United States showing the voting power each states has by making one hexagon equal to one electoral college vote for president.

Because electoral votes mostly - though not completely - scale with population it’s also a map of where people live with a bonus given to the smaller states to make them a bit bigger than they would otherwise be.

In early November, when citizens go to the polls they aren’t voting for president directly but they’re really telling their state how they want it to use its electoral votes.

48 of the 50 states give all their electoral college votes to the candidate who wins a majority in their state.

Take Florida, for example, which has 29 electoral college votes. If a candidate wins a majority, no matter how small that majority, he gets all the votes.

So the path to the White House is clear: win enough majorities in enough states to get more than half of the Electoral college votes and you get to sit at the big desk.

That wasn’t so complicated, you say.

Well, there were a few details left out:

The Electoral College loves states, but what about the 11 million Americans who don’t live in a state?

What happens to their vote, and where are these people hiding?

There are about 600,000 in the District of Columbia an area set aside specifically not to be a state so that the capital of the country would be free of local politics.

For most of the United States’ history people living in the district didn’t get to vote for president. Then in 1964 the constitution was amended to give D.C. the same number of votes as the least populous state, Wyoming.

So the electoral college likes DC. But you know who it doesn’t like? The Territories.

The often forgotten Puerto Rico, Guam, U.S. Virgin Islands and Northern Mariana Islands, get no votes from the electoral college because they aren’t states and they don’t have a special constitutional amendment to recognize them.

Which is a bit odd considering they’re part of the United States and everyone who lives there is a citizen so – for most practical purposes – they’re just like D.C.

And 4.4 Million people live in the territories – that might not sound like a lot, but it’s than the populations of Wyoming, Vermont, North Dakota, South Dakota, Alaska & Delaware. Combined.

But still, no votes from the Electoral College do they get.

The whole situation with territories is extra strange when you consider the final group of Americans who don’t live in States, the 6.3 million Americans who live abroad.

If you’re a United States citizen who moves to a foreign country, you can usually send a postal vote to the last state that you resided in.

But, if you move within the United States to one of its territories, you lose your right to vote for president for as long as you live there making these the only spots on the whole earth where Americans are not allowed to vote for president.

Actually, they’re the only spots in the whole Universe because American astronauts are allowed to vote for space.

The last bit of electoral college complication is the weirdest and has to do with the votes themselves.

The state of Florida – and all the others – doesn’t really give votes to a candidate, that’s just a simplified way to think about it, because the reality of the situation is… odd.

What citizens are voting for on election day is a group of electors appointed by the political parties who chose the president on the citizens’ behalf.

The number of votes that a state gets from the Electoral College is actually the number electors the state is allowed to send to a collegiate meeting to vote on who the president will be.

What makes it odd is that while these electors promise they will vote for president as their state’s citizens want them to, they aren’t required to do so.

Electors are free to vote the way they want . While this has never swung an election, 87 times in the past electors have voted against the wishes of the very people who elected them.

Why set up this crazy system where a small group of people essentially unknown to the general public are the ones who really decide on the president?

Because in the 1700s – when the electoral collage was designed – the quickest way to send a piece of information was to write it on a piece of paper, hand it to a guy on a horse, wish him godspeed, good sir’ and hope he didn’t get killed by indians or die of dysentery along the way.

Because information moved so slowly and because the young country was so big, the idea was to send all the electors to Washington where they could have the most up-to-date information to make decisions for the people back home who wouldn’t know the latest news.

Though now, when we carry information on beams of light in fiber optic cables rather than on the backs of herd animals this particular aspect of the electoral college might seem a little out of date.

None the less, while most people think that the election for president takes place in early november it doesn’t – that’s the election that determines who the electors will be.

The 538 electors who are chosen then meet in early december and they cast the real votes that determine who is the next president of the United States.

Problems With The Electoral College

In a fair democracy everyone’s vote should count equally, but the method that the United States uses to elect its president, called the electoral college, violates this principle by making sure that some people’s votes are more equal than others.

The Electoral College is, essentially, the 538 votes that determine who wins the presidency.

If these votes were split evenly across the population every 574,000 people would be represented by one vote.

But that’s not what happens because the Electoral College doesn’t give votes to people, only states. Which has some unfair consequences.

For example there are 11,500,000 people in Ohio so, to fairly represent them, it should get 20 electoral votes. But the Electoral college doesn’t give Ohio 20 votes, it only gets 18 – two less than it should.

Where’d those other votes go? To states like Rhode Island.

Plucky Rhode Island has 1.1 million people in it, so it should have about two votes, but instead it gets four!

Those extra two votes that should be representing Ohioans go to representing Rhode Islanders instead? Why?

Because, according to the rules of the electoral college, every state, no matter how few people live there, gets three votes to start with before the rest are distributed according to population.

Because of this rule there are a lot of states with a few people that should only have one or two votes for president but instead get three or four.

So Georgians, Virginians, Michiganders & Jerseyites are each missing one vote,

Pennsylvanians, North Carolinians, Ohioans & Hoosiers are missing two, Floridians are missing 4, New Yorkers, 5, Texans 6, and Californians are 10 short of what they should get.

Because of this vote redistribution, the Electoral College essentially pretends that fewer people live where they do and more people live where they don’t.

An American who lives in one of these states, has their vote for president count for less than an American who lives in one of these states.

In some cases the Electoral College bends the results just a little, but if you live in a particularly large or small state, it bends them a lot.

One Vermonter’s vote, according to the Electoral College is worth three Texans’ votes. And one Wyomingite’s vote is worth four Californians’.

Now, hold on there son, you might be saying to yourself right now: you’re missing the whole point of the electoral college. It’s to protect the small states from the big states.

Give the small states more voting power and the presidential candidates will have to pay them more attention in an election.

If that’s the goal of the electoral college, it’s failing spectacularly.

Here’s a graph showing the number of visits the presidential Candidates paid to each of the states in the last two months of the previous election.

If it looks like there are a few states missing, you’re right. Only 18 of the 50 states received even a single visit from a candidate. And just two of those states, Mane and New Hampshire have very small populations.

The area of the country with the most small states is conspicuously missing.

The Electoral College doesn’t make candidates care about small states.

But, interestingly the biggest states, California, Texas and New York are missing as well so what’s going on?

Looking closer, just four states, Ohio, Florida, Pennsylvania and Virginia received a majority of the candidates’ attention during the election.

And if you follow the money, it’s the same story.

Why do candidates spend so much money and time in so few states? Because the way the electoral college works forces them to do so.

The elections are winner-take-all. As long as a candidate gets just over 50% of the popular vote in a state he wins 100% of that state’s electoral votes.

That means winning by millions of citizens’ votes is no better than winning by a single vote.

So candidates are safe to ignore states where they poll with big margins.

Instead, the electoral college makes candidates intensely interested in the needs of just a few states with close races, to the detriment of of almost all Americans, which is why it should be abolished.

But wait! You might say, won’t abolishing the electoral college and voting directly for president cause candidates to spend all their time in big cities? That wouldn’t fair to most Americans either.

This sounds like a reasonable fear, but ignores the mathematical reality of population distribution.

There are 309 million people in the United States, only 8 million of which live in New York, the largest city by far. That’s 2.6% of the total population. But after New York, the size of cities drops fast.

LA has 3.8 million and Chicago has 2.7 but you can’t even make it to the tenth biggest city, San Jose before you’re under a million people.

These top ten cities added together are only 7.9% of the popular vote hardly enough to win an election.

And even winning the next 90 biggest cities in the United States all the way down to Spokane is still not yet 20% of the total population.

So unless there’s a city with a few hundred million people hiding somewhere in America that’s been left out of the census, the idea, that a candidate can just spend their campaign Jetting between New York, LA and Chicago while ignoring everyone else and still become president is mathematically ludicrous.

Want to see the real way to unfairly win?

How YOU can become President with only 22% of the popular vote by taking advantage of the Electoral College today!

Don’t believe that’s possible in a democracy? Just watch:

Here’s the action plan: win the votes of the people who count the most and ignore the people who count the least.

Start with Wyoming, the state where 0.18% of Americans live but who get 0.56% of the electoral college votes for president.

And, because it’s a winner take all system, you don’t need all of them to vote for you, just half plus one or 0.09%.

Next up is the District of Columbia where winning 0.1% of the population also gets you an additional 0.56% of the electoral college.

Then add in wins in Vermont, and North Dakota, and Alaska.

Notice how the votes your getting to win the presidency go up much faster than the percent of the population who voted for you because of the Electoral College’s rules.

Next is South Dakota, then Delaware, Montana, Rhode Island, New Hampshire, Maine, Hawaii, Idaho, Nebraska, West Virginia, New Mexico, Nevada, Utah, Kansas, Arkansas, Mississippi, Iowa, Connecticut, Oklahoma, Oregon, Kentucky, Louisiana, South Carolina, Alabama, Colorado, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Maryland, Missouri, Tennessee, Arizona, Indiana, Massachusetts, Virginia, and New Jersey.

Congratulations, by taking advantage of unfair rules and winning states, not people, you’ve won a majority in the Electoral College even though 78% of the population voted against you.

This is not Democracy, this is indefensible.

While this particular scenario is unlikely, if you have a voting system that allows losers to win, you shouldn’t be surprised when they do.

Not once, not twice, but thrice in American history the candidate with the most votes from the people actually lost because of the electoral college.

Three errors in 55+ elections is a failure rate of 5%.

Would anyone tolerate a sport where, by a quirk of the rules, there was a 5% chance that the loser would win? Not likely.

Given how much more important electing the president of the United States is, that’s a rather dangerously high percentage of the time to get it wrong.

If we abolish the Electoral College and simply let citizens vote for the president directly, all of these problems will go away and everyone’s vote will be equal.

Corrections & Notes

The Trouble with the Electoral College

0:30 11.5 Million is 11,500,000, not 11,500,00

1:47 The Wyoming Guy should have a vote in his hand

People from Illinois are Illinoisan not Hoosiers.

North Carolina changes color from votes count less to votes count more

Iowa is IA not IO

Credits

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