Imagine if Everyone’s Votes Counted
New York Times article takes a look at New Yorkers trying to make a difference in the campaign. Not by voting, of course, since New Yorkers’ votes don’t count. And not by talking to neighbors and coworkers about the election. Or by calling other people in their community. After all, New Yorkers’ votes don’t count! Instead, they’re phone banking to swing states hundreds of miles away.
And good for them.
And of course it’s not just New York. Washington, DC contains a lot of hard-core Obama fans who want to help the campaign and we’re lucky enough to live right next door to a swing state, so for weeks now there’ve been weekend caravans taking Districters across the Virginia border to do canvassing in the Old Dominion. And it’s all a great American tradition — I remember taking College Democrats buses from Cambridge, MA up to New Hampshire because, of course, our votes didn’t count in Massachusetts. It’s all in good fun, but we could live in a country where everyone’s votes counted, and would-be activists could do their GOTV and persuasion activities wherever it was most convenient for them, rather than in special states. It would be fairer, it would be healthier for democracy, and it would be easier for everyone.
The answer is the National Popular Vote movement.
75 Responses to “Imagine if Everyone’s Votes Counted”
Register
RSSLogin
Topic Cloud
ArchivesBlog RollAbout Matt YglesiasContact Me
Donate
November 2nd, 2008 at 3:56 pm
One day you’ll get your NPV and we’ll be hit with a National Recount. Won’t that be fun.
November 2nd, 2008 at 3:57 pm
Wouldnt it make it less fun for the pollsters and political junkies?
November 2nd, 2008 at 4:00 pm
My biggest moment of cognitive disconnect in life came when I my polisci professor at a rural NYstate school defended the electoral college by saying that it focussed attention on areas that wouldn’t otherwise get attention in the presidential race.
Umm. Ok. When, since FDR, did a presidential candidate visit Saratoga Springs, Professor S?
Man, it would be nice to have a meaningful presidential vote. I’m currently living in England, and it’s really hard to explain to people why my vote actually doesn’t count.
November 2nd, 2008 at 4:11 pm
The National Popular Vote Movement will never work. Any state that is “swingier” than the average state would see its own influence in Presidential politics diminish, so it would never sign on and you’d never get the 50%+1 critical mass necessary for the plans to activate.
And if you somehow did get the plans to activate, they’d last exactly as long as it would take for them to matter once, and then they’d be forever repealed. For them to matter, a state whose population voted one way would have to tip the election by casting its electoral votes the other way. Imagine how Texans would have felt if their electoral votes put Al Gore in office, or how Californians would feel if the roles were reversed.
Shit sucks, but the electoral college is here to stay. Yet another problem caused by the difference between the America-as-union-of-states paradigm of the Founders and the America-as-union-of-people paradigm of the modern day.
November 2nd, 2008 at 4:13 pm
I’m currently living in England, and it’s really hard to explain to people why my vote actually doesn’t count.
Really? In England? Where they have first past the post elections in electoral districts where, a great deal of the time, one party has no possible chance of losing?
If you live in the Cities of London and Westminster constituency, your MP will always be a Tory. If you live in Manchester Central, your MP will always be Labour. If you live in Argyll and Bute, your MP will be a Liberal Democrat.
That British people, of all nationalities, would get up on their high horse about our electoral system being undemocratic because whether your vote counts depends on where you live is absurd.
November 2nd, 2008 at 4:14 pm
I wish you’d stop pushing the NPV. That should be the last step in election reform, not the first. We are too crappy at counting ballots, the electoral college acts as a stop gap for all the problems; a tourniquet for our profusely bleeding election system.
If votes are grains of sand, bricks are electoral votes and it’s much easier to build a house brick by brick than to try to do so with individual grains of sand. And until the margin of error stackup on a national scale is reduced to an acceptable point we cannot abandon the Electoral College just to make people who live in partisan states feel valid (speaking as someone whose lived in 3 deep blue states that “don’t count”).
1) Election Day should be a national holiday or on a weekend day with long, standardized hours.
2) Federal standards need to be imposed to regulate the election so there’s 1 set of rules. (just ask why carter won’t observe our elections http://cartercenter.org/peace/democracy/index.html)
3) We need to be better at counting ballots. Chads, faulty/hackable e-voting, bad scanners, lost absentee ballots… Frankly we suck.
4) We need to have clear and complete registration. Like in Australia, being a registered voter should be required and the onus should be put on the government to make sure people are on the rolls.
We live in a partisan country that’s pretty terrible at getting people to vote and counting every vote so while the margin of error is in the same ballpark as the difference in votes between candidates, introducing the NPV would throw the system into recount anarchy. Every election would be Florida 2000.
The NPV makes sense as the capstone after a long line of reforms, not the first.
In the meantime I’d go from a 50 state electoral college to a 436 district electoral college. Staying in a discrete (easily countable) system with smaller units of measure rather than moving into a haphazard continuous system of 300 million grains of sand in which far too many would slip through our fumbling fingers.
November 2nd, 2008 at 4:15 pm
Also, for what it’s worth, NO ONE’S VOTE COUNTS. The only time your vote matters is when the electorate is exactly numerically tied such that your single vote tips the balance, and the odds of that happening in an electoral college system or in a popular vote system are infinitesimal. Even Florida in 2000 had a margin of hundreds of votes, which still means no single vote mattered. Never has; never will; at least, not in Presidential elections.
So, speaking as a fellow New Yorker, I really have very little sympathy for the people in that article. We’re all disenfranchised. We go to the polls because it is our moral duty, not because it’s going to change who the winner is. And if we don’t, we’re fools.
November 2nd, 2008 at 4:22 pm
It’s not enough for ’small states’ to have a disproportionate influence in the Senate, but they have to drag the presidential election to the right too…
November 2nd, 2008 at 4:26 pm
I know, I know, and I couldn’t agree more…
How sad it is that people actually have to, you know, get involved and you know do something beside voting…
How sad that potential leaders have to be charismatic enough to foster and encourage the energy to get involved…
How sad that potential leaders have to have enough vision to build an infrastructure and provide cutting edge IT tools to make volunteering easier…
How sad that potential leaders must tour the states, meet their citizens, and learn their desires and concerns…
November 2nd, 2008 at 4:27 pm
Umm, Matt, Washington DC is overrepresented in the presidential election. Yes, they are undeservedly underrepresented in Congress. But you shouldn’t complain about the Electoral College as screwing DC. It doesn’t. Check it out:
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2008/11/02/opinion/20081102_OPCHART.html
November 2nd, 2008 at 4:27 pm
Why stop at the NPV? Since what the U.S. does can and will have a dramatic impact on other countries, why not have a Global Vote Movement? Doesn’t that make sense too, at least to MattY?
On a sidenote related to a post below, has MattY seen the new section of BHO’s website just for white people?
November 2nd, 2008 at 4:28 pm
That should be the last step in election reform, not the first.
Damn straight.
Also, Matt, you push the NPV all the time, but are you ever going to address the legitimate arguments for the Electoral College, or are you just going to ask us to trust you?
November 2nd, 2008 at 4:33 pm
By this logic, since no election has ever been won by a single vote, no one’s vote has ever “counted.”
November 2nd, 2008 at 4:33 pm
I don’t see how NPV would help. Without NPV efforts are divided according to states, but with it, campaigns would still prioritize efforts based on return-on-investment, which I guess would turn on the local media market demographics. My understanding of the candidates’ personal appearances is that their real value is to leverage the free media from local news; even a really big rally just isn’t that many people in absolute terms.
The New York metro area still wouldn’t be contested this time around, for instance. (You actually see both sides advertising here, but I figure that’s just for fundraising, not votes.) Maybe upstate would be in play, but other areas in current swing states would go out of play.
Different board, same game.
November 2nd, 2008 at 4:49 pm
I don’t think this is the best argument for NPV. The reason why New Yorkers’ votes “don’t count” is because NY is noncompetitive / Obama’s margin of victory will be large here. Under NPV, the whole country could be noncompetitive. If one candidate has a 5-7% lead (as Obama does), no one’s votes will “count” (where “no one” here is defined as “no marginal voter”).
I don’t really have a problem with this, BTW. The purpose of elections is not to provide entertaining finishes, but to reflect popular will.
November 2nd, 2008 at 4:51 pm
While a national recount would be unfun, it’s also extremely unlikely. As the size of an electorate increases, the probability of the victory margin being small enough to require a recount decreases.
November 2nd, 2008 at 4:56 pm
New Yorkers’ votes do count. On Tuesday, they’ll deliver 31 electoral votes for Obama. Sorry it’s not gonna be all exciting and down to the wire and shit, but facts are facts.
November 2nd, 2008 at 4:57 pm
“Different board, same game.”
True, but the rules would be changed to give more weight to informed voters. Our current system asserts that a voter in Iowa is more intelligent and more informed than a voter in New York. I’m willing to bet that the opposite is true. Give the New Yorker an equal voice to an Iowan, and I think we’ll have better government. And I like Iowans more than I like New yorkers, but I don’t believe they are super-citizens deserving of a greater voice. The idea that some people should get extra voting rights because they work in outdated industries makes no sense. In Democracy, there is only one thing that makes sense: One Person, One Vote. That alone should be sacrosanct.
November 2nd, 2008 at 4:59 pm
I lived in Massachusetts most of my life (well the first 18 years at least) and I though presidential canidates only appearances were at the debates, and no one actually got to see them in person. Heck I didn’t even know political ads existed. … Then I moved to PA for college and got to see the good and the bad. I got to go see Kerry and Bush in 2004. For the primaries I got Clintons (Hillary, Bill, and Chelsea) and Obamas (Barack and Michelle) and John McCain, Joe Biden, and even Sarah Palin was in town. You actually get to see the candidates and feel a part of the process, and know that your vote “counts” I also get the bad side of it. The non stop ads featuring hicks saying Obama is going to take their guns, or of a woman holding up a baby saying Obama wants to kill it, or the one legged solider saying Obama hates the troops, or the black man saying that MLK would hate Obama, or the ads that say Obama would lead to an international crisis and that he is not ready to lead … Yet. But I guess that negative stuff is the candidates choice, as I have noticed the Obama ads for the most part tend to be uplifting and motivational. Point being, if you want to feel a part of the process move to a swing state or a state that has only only primary going for 2 months. But be prepared to deal with the GOP smear machine and have your “Dirty Jobs” interrupted by mother who is scared of Obama because he wants to kill her baby.
November 2nd, 2008 at 5:04 pm
why not have a Global Vote Movement?
Or a Tinfoil-Hatted Fucktard Vote Movement, in which only Chris Kelly gets to vote? Then they’ll take notice of him!
November 2nd, 2008 at 5:05 pm
I’ve got to say that I’m sick of people living in England telling me that they can’t explain how the U.S. selects Presidents. There you only get to vote for your local M.P. and the party chooses the prime minister. Ask them when they voted for Brown or Blair.
November 2nd, 2008 at 5:05 pm
Scythia makes a good point. If votes “don’t count” when the lead is substantial, then a national popular vote would mean that no one’s votes would count if one candidate had a significant national lead.
November 2nd, 2008 at 5:07 pm
Stuff like this ticks me off more than this stupid argument being pushed by Matt, a guy I’m wondering if is as smart as I thought, or really merely another urban wonk who believes in gross generalizations about voters based on what f*cking state they live in.
This crap is why I’d fight tooth and nail against any NPV hilarity.
November 2nd, 2008 at 5:25 pm
If we define “small states” as those with 5 EV or less, I count six reliably blue (DC, VT, RI, DE, HI, ME), 6 reliably red (MT, ND, WY, SD, AK, ID, UT), and 4 swingers (NH, NM, NV, WV). That seems pretty balanced to me.
November 2nd, 2008 at 5:25 pm
Sorry, that should be “seven reliably red”.
November 2nd, 2008 at 5:30 pm
The state-by-state winner-take-all system is not a firewall, but instead causes unnecessary fires.
Under the current system, there are 51 separate vote pools in every presidential election. Thus, our nation’s 55 presidential elections have really been 2,084 separate elections. This is the reason why there have been five seriously disputed counts in the nation’s 55 presidential elections. The 51 separate pools regularly create artificial crises in elections in which the vote is not at all close on a nationwide basis, but close in particular states.
If anyone is genuinely concerned about the possibility of recounts, then a single national pool of votes is the way to drastically reduce the likelihood of recounts and eliminate the artificial crises produced by the current system.
November 2nd, 2008 at 5:31 pm
I’m in Texas, my vote didn’t count either– because of how votes are bracketed.
The electoral college is amoral and needs to go. The arguments about national recounts and “we’re not good enough at counting” are laughable: every other major industrial democracy makes do without an electoral college.
The idea of breaking things into 436 easy-to-gerrymander districts, though, THAT is horrifying.
November 2nd, 2008 at 5:31 pm
I’m amazed all these idiots are defending a system in which it’s in no national polician’s interest to speak directly to New York or Los Angeles or Chicago or Washington DC. If you read this blog, you might notice how much time we spend wondering why nobody gives a shit about urban issues. Oh my god, there’ll be recounts! The prospect of a national recount might be just the thing to get our heads out of our collective state-by-state-is-a-fine-system asses.
I’m a New Yorker and I just spent the last two days canvassing for Obama in New Hampshire. And everyone I talked to had a glowing sense of patriotism and a pride in the fact that their state was abuzz with civic-mindedness. They take their vote seriously. I left NY without voting because there is not a single competitive race in my district.
NY is a guaranteed blue state, and as such, its interests are irrelevant to the presidential candidates. If you can’t see how that amputates our political process, I don’t know what to tell you. If there were a NPV, this whole frame would be ridiculous, each vote matters exactly the same as any other. You’d see voter drives in Harlem and Birmingham.
November 2nd, 2008 at 5:32 pm
In Gallup polls since 1944, only about 20% of the public has supported the current system of awarding all of a state’s electoral votes to the presidential candidate who receives the most votes in each separate state (with about 70% opposed and about 10% undecided). The recent Washington Post, Kaiser Family Foundation, and Harvard University poll shows 72% support for direct nationwide election of the President. This national result is similar to recent polls in Vermont (75%), Maine (71%), Arkansas (74%), California (69%), Connecticut (73%), Massachusetts (73%), Michigan (70%), Missouri (70%), North Carolina (62%), and Rhode Island (74%). In short, the public believes that the candidate that receives the most votes should get elected.
It is important to note that the voters have not “rebelled” in reaction to the state laws in Maine and Nebraska that permit a presidential candidate to win electoral votes in those states without carrying the state. More importantly, the voters did not “rebel” in 2000 when Bush won the Presidency without receiving the most votes nationwide. Voters in states that Bush carried in 2000 did not “rebel” because their state’s presidential electors voted for the candidate who did not receive the most votes nationwide. Everyone understood that the winner-take-all system was the existing law that governed the 2000 election. George W. Bush won the Presidency by winning a majority of the electoral votes (one more than the 270 needed) in an election where everyone involved knew the rules of the game. If a state legislature responds to the wishes of 70% of its voters and enacts a law saying that the presidential candidate receiving the most votes in all 50 states will win the Presidency, and if the presidential campaign is then conducted with both candidates and voters knowing, in advance, that national popular vote is the law and with everyone expecting that the presidential candidate receiving the most votes in all 50 states will win the Presidency, then the voters are not going to rebel when the National Popular Vote law delivers its advertised outcome.
November 2nd, 2008 at 5:36 pm
The major shortcoming of the current system of electing the President is that presidential candidates concentrate their attention on a handful of closely divided “battleground” states. In 2004 two-thirds of the visits and money were focused in just six states; 88% on 9 states, and 99% of the money went to just 16 states. Two-thirds of the states and people were merely spectators to the presidential election. Candidates have no reason to poll, visit, advertise, organize, campaign, or worry about the voter concerns in states where they are safely ahead or hopelessly behind. The reason for this is the winner-take-all rule under which all of a state’s electoral votes are awarded to the candidate who gets the most votes in each separate state.
Another shortcoming of the current system is that a candidate can win the Presidency without winning the most popular votes nationwide. This has occurred in one of every 14 presidential elections.
In the past six decades, there have been six presidential elections in which a shift of a relatively small number of votes in one or two states would have elected (and, of course, in 2000, did elect) a presidential candidate who lost the popular vote nationwide.
The National Popular Vote bill would guarantee the Presidency to the candidate who receives the most popular votes in all 50 states (and DC).
Every vote would be politically relevant and equal in presidential elections.
The bill would take effect only when enacted, in identical form, by states possessing a majority of the electoral votes—that is, enough electoral votes to elect a President (270 of 538). When the bill comes into effect, all the electoral votes from those states would be awarded to the presidential candidate who receives the most popular votes in all 50 states (and DC).
The National Popular Vote bill has passed 21 state legislative chambers, including one house in Arkansas, Colorado, Maine, North Carolina, and Washington, and both houses in California, Hawaii, Illinois, New Jersey, Maryland, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Vermont. The bill has been enacted by Hawaii, Illinois, New Jersey, and Maryland. These four states possess 50 electoral votes — 19% of the 270 necessary to bring the law into effect.
See http://www.NationalPopularVote.com
November 2nd, 2008 at 5:39 pm
This is dumb. The more lopsided a race, the clearer it is that the voters were not offered a real choice between candidates (see, e.g., Castro, Fidel). And the greater the margin of victory, the less the winner needs to fight for any individual vote.
Democracy occurs in the fight for votes–that’s where the interests of the poeople are internalized by the ruling elites. If that process is not taking place in most of the country (particularly in all the cultural centers of the country), then there’s a real problem. This is like 3rd grade civics. I don’t get how it’s hard to understand.
November 2nd, 2008 at 5:48 pm
Skiddie: I don’t have the exact facts committed to memory, but in 2000 I read an article noting that at least twice in British history (I believe the years were 1951 and 1974, once benefitting Conservatives and once benefitting Labour) the candidate (Attlee in 1951, Heath in 1974) whose party won the plurality of votes did not win the plurality of seats; hence the other guy (Churchill and Wilson) became prime minister.
France or Germany have systems that include elements resembling national popular vote, but the U.K. and Canada do not, and those who criticize our system but support theirs are confused.
November 2nd, 2008 at 5:48 pm
While a national recount would be unfun, it’s also extremely unlikely. As the size of an electorate increases, the probability of the victory margin being small enough to require a recount decreases.
How close, though, is close enough to require a recount? My sense is once you get down to 100,000 votes, that’s recountable. Because think about it. On average that’s only a margin of 2000 per state. Which is pretty close. Granted, we’ve only had one election that close in the past hundred years (1960), but we’ve also had only one election that came down to one state recount in the past hundred years. So I don’t see the one being that much less likely than the other.
November 2nd, 2008 at 5:53 pm
Since Matt as usual sees fit to present only one side of an argument, here’s another: A Critique of the National Popular Vote Plan for Electing the President
November 2nd, 2008 at 5:55 pm
I like that idea at first, but I think that it would make presidential campaigns even more impersonal and media-based…
Perhaps this is already the case, I hope EV are assigned due to population numbers, and they change when the population numbers change sufficiently. Everyone should at least have an equal number (or fraction, rather) of EVs representing them.
November 2nd, 2008 at 5:57 pm
The proof:
1951 –
Churchill(C) Attlee (La) Davies (Li)
12,660,061 13,948,883 730,546
321 295 6
1974 –
Wilson (La) Heath (C) Thorpe (Li)
11,645,616 11,872,180 6,059,519
301 297 14
(Wilson’s mere plurality of seats forced him to form a coalition with Thorpe, so I suppose one could say that the Government that came in, if both parties are counted, had more votes than the Opposition.)
Apparently it also happened in 1929 -
MacDonald Baldwin Lloyd George
8,048,968 8,252,527 5,104,638
287 260 59
(Here again, as one can see, a coalition had to be formed, so 1951 is the only pure example. Still, once enough to prove my point – it has only happened once in the last 120 years in the U.S. as well.)
November 2nd, 2008 at 6:00 pm
The columns didn’t line up quite right despite my efforts to make them do so, but the meaning is easy enough to figure out. The source was Wikipedia, which is generally reliable in cases like these.
November 2nd, 2008 at 6:03 pm
“After all, New Yorkers’ votes don’t count!”
Yes, NPV would be a good idea. But pushing for it by saying New Yorkers’ votes don’t count is silly. Of course they count. It’s precisely because New Yorkers’ votes *do* count that McCain has no chance in the state.
So what if people are travelling to places other than where they live to work on the campaign. I’m pretty sure Harvard students would be working for Obama in someplace other than Harvard.
The real problem MY is aiming at, but just missing, is that there are potential voters that are “locked up” as it were in solid red or blue states that won’t be mobilized because their states are out of reach. So the many black voters in Mississippi or Alabama, New York, Chicago, or LA, are not going to be contacted by GOTV efforts because it’s not a good use of resources.
Two problems with this: the existing resources are used to the point of near-zero effectiveness (overkill on voters in Cleveland and Miami), and it’s sort of arbitrary whether your community gets a full-fledged campaign, or you get to watch on national TV as candidates campaign in other places and to other people. (Sometimes the complaint about the electoral college amounts to: “Why won’t the candidates ever pander to me and my state?”)
But the second problem would still exist with a national popular vote. If we had a national popular vote, Obama would be spending money on mobilizing liberal, lower turnout groups (e.g. the young and the poor), and to convince swing voters to favor him. He would not be spending resources and campaigning to convince and mobilize say liberals with graduate degrees to vote for him. They usually vote and they’re on his side already. And those voters can’t work for Obama by spreading the word among their liberal colleagues! But it would be very strange to say that therefore their votes don’t count.
“One day you’ll get your NPV and we’ll be hit with a National Recount. Won’t that be fun.
“While a national recount would be unfun, it’s also extremely unlikely. As the size of an electorate increases, the probability of the victory margin being small enough to require a recount decreases.”
Yes–it’s important to note that the popular vote total was not close enough in 2000 to have caused a Florida-style fiasco. If you divide the electorate up into 51 different, of course smaller races, your chances of having a virtual tie somewhere are made much more likely, not less. Sure, it would be bad to have a national recount. But in what way would it be worse than 2000, where the Supreme Court basically ended the contest? At least with a national popular vote the Supreme Court would have some legal justification for butting in.
November 2nd, 2008 at 6:08 pm
Proportional distribution of electoral votes solves the problem, without handing the state’s electoral votes based on the votes of people in other states … which is the objection that will kill NPV before it gets to 271 electoral votes.
And it can be implemented incrementally … just get a roughly equal number of “red” and “blue” states to agree to do it as a group, and then they all have one or more “swing” electors.
November 2nd, 2008 at 6:09 pm
Even if we had a national popular vote, you would still have to come to Virginia to do meaningful canvassing (after you had talked to the 3 DC residents that were leaning towards McCain, of course).
November 2nd, 2008 at 6:12 pm
I’m just talking about general probabilities. Consider a group of 3 people voting on something. What are the chances that the decision will come down to one vote? Extremely high. Say the group has 10 people instead. The chances of the victory margin being one vote are much lower, though still high. Now consider a group of 1000 people. The chances of it coming down to one vote are extremely low. For any fixed recount threshold (like 100,000), an increase in the size of the electorate will decrease the likelihood of a “close” (less than the threshold) race.
November 2nd, 2008 at 6:18 pm
DC I’ll give you, but LA? California has gone for the Democrats 4 of the last 8 elections, and for the Republicans 4 of the last 8. It’s been much swingier than, say, Nebraska or Alaska. New York used to be pretty reliably Republican. In other words, every state gets its day in the sun, so to speak, eventually.
November 2nd, 2008 at 6:20 pm
And it can be implemented incrementally … just get a roughly equal number of “red” and “blue” states to agree to do it as a group, and then they all have one or more “swing” electors.
Ah, right. How do you propose to “just get” them to do that? What incentive do blue voters in blue states, or red voters in red states, have to support a change that would give some of their electoral votes to the other party?
November 2nd, 2008 at 6:27 pm
For any fixed recount threshold (like 100,000), an increase in the size of the electorate will decrease the likelihood of a “close” (less than the threshold) race.
But the threshold isn’t fixed; it grows as you increase the size of the electorate. In a group of 1000, it’s impossible that the count could be off by a hundred. In a group of 100,000, it’s very possible. Once you get up to over a hundred million, the threshold can be very high. Up to a hundred thousand, maybe. In any given state, you’re never going to recount if the margin’s that big. In an NPV, you would. So the margin increases, but so does the recount threshold. Therefore, the chances of needing a recount don’t really drop much.
November 2nd, 2008 at 6:28 pm
I’m just talking about general probabilities. Consider a group of 3 people voting on something. What are the chances that the decision will come down to one vote? Extremely high. Say the group has 10 people instead. The chances of the victory margin being one vote are much lower, though still high. Now consider a group of 1000 people. The chances of it coming down to one vote are extremely low. For any fixed recount threshold (like 100,000), an increase in the size of the electorate will decrease the likelihood of a “close” (less than the threshold) race.
Why should the threshold for triggering a recount be a fixed number rather than a proportion?
And recount may be less likely under NPV than under the current system, but it would also be a much bigger effort. Instead of recounting a few million votes, you’d have to recount tens of millions.
November 2nd, 2008 at 6:41 pm
I vote to run up the margin of victory, not because I have some delusion that my vote will be decisive. This holds as true in Ohio, where I used to vote, as in New York, where I vote now.
November 2nd, 2008 at 6:50 pm
Even if you use a proportional threshold, you still have a lower probability of needing a recount with NPV. While the chance of the entire nation needing to be recounted is about the same as any one state, the fact that there are 50 states increases the probability dramatically (as I think susan pointed out above).
Again, a thought experiment with small numbers: say you have 9 voters and set the recount threshold to 33%. Assume each voter has a 50-50 chance of voting one way or the other (we’re assuming a very close election, after all). This is a straightforward application of the binomial distribution. The chance of a 6-3 or 5-4 election is about 91%.
Now let’s say we broke up the 9 voters into 3 groups (states) of 3 voters each, and our recount threshold is still 33% within each state. The chance of any one state getting recounted is 75% (of 8 possible outcomes, 6 are 2-1 victories). So the chance of at least one state needing a recount is .75 + .25*.75 + .25*.25*.75 = more than 98%.
November 2nd, 2008 at 6:50 pm
Does this make you feel better about this system? Honestly? Of the four Republican wins in CA, two were Reagan blowouts, where no state was really a “swing state.” Their vote hasn’t been key since 1976 (when they went for loser Gerry Ford). The central question is whether a candidate has to adjust their campaign to satisfy the interests of a given state.
You have a state with a fifth of the nation’s population that nobody has paid much attention to in decades. This is serious stuff–it means that things like early tech research investment by gov’t and the rolling blackouts of 2003 were not the major national priorities they should have been.
The system is shit. And for you folks counting angels on the head of the recount, maybe if a national recount was at stake someone would finally insist on a system that is simple, uniform, and verifiable. That would be an unqualified benefit.
November 2nd, 2008 at 6:54 pm
The “NY votes don’t count” argument is not true on its face, of course, but a NPV would increase voter participation (and incentive) dramatically.
November 2nd, 2008 at 6:56 pm
I vote to run up the margin of victory, not because I have some delusion that my vote will be decisive. This holds as true in Ohio, where I used to vote, as in New York, where I vote now.
This isn’t any more rational than voting on the grounds that it may be decisive. The expected benefit is the size of the payoff times the probability that it will occur. A decisive vote has a massive payoff but an infinitesimal probability. A margin-changing vote has a massive probability but an infinitesimal payoff. Why is it worth the cost in time and effort to vote?
November 2nd, 2008 at 6:59 pm
That was just the premise in Asher’s comment that I was replying to.
This is a fair point. Obviously, there’s a tradeoff between the chances of needing a recount and the difficulty of conducting one. But if we give more weight to difficulty, that argues for a Nebraska- or Maine-style district-by-district electoral vote, which would reduce the size of the regions in which a recount was necessary.
November 2nd, 2008 at 7:04 pm
As the Republican Party completes its death spiral, will the general elections mean anything any more. If you want people’s votes to count reform the primary system and install term limits. If not, then the winner of the Presidential Election in 2016 will be decided between the Iowa Caucuses and Super Tuesday and Senate and House seats will have a meaningful election once a generation.
November 2nd, 2008 at 7:04 pm
I’ll accept that 1988 was close too. So it’s only been 20 years since CA mattered. Wonderful.
Also, let me say again that the issue is not the efficacy of any given vote; it’s the extent that a candidate needs to address the interests of that voter. Under that theory, a voter in Ohio is infinitely better represented under our system than a voter in Manhattan or LA. The question of the “value” of their vote misses the importance of the process that precedes the vote.
November 2nd, 2008 at 7:33 pm
ck Says: November 2nd, 2008 at 6:59 pm
Except that it both reward existing gerrymandering and provides further incentive to do even more.
That is one of the arguments for proportional allocation … state boundaries cannot be gerrymandered for partisan advantage.
November 2nd, 2008 at 8:16 pm
A co-worker of mine (works in Manhattan, lives in New Jersey) is being sent to Pennsylvania on Election Day to do some final get-out-the-vote work for Obama. It looks like the Keystone State is not being taken for granted.
November 2nd, 2008 at 8:26 pm
Also, let me say again that the issue is not the efficacy of any given vote; it’s the extent that a candidate needs to address the interests of that voter. Under that theory, a voter in Ohio is infinitely better represented under our system than a voter in Manhattan or LA.
Your “theory” just doesn’t make any sense. The fact that Obama is so popular in Manhattan and LA implies that he’s addressing the interests of the voters in those places quite well.
November 2nd, 2008 at 8:36 pm
NSinNY, I’m not quite sure what you mean by Ohioans being better represented in the Presidential election. They’re getting more visits, more ads, and maybe more pandering, but are there really any substantive policy issues where fighting the campaign in Ohio rather than New York is changing anything? Could you give an example?
November 2nd, 2008 at 9:35 pm
The most interesting fact about the NPV idea is that a candidate could lose the popular vote in the participating states and yet win the national popular vote. This would result in a similar disenfranchisement.
For me the biggest question is how does the NPV mesh with impeachment? (Not well, I believe.)
The major flaw with NPV is that it ignores the political and practical reasons for the electoral college, and it also assume a utopia where nothing ever goes wrong during the months long period starting just before the election and extending up to inauguration.
November 2nd, 2008 at 9:43 pm
No, because the electoral college system means that having a close state isn’t enough to require a recount, you need a close EV vote also.
Well, presumably Reagan did adjust his campaign to satisfy the interests of Californians, because they voted for him. Or are you saying that Reagan somehow won a landslide without actually addressing the interests of any state?
November 2nd, 2008 at 10:18 pm
You’ll have to show your work to convince me that this matters. All of the situations we’re considering involve the election as a whole being relatively close. The point is that the likelihood of the popular vote being so razor-thin as to require a recount is much smaller than the likelihood that at least one state will meet a similar threshold for closeness. If the popular vote is close, a lot of states are going to be close – individual state outcomes are not completely independent of the national mood.
November 2nd, 2008 at 10:57 pm
Brazil has direct vote. Since 1990 there is only one candidate who went to the second round of polling and didn´t had electoral base on the State of São Paulo, that acounts for something like 15% of the population.
What I like in the Electoral College is that it allows people that doesn´t vote to be counted. If a state has lower turnout, the STATE will have the same power electing the president. An idea would be to be distribute proportionally(If someone gets 60% of the votes in Pennsylvania he gets 12 electoral votes).
But the biggest problem is the size of the House of Representatives. The whole population of a bunch of states is smaller than the average Congressional District in bigger states(In some states it´s almost twice the population of Wyoming). If the average Congressional District becomes bigger than one million votes it will surely become VERY problematic.
November 2nd, 2008 at 11:24 pm
If a state has lower turnout, the STATE will have the same power electing the president.
And a state with higher turnout also has the same power electing the president, which is why the electoral college helps protect against fraud with the system we have now. If we had NPV right now, then with local control of elections in every state, there could be significant ballot-box stuffing in one-sided states as the voters and the entire governmental structure would be united in the effort to increase the influence of that state’s preference. I know I would not trust huge vote counts from, say, Utah or Nebraska, and they would not trust huge vote counts from Massachusetts.
For that reason, I agree that NPV should be the goal, but not until there is some protection from this kind of thing, such as somehow having national oversight of the presidential voting.
November 3rd, 2008 at 1:20 am
Even if you use a proportional threshold, you still have a lower probability of needing a recount with NPV. While the chance of the entire nation needing to be recounted is about the same as any one state, the fact that there are 50 states increases the probability dramatically (as I think susan pointed out above).
Again, a thought experiment with small numbers: say you have 9 voters and set the recount threshold to 33%. Assume each voter has a 50-50 chance of voting one way or the other (we’re assuming a very close election, after all). This is a straightforward application of the binomial distribution. The chance of a 6-3 or 5-4 election is about 91%.
Now let’s say we broke up the 9 voters into 3 groups (states) of 3 voters each, and our recount threshold is still 33% within each state. The chance of any one state getting recounted is 75% (of 8 possible outcomes, 6 are 2-1 victories). So the chance of at least one state needing a recount is .75 + .25*.75 + .25*.25*.75 = more than 98%.
Now I’m not a math major. But I think experiments with really small numbers aren’t helpful here. At least on an intuitive level, I don’t see why elections of 100 million vs 2 million are any more prone to be decided by margins of, say, 0.1%.
November 3rd, 2008 at 9:11 am
Yes, if the popular vote is close, a lot of states will be close. But that in itself won’t trigger multiple recounts if the electoral college margin is large enough. In 1968, Nixon won by less than 500,000 votes but had a winning margin of over 100 electoral votes. You need both a close popular vote and a close electoral vote. Under a National Popular vote, you just need a close popular vote.
November 3rd, 2008 at 9:45 am
The problem is not whether you have EC ou NPV. The problem is that in the United States you have a total decentralization of the process, and that allows voter fraud. For example, laws that forbids felons from voting are kind of bizarre.
Another problem is the size of the House of Representatives, that creates distortions. Again: we are not far away from having districts in bigger states with more than one million people. If Utah or Maine have the same electoral clout than Wyoming you surely have problems.
And if you have EC, politicians aren´t going to search for votes in big cities. They are going to areas with swing voters, regardless of the state. They would campaign in the Chicago suburbs(Like Aurora), but not on Cook County.
November 3rd, 2008 at 10:20 am
Not sure anyone is paying attention to this thread anymore, but:
Ohio doesn’t have urban public transit on the scale of major American cities. If you read this blog, you may have notices that urban transportation issues, and urban planning generally, are entirely absent from our national discourse. They’re relegating to being local issues, while somehow ethanol subsidies are issues of pressing national interest. That is to say, pandering matters. It shapes the discourse and turns into policy.
Scott de B, I’m not saying that Reagan didn’t do anything to impress Californians, just like I’m not saying that Kerry didn’t do anything to impress New Yorkers or Obama for Districters or whatever. I’m just saying non-competitive elections are not relevant to this discussion.
An extreme example as illustration: If I were running as a Democrat against one competitor from the Mandatory Babykilling Party in a first past the post national election, I could take every Sarah Palin position and win New York. The problems we are talking about will occur in a non-competitive election no matter what.
W/r/t competitive elections, if they are only competitive in certain states, it stands to reason that a president only needs to address interests in those states to win.
My final point: let’s say you were putting together a system from scratch (this is how progressives, as opposed to conservatives, think about government). Electoral college based on locking voters in arbitrary mostly pre-1900 borders? Would never happen. Ever.
November 3rd, 2008 at 2:41 pm
I can only dream. We might see politicians talking about the “real Americans” in the urban centers.
March 2nd, 2009 at 10:16 am
levitraIf you have to do it, you might as well do it right
March 11th, 2009 at 10:32 am
If you have to do it, you might as well do it right
March 14th, 2009 at 10:46 am
Incredible site!
xanax
March 17th, 2009 at 3:45 am
Great site. Good info
tramadol
March 22nd, 2009 at 7:55 am
tramadol
Great site. Good info