America's Worst
College: Part 5
Why the "Massachusetts Uber Alles"
argument is wrong
"Chatterbox", Slate
Timothy Noah
November 10, 2004
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John Harwood of the Wall Street Journal correctly
pointed out in a Nov. 10 column that the GOP almost got seriously
screwed by the Electoral College:
[I]f 75,000 voters in Ohio had swung toward Sen. John
Kerry, all 20 of the state's electoral votes would have gone to
him, too—even though the Republican incumbent still would have
received his impressive 51% majority of the national popular vote,
a margin of three percentage points over his opponent. Mr. Kerry
would have won the election with a 272-266 Electoral College
victory.
Bush got 3
and a half million more votes than Kerry, but Ohio could have
killed it for him. That should be reason enough for conservatives to
want to abolish the Electoral College, and a few do. It should be an
especially easy sell for conservative populists. And yet
the Conservative Caucus, chaired by the veteran right-wing activist
Howard Phillips, is sending every presidential elector a free copy
of The
Importance of the Electoral College, by George Grant, a
humanities professor at Franklin Classical School, an evangelical
high school in Tennessee.
Grant's book, which is elegantly written and tightly
argued—kindly note this blue-stater's respect for red-state
evangelist scholarship—is preoccupied with states' rights, which
the Electoral College does indeed enhance (at the expense of the
voters). Its most arresting argument, though, is the following
nightmare scenario:
If the federal hedge of the Electoral College were not
in place then it would be perfectly possible for a candidate to
lose as many as 49 states and still win the Presidency. Imagine
the chaos if George Bush had won every state but lost
Massachusetts by a popular vote margin sufficient to cost him the
Presidency. If he had won each of those states by fairly small
margins—akin, say, to his actual margin of victory in
Florida—his lead might amount to less than half a million
overall. If Gore had won Massachusetts by a million votes—mostly
from the city of Boston and its suburbs—then Gore would have won
the overall popular vote total, despite having lost 49 of the 50
states. His popular vote would be 500,000 votes more than Bush's.
With the Electoral College, Bush would have won 523-13. In a
direct election, Gore would have prevailed.
Popular-vote margins this thin aren't unheard-of. In 2000, Gore won
the popular vote by a margin of 540,000. In 1960, John F. Kennedy won
the popular vote by a margin of only 113,000. Theoretically, one
could pick up the votes necessary to win the popular vote in a
single state while losing all the other states.
In practice, though, it seems unlikely. What Grant is positing is
essentially 49 more or less tie votes that all resolve themselves in
Candidate A's favor. It's like imagining 49 consecutive coin tosses
that all come up heads. I'm sure that's happened sometime,
somewhere, but you'd be foolish to plan your life around the
possibility. Plus, one state would have to give Candidate B a
popular-vote victory margin about 20,000 times as great as Candidate
A received in any other state. We live in a diverse nation, but it
isn't that diverse. If any one state showed results so dramatically
different from the results in each of the other 50 states, the
likeliest explanation would be that someone had tampered with the
polls.
But let's imagine that, in spite of these obstacles, Grant's
nightmare scenario came about without any stuffing of ballot boxes.
Why should we regard the outcome as a terrible thing? None of
Candidate A's 49 states would have rejected Candidate B by a
statistically significant margin. In truth, Grant's example
describes a popular vote that was tied in 49 states, with the 50th
breaking the tie.
Grant's argument is a pretty good example of one key distortion
in our thinking brought about by the Electoral College. It makes
imaginary victories look real. Who cares who won in a given
state if the popular-vote difference was statistically
insignificant? In reality, nobody won. But under the
Electoral College system, somebody always has to win at the state
level, or else you can't award state electors. Under a popular-vote
system, we wouldn't have to play that game. We'd just count up the
ballots and see who got the most votes.
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