In defence of the Electoral College: follow-up

Some timely links regarding my points made earlier about the effect of the winner-take-all method of awarding states’ electoral votes:

#1: conservative commentator Rich Lowry passes on an email from a Republican activist complaining about the winner-take-all system (which the writer erroneously claims was implemented by fin-de-siècle progressives). He goes on to whinge that a) Bush-43 had to promise steel tariffs to win West Virginia in 2000 (but surely that was more for Pennsylvanian consumption); b) Obama could close West Virginian coal mines because it had become a safe GOP state; c) Obama ignored the Gulf oil spill because Louisiana wasn’t a swing state; d) having elections contested in fewer states makes it easier for Big Gummint Librulz to “buy off a few select voters”; and e) rural voters in Michigan and Pennsylvania are “dictate[d]” to by Detroit and Philly. This litany of complaints has been rehashed on the American right ever since FDR and Truman began carrying large northern states by winning over racial minorities and union members.

#2: after failing yet again to carry Pennsylvania, Republicans there are again pushing to move the state away from the winner-take-all system. Last year they floated the idea of changing to the Maine/Nebraska method (one vote per congressional district plus two to the statewide winner); this time they want to allocate eighteen votes proportionally and the bonus two to the statewide winner.

Musings on electoral systems: geometric means in Bern

One of the challenges in designing any political system is the question of how to ensure proportionate representation and influence for racial and ethnic minorities. Two of the world’s best-known political scientists have offered different solutions. Arend Lijphart (in works such as Patterns of Democracy) has painted a picture of ‘consociational democracy’: proportional representation, parliamentary government, grand coalitions, and policy consensuses forged by bargaining between group elites. (Think the Netherlands, Belgium, or post-1998 Northern Ireland.) Donald Horowitz focuses on pre-electoral coalition-building, and boosts the alternative vote as a means of forcing candidates to reach out to other groups. (Unfortunately for him, his preferred example – Fiji – has never implemented the system fully and has never found a political modus vivendi between its Fijian and Indian populations.) Across the world, the push for minority representation yields a variety of arrangements – India’s reserved seats for scheduled castes and tribes, New Zealand’s Maori seats, and the United States’ racially-gerrymandered electoral districts to name just a few.

Being cleaved many ways by its linguistic (German-French-Italian) and religious (Protestant-Catholic) divisions, Switzerland is fertile ground for experiments in minority representation. One of its largest cantons, Bern, is something of a microcosm of the nation as a whole, with a small French-speaking minority in the north dominated by German-speakers elsewhere. After the Catholic French parts of the canton seceded in 1979 to form the canton of Jura, Bern realised it needed to meet the aspirations of the remaining (Protestant French) areas. It does this in two ways: guaranteed seats in the legislature and executive (like all Swiss cantons, Bern has a popularly-elected plural executive), and the creation of a 24-member quasi-legislative body for the region (the Conseil du Jura bernois) with power over certain culturally-sensitive matters.

Every four years, the Bernese people elect 160 members of the legislature (Grand conseil) and seven members of the executive (Conseil exécutif). The former has 160 seats, elected by proportional representation in large multi-member districts (see here for a previous post on Switzerland’s unique twist on PR). The Bernese Jura elects twelve of these, while the French-speaking community of Bienne-Seeland elects another three. At the same time, and using the same electoral system, the Bernese Jura elects the twenty-four members of the Conseil du Jura bernois. The executive election, however, is the most interesting, and uses a method to ensure fair representation unique in the democratic world.

Bern’s executive is elected by a two-round majoritarian system, common among Swiss cantons (some use a one-round majoritarian system, and two use proportional representation). One of the seven seats is reserved for a candidate from the Bernese Jura. If such a candidate obtains a first-round majority, they are elected, provided that among all candidates from the region, they had the highest ‘geometric mean’; otherwise, the candidate from the region with the best geometric mean in the second round is elected. The figure in question is the square root of the product of the candidate’s votes in the Bernese Jura and their votes across the canton (eg. a candidate obtaining 1000 votes in the region and 20,000 canton-wide would have a geometric mean equivalent to the square root of 20,000,000).

The use of the geometric means ensures that if two French-speaking candidates run equally well across the canton, the one who polled better in the Bernese Jura is elected, while if two candidates poll equally well in the Bernese Jura, the one with more votes in the rest of the canton is elected. In this way, candidates are given incentives to appeal to voters outside their region, but the preferences of the people of the Bernese Jura cannot be denied by the election of a French-speaking candidate whose support comes disproportionately from German-speaking areas. In recent years, a campaign for the popular election of the federal multi-member executive has proposed this method for ensuring that French- and Italian-speaking regions of Switzerland continue receiving their usual two seats should their proposal be adopted.

The ‘geometric mean’ method allows for the entire electorate of Bern to vote for its executive (as opposed to, say, having the German-speaking majority elect six and the Bernese Jura elect one) while deviating slightly from the one-man-one-vote ideal to give a geographically concentrated minority the opportunity to elect the candidate of its choice. One can imagine it being adapted for geographically dispersed minorities, provided there were some means of segregating their ballots from the rest of the population. It is designed for a multi-member majoritarian election, and might not be adaptable to proportional elections. Nevertheless, the constitutional protections for the Bernese Jura are an interesting mesh of Lijphartian ideas (proportional representation in the legislature) and Horowitzian ones (an executive electoral system which incentivises cross-ethnic coalition-forming).

In defence of the Electoral College 3

Part Three: Why the Electoral College is Good for America

In the preceding two posts of this series, I have shown how the focus of the 1948 and 1960 presidential campaigns on large northern states produced better outcomes for those Americans whose power was diluted in other organs of governmental power at the time – city-dwellers, racial and ethnic minorities, and unionised workers. In this part, I will make the case for the Electoral College, and recommend a few small changes which would improve its operation.

*Direct election would punish states with lower turnout (which is usually caused by having proportionally more poor and minorities – Hawaii, California, and Texas currently have the lowest rates of turnout in presidential polls). Under the current system, 436 of the 538 votes are distributed according to states’ total population, which includes non-citizens, those under 18, those not registered to vote, and those disenfranchised by various state laws – all of these groups are poorer and/or less white than the American people at large. The other 102 electoral votes do tilt the scales back to small, majority-white states, but this effect is outweighed by the effect of large states casting their entire electoral votes en bloc. The Electoral College thus ensures that a state’s influence on the presidential contest is not decreased by having a large minority population, or by random events which lower election-day turnout (such as hurricanes or uncompetitive down-ballot races).

*The Electoral College allows historically oppressed and marginalised groups the chance to be the swing voters: from Irish-Americans punishing the Democrats for Woodrow Wilson’s anglophilia in 1920, to Harry Truman’s appeals to African-Americans and Jews in 1948, to Kennedy’s success among Catholics in 1960, to non-whites providing the margin of victory in a few states for Obama in 2008, minorities concentrated in large states have benefited from being able to shift sizable blocs of electoral votes. Although diverse states such as New York, California, and Illinois are no longer swing states, Florida’s Cuban-Americans were pivotal in 2012, and Texas’ Latino population may be crucial in future election cycles.

*The Electoral College punishes candidates who attain large margins in a few states (which usually results from voter suppression or a lack of two-party competition). Historically, the Democratic lock on the South (itself due to Jim Crow) meant that scores of southern votes were wasted, giving the party the freedom to pursue swing voters in large northern states without risking many southern electoral votes. Direct election would have forced Democratic nominees to pander to segregationism, lest they risk a decrease in their popular vote totals in Dixie. Moreover, the election of Abraham Lincoln in 1860 (with 39% of the popular vote) was made possible by his winning of narrow pluralities or majorities in almost all northern states.

*‘Faithless electors’ could prevent constitutional crises. There are two advantages to having 538 warm bodies, instead of relying on an automatic tally of electoral votes. In the case of a presidential or vice-presidential candidate dying (as happened with Horace Greeley in 1872 and John Sherman in 1912), the electors could switch their votes to the party’s new nominee. In the case of a 1968-style situation, in which an extremist third party candidate holds the balance of power, the major parties could trade electoral votes to put one of them over the top, thereby forming an analogue to the ‘grand coalitions’ used by European parties to keep the far-right out of power.

The Electoral College could do with a few changes, however:

*End the malapportionment of electoral votes, either by eliminating the 102 votes and having a 436-member College, or by increasing the size of the House so as to overwhelm the effect of the 102 ‘Senatorial’ votes.

*Bring back the ‘long ballot’. Between 1940 and 1980, all states adopted the ‘short ballot’, under which voters vote for a ticket and are considered to have cast one vote for each elector pledged to that ticket – in most states, the electors don’t even appear on the ballot. A return to voting for individual electors would allow voters to split their votes between two or more presidential candidates, and increase awareness of the electors’ role.

*Repeal state laws punishing ‘faithless electors’. In twenty-four states, electors could be fined or jailed for failing to vote for a dead candidate or for voting for another candidate in order to thwart an extremist third party candidate holding the balance of power.

*Bring back electoral fusion. Imagine if Al Gore had been able to offer spots on Democratic slates to electors pledged to Ralph Nader, and to have those slates appear on both the Democratic and Green ballot lines. The Nader electors could vote for their candidate, but could switch to Gore if needed to give him 270. (Fusion slates were used by the Greenbackers and Populists, and also by Oklahoma Republicans in 1912, who slated pro-Roosevelt electors in an attempt to fend off the Bull Moose threat.)

*Bring back unpledged electors. Although unpledged electors are most associated with the defence of Jim Crow in the 1944, 1956, 1960, and 1964 elections, they could be used by any ideological group. Instead of backing Ron Paul or Gary Johnson, for example, the libertarian movement could nominate unpledged slates; if victorious, their votes could be traded to one of the major-party nominees in return for an end to the War on Drugs or an end to drone strikes.

The Electoral College is part of what made America great. I can only hope that when that glorious day comes when Australia becomes a republic, we see fit to copy this magnificent institution.