You Decide

… that the Electoral College prompts politicians to create broad-based coalitions, ensuring that smaller states will not be ignored during elections?

The framers of the Constitution argued long and hard about the best method for selecting the president. They initially opted to allow Congress to elect the president, reasoning, in the words of George Mason, that a presidential election decided by popular vote would be the equivalent of allowing a blind man to preside over a “trial of colors.”

It wasn’t until later that the framers hit upon the compromise idea of the Electoral College. Certainly, the framers’ belief in the electorate’s ignorance informed their decision to filter the public’s will through the College. But they were equally concerned that an election based solely on the popular vote risked highjack by regional interests and that candidates would concentrate exclusively on population centers, ignoring the country’s less populated regions.

To guard against this type of regional factionalism, the Electoral College system provides each state an allotted number of electors that is equal to the number of politicians in that state’s congressional delegation.

Take a look again at the Wyoming/California comparison: With a 2006 population of just over 500,000 people, Wyoming has three electors: one for the state’s sole member of the U.S. House of Representatives and two for its pair of Senators. California, meanwhile, has a population of roughly 36.5 million and 55 electors. Thanks to the Electoral College, an electoral vote in Wyoming (which has about 233,000 registered voters) comprises about 78,000 individual votes, but an electoral vote in California (which has about 16  million registered voters) is composed of about 291,000 votes. Again, the net effect is that a ballot cast in Wyoming is about 3.75 times more influential than a ballot cast in the Golden State.

What better way to give the little guy a voice, indeed, a reason to vote?

That may sound less than democratic, but the framers engineered this imbalance to ensure that politicians would not pander exclusively to the country’s more densely populated regions. Meant to lure vote-hungry candidates to the hinterlands, the disparity helps force politicians to listen to the concerns of less powerful states, ensuring that, ideally, winning candidates will have built broad-based coalitions and will enjoy countrywide support instead of relying on a few densely populated regions to deliver them the presidency.

… that the Electoral College increases voter apathy?

One way to increase voter participation is to make people believe their vote matters, but the Electoral College, its opponents argue, has the opposite effect on voters: It makes them feel as though their individual vote doesn’t matter. One reason for this, they argue, is that a state’s allotment of electoral votes is based on a state’s population — not voter turnout. In other words, a year with 100 percent voter turnout would deliver the same number of electoral votes as a year with 25 percent voter turnout.

Opponents argue that the College’s effect on minority voters in “safe” states (where a majority of voters reliably votes for one party) is even worse. Opponents contend that those voters have even less incentive to participate in elections because they realize that their vote, overwhelmed by the state’s majority, will not register in the Electoral College.

Opponents add that the College’s winner-take-all method further suppresses voter turnout by forcing elections to concentrate on a handful of swing states. They argue that most states are safely Democratic or Republican. Presidential candidates, in turn, have little incentive to visit these “safe” states because if their polling indicates that they are already guaranteed a simple majority, then voter turnout in that state becomes less important. They take the state’s support for granted, and, opponents argue, stop visiting the state to hear the concerns of its voters.

Instead, candidates concentrate on winning votes in the small towns and villages of a few battleground states. Far from encouraging candidates to run campaigns that are inclusive of national issues, these opponents argue, presidential campaigns instead spend an inordinate amount of time concentrating on issues that affect, say, working-class white voters in western Pennsylvania or elderly Jewish voters in Florida.

The rest of the country is largely ignored, they argue, as presidential candidates pander to interests that do not concern the rest of the country. The result: Voters in the “safe” states become disillusioned with the narrowness of presidential politics. They realize that their concerns are not being heard, begin to believe that their vote doesn’t matter and, come Election Day, stay home.