The US electoral college—538 votes across the 50 states plus the seat of the federal government in Washington, DC—makes headlines every four years when presidential candidates seek the 270 delegate votes needed for an electoral majority. In both 2000 and 2016 the election winners hit that 270 delegate mark while receiving less than 50% of the popular votes cast. In 2016, the popular vote margin was over 3 million in favor of the runner-up. While the electoral college is blamed for this seemingly undemocratic process, the issue is actually much more pervasive in its impact than this once-in-four-years body.
First of all, we should understand that the makeup of the electoral college is very straightforward: each state has as many votes as they have members of Congress (both the Senate and House of Representatives). Some basic US Gov for you: each state is guaranteed two members of the Senate (where mob rule is thwarted by equal representation) and at least one member of the House of Representatives (where rule by elites is thwarted by representation based on population). In 1961, the seat of the federal government (currently Washington, DC) was also awarded the minimum count of votes in the electoral college (that is, three).
In 1789, there were 24 Senators from the twelve states, plus 65 members of the House of Representatives. After Nevada was admitted to the U.S. in 1864, there were 72 Senators across 36 states, and 191 members of the House. To keep up with a growing population, the size of our representative government had nearly tripled in less than 100 years. Despite this need for rapid growth to ensure voters’ voices were represented accurately and equally, 47 years later the Apportionment Act of 1911 was passed to stop the proportional growth of Congress.
Since 1911, the number of congresspeople in the House of Representatives has been fixed at 435 (433 for the then-current states, plus one held in reserve for each Arizona and New Mexico, then in the process of becoming states). While the number of senators would continue to grow as territories achieved statehood (two each for Arizona, New Mexico, Alaska, and Hawaii), the 435 House Members would simply be re-apportioned based on the census every ten years.
Capping the size of Congress makes some degree of sense, as one purpose of representative democracy is to reduce the number of voices in the room attempting to negotiate policy. However, as the populations of some states has increased dramatically while others has remained stagnant, the relative proportion of 435-members-to-330,000,000-citizens no longer allows for equal representation. This is especially the case when every state is guaranteed one of those 435 votes.
Despite having less than 1% of the overall US population, states that are guaranteed one seat in the House plus two seats in the Senate end up with over 1% of the voting power in government. Six small states are over-represented in this manner.
Additionally, five states are under-represented by 10%: each state’s share of congress would need to increase by more than 10% for it to have equal representation based on its population. This would translate to adding 9 more seats for Texas, 6 for Florida, 10 for California, 2 for North Carolina, and 3 for New York.
And where would these seats come from?
In a system where a state’s share of population and share of Congress are equal, the six states with less than 1% of the US population plus the other states highlighted above would all lose one or two voting seats. They could certainly have non-voting members (like the District of Columbia presently does), but to give these states three votes in Congress creates massive inequities in voting power for US citizens.
I want to highlight that last point: the electoral college is a once-every-four-years reminder of an inequality that impacts every single policy decision in the United States. Every time a bill is written, debated, and voted on, more than half of the states have a larger share of the voices debating it than they would in a system where everyone was represented equally. Meanwhile, states like Texas, Florida, and California do not have nearly as much sway as their population should provide them.
The electoral college is a once-every-four-years reminder of an inequality that impacts every single policy decision in the United States
Rather than take seats away from 26 states plus DC, we could go back to the practice that worked for 120 years: allow Congress to grow with the population of the US. The original idea was that each House member should represent about 30,000 citizens. That policy today would put us at 11,000 members of congress.
Okay, maybe that’s a bit crazy. What if we just wanted each state to “earn” its 3 seats in congress?
That is, let’s set the citizens-per-congressperson ration at [smallest state population]-to-[3 representatives]. Well, the smallest state by Population is Wyoming, at roughly 579,000 (2019 estimate). Each representative would, then, speak for 193,00 citizens. Not the most representative, perhaps, but at least we could achieve proportional representation across states.
However, even with nearly 200,000 people being represented by a single voice, the size of congress would have to increase dramatically:
It doesn’t seem likely to me that the US is going to increase the size of Congress by practically one thousand seats. Hopefully, this puts into perspective just how disproportionate the current system is, and how instances like the 2000 and 2016 elections can occur: not because of the electoral college, but because the system for representative democracy (ie, the size and apportionment of the House of Representatives), is so drastically flawed.
AdTech Analyst 