When Americans elect a president every 4 years, the method we use is actually pretty strange when you stop to think about it:
1) Every state gets a number of votes equal to their number of representatives plus two. These are called "electoral votes".
2) 48 of the 50 states use a winner-takes-all system, where whichever presidential candidate gets the most votes in that state gets ALL the electoral votes of that state. The other two states use an adaptation of that method, where each candidate gets an electoral vote for each congressional district they win, plus two more for winning the overall state popular vote.
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| Electoral College for the year 2000 |
A notable side-effect of this policy is that someone can become President of the United States while losing the popular vote. This has happened 4 times out of 55 US presidential elections, or 7% of the time. Maybe that seems like an acceptably small fraction to you, but consider that there are also cases where it was very close to happening, like in 2004: Bush II had about 3,500,000 more nationwide votes than Kerry, but if 60,000 Bush voters had changed their minds and voted for Kerry in just one state (Ohio), he would have become the president. In the last 60 years, a "close" election like this, where fewer than 60,000 voters could've made the wrong man President, has come close to happening 6 times, meaning that 6/15 or 40% of recent elections were problematic.
For fun, I've taken the liberty of running some simulations. Each state is given its share of electoral votes as of the 2000 census, I specify the national popular vote totals and give each state its own vote total, normally distributed about the national mean, with a standard deviation taken from the last three presidential elections (about 11% each time). Then I check to see if the national popular vote winner is also the electoral college winner.
For an example election that's 48/52 (i.e. a 4% margin for one candidate), I ran this simulation 1,000,000 times, and here are the EV results:
We see that in more than 10% of the runs, the national popular vote winner does not become the president. Repeating this process for a collection of margins, I find the probability of the "wrong president" vs. national popular vote margin:
I also show the last eight elections as vertical lines on the bottom, highlighting in red the one that gave us the "wrong" person. Statistically speaking, we should have seen on average 1.3 "wrong" presidents in the past 8 elections. Reality, however, is constrained to integers in this case, so it's really no huge anomaly that we got 1 error out of 8. What's surprising to me is how astonishingly poor this system is at electing the popular vote winner to the presidency. With a national popular vote margin of 4% we get an error of 10%. With a margin of 1% we get an error of 37%. For margins smaller than 1% we may as well flip a coin, even though 1% represents more than 3,000,000 Americans.
Raw data is tabulated below. For reference, the margins of the last 8 elections ranged between 0.5% and 10%. The real miracle here is that we have had only four wrongly-elected presidents out of 55!
For fun, I've taken the liberty of running some simulations. Each state is given its share of electoral votes as of the 2000 census, I specify the national popular vote totals and give each state its own vote total, normally distributed about the national mean, with a standard deviation taken from the last three presidential elections (about 11% each time). Then I check to see if the national popular vote winner is also the electoral college winner.
For an example election that's 48/52 (i.e. a 4% margin for one candidate), I ran this simulation 1,000,000 times, and here are the EV results:
We see that in more than 10% of the runs, the national popular vote winner does not become the president. Repeating this process for a collection of margins, I find the probability of the "wrong president" vs. national popular vote margin:
I also show the last eight elections as vertical lines on the bottom, highlighting in red the one that gave us the "wrong" person. Statistically speaking, we should have seen on average 1.3 "wrong" presidents in the past 8 elections. Reality, however, is constrained to integers in this case, so it's really no huge anomaly that we got 1 error out of 8. What's surprising to me is how astonishingly poor this system is at electing the popular vote winner to the presidency. With a national popular vote margin of 4% we get an error of 10%. With a margin of 1% we get an error of 37%. For margins smaller than 1% we may as well flip a coin, even though 1% represents more than 3,000,000 Americans.
Raw data is tabulated below. For reference, the margins of the last 8 elections ranged between 0.5% and 10%. The real miracle here is that we have had only four wrongly-elected presidents out of 55!
Popular Vote Margin
|
Probability of Wrong President
|
10%
|
0.06%
|
8%
|
0.52%
|
6%
|
2.7%
|
4%
|
10.4%
|
2%
|
26%
|
1%
|
37%
|
0.4%
|
44%
|
0.2%
|
47%
|
Because of the state-by-state winner-take-all electoral votes laws (i.e., awarding all of a state’s electoral votes to the candidate who receives the most popular votes in each state) in 48 states, a candidate can win the Presidency without winning the most popular votes nationwide. This has occurred in 4 of the nation's 56 (1 in 14 = 7%) presidential elections. The precariousness of the current state-by-state winner-take-all system is highlighted by the fact that a shift of a few thousand voters in one or two states would have elected the second-place candidate in 4 of the 13 presidential elections since World War II. Near misses are now frequently common. There have been 6 consecutive non-landslide presidential elections (1988, 1992, 1996, 2000, 2004, and 2008). 537 popular votes won Florida and the White House for Bush in 2000 despite Gore's lead of 537,179 (1,000 times more) popular votes nationwide. A shift of 60,000 voters in Ohio in 2004 would have defeated President Bush despite his nationwide lead of over 3 million votes.
ReplyDeleteThe National Popular Vote bill would guarantee the Presidency to the candidate who receives the most popular votes in all 50 states (and DC).
ReplyDeleteEvery vote, everywhere, would be politically relevant and equal in presidential elections. No more distorting and divisive red and blue state maps. There would no longer be a handful of 'battleground' states where voters and policies are more important than those of the voters in more than 3/4ths of the states that now are just 'spectators' and ignored.
When the bill is enacted by states possessing a majority of the electoral votes– enough electoral votes to elect a President (270 of 538), all the electoral votes from the enacting states would be awarded to the presidential candidate who receives the most popular votes in all 50 states and DC.
The bill uses the power given to each state by the Founding Fathers in the Constitution to change how they award their electoral votes for President. Historically, virtually all of the major changes in the method of electing the President, including ending the requirement that only men who owned substantial property could vote and 48 current state-by-state winner-take-all laws, have come about by state legislative action.
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). Support for a national popular vote is strong among Republicans, Democrats, and Independent voters, as well as every demographic group in virtually every state surveyed in recent polls in closely divided Battleground states: CO – 68%, FL – 78%, IA 75%, MI – 73%, MO – 70%, NH – 69%, NV – 72%, NM– 76%, NC – 74%, OH – 70%, PA – 78%, VA – 74%, and WI – 71%; in Small states (3 to 5 electoral votes): AK – 70%, DC – 76%, DE – 75%, ID – 77%, ME – 77%, MT – 72%, NE 74%, NH – 69%, NV – 72%, NM – 76%, OK – 81%, RI – 74%, SD – 71%, UT – 70%, VT – 75%, WV – 81%, and WY – 69%; in Southern and Border states: AR – 80%,, KY- 80%, MS – 77%, MO – 70%, NC – 74%, OK – 81%, SC – 71%, TN – 83%, VA – 74%, and WV – 81%; and in other states polled: CA – 70%, CT – 74%, MA – 73%, MN – 75%, NY – 79%, OR – 76%, and WA – 77%. Americans believe that the candidate who receives the most votes should win.
The bill has passed 31 state legislative chambers in 21 small, medium-small, medium, and large states. The bill has been enacted by 9 jurisdictions possessing 132 electoral votes - 49% of the 270 necessary to bring the law into effect.
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The electoral college system was one of many compromises that came out of making the United States in the 1780s and like everything else in the Constitution is very hard to change.
ReplyDeleteIncidentally, even if it was repealed and we simply had the popular vote this would in no way mean what toto claims. Candidates would still battle over the well populated states instead of the less populated states and many states would still be either 'blue' or 'red'. Simply changing the precise criteria for election doesn't do a thing to change demographics or what the majority of likely voters in a state feel.
The current "winner-takes-all" system is not written into the constitution, it is independently enacted in 48 of the 50 states. That means state-level action can change it, and a federal constitutional amendment is not required.
DeleteNext, candidates would not simply focus on the more-populous states if the national popular vote determined the winner. With each vote being equal, they would focus on all people regardless of state. There might be a better return-on-investment for advertising in cities vs. rural, though.
Very interesting simulations. Will you be doing more political calculations closer to the election? If you'd like to follow my blog, I'd definitely appreciate it!
ReplyDelete