By Mark Jenkins
Resident Scholar Wyoming Humanities
I have friends in Wyoming who will not vote for a president this November. They know their vote will not count toward the election, so, as an act of protest, they’re not voting at all. I utterly disagree with this repudiation of the most basic American right---in my opinion, it is the duty and privilege of every eligible American citizen to vote---but I understand the sentiment.
The president and vice president of the United States are not elected by a plurality of the popular vote: they are elected by the electoral college. What is the electoral college? A group of 538 people selected from all 50 states and Washington DC. The number of electors from each state is the combined number of senators and representatives. In Wyoming, we have three electors because we have two senators and one representative. Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, Alaska, Vermont, Delaware and Washington DC all also have three electoral votes. Colorado has nine, Pennsylvania has 20, Texas has 38.
For 48 states, including Wyoming, it is winner-take-all in the Electoral College. Whoever wins the popular vote in each of these states receives all the electoral votes. For example, in the 2016 presidential election, 174,419 residents of Wyoming voted for Donald Trump, 55,973 residents voted for Hillary Clinton, 13,287 voted for Gary Johnson, and 12,170 people voted for other candidates. In terms of the electoral college, because Donald Trump won a plurality of votes, he got all three electoral votes, freezing out the votes of 81,430 Wyoming residents.
This was the case for some 52 million Americans in 2016---more than 1/3 of the total number of voters. Four years ago, 63 million American citizens voted for Donald Trump and 73 million voted for Hillary Clinton or some other candidate, and yet, due to the winner-take-all approach by 48 states, Mr. Trump became president because he was the first to receive 270 electoral votes, the magic number (majority of 538 total votes). Note that there were 250 million people eligible to vote in 2016 and only 136 million actually did; 114 million Americans, 45% of the country, failed to perform their most basic civic duty.
The electoral college is in the constitution (Article II, Section 1), but the winner-take-all approach is not. States are allowed to choose how they award their electoral votes. Many scholars, including myself, believe the winner-take-all approach is not merely undemocratic, but unconstitutional---and it is self-evidently unfair. Presidential campaigns essentially ignore all states where the electoral outcome is obvious (Wyoming will go Republican, Maryland will go Democrat), and focus instead on six key swings states: Arizona, Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Florida. Combined, they represent 101 of the 270 electoral votes needed to take the White House. In the 2016 election, both Trump and Clinton spent 99% of their ad dollars and 95% of their campaign visits on these six states and eight others consider potential swing states. In 2020, you won’t see Biden spend much time or treasure on Texas, and Trump will ignore California, but both will invest heavily in Florida. Since both candidates know they must win the electoral votes in swing states, and because of winner-take-all, they essentially ignore the other 44 states in the union.
Three of the swing states are located in the Great Lakes region, the other three are in sunbelt country. These six states do not accurately represent the needs and wants, hopes and dreams, of voters in other parts of the country---the Northeast, or the Northwest, or the Midwest.
There is a way out of this electoral mess: states should abandon winner-take-all and apportion electoral votes according to actual votes. If a candidate wins 60% of the popular vote in a given state, then he or she receives 60% of the electoral votes (not 100%.) This change has not happened because of partisan biases.
There is one other way out of this electoral maze short of a constitutional amendment: the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact---an agreement in which states award their electoral votes to whomever wins the national popular vote. Fifteen states and Washington DC have ratified this agreement, accounting for 196 electoral votes. In five more states, another 64 electoral votes, the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact is pending. If these five states ratify NPVIC, we will only need a couple more states to do so and winner-take-all will be history.
We need a system in which our rights and responsibilities are matched with the value of our vote.
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