The Electoral College and the American Union
The Electoral College does not diminish democracy but structures it through states, preventing both simple majoritarian rule and the dominance of a few populous regions.
Every few years, we in the United States endure something like the sweats of malaria while certain people, devoted to “democracy,” call to abolish the Electoral College, now merely a counting system whereby each state is assigned an electoral weight based on its representation in Congress—the sum of its senators and representatives. There are two main lines of the argument.
The first is that because of the College, a president can be elected without a majority or a plurality of the vote. In elections involving two main candidates, this has happened three times: 1888 (Harrison over Cleveland), 2000 (Bush over Gore), and 2016 (Trump over Clinton). In two of those cases, the plurality held by the losing candidate (not a majority) was minuscule. In the third case, 2016, the 2.1 percent edge in Hillary Clinton’s plurality was more than covered by her popularity in California alone. I do not believe that most Americans wish to be governed by the woolly ways of that state, which have gone, in my lifetime, from an energetic experiment in self-rule to utter dysfunction.
But why should the winner of the popular vote not win the election, regardless of where the votes come from? Here I note that in winner-take-all systems, the winner will rarely possess a majority, since such systems favor a proliferation of parties and candidates, enabling a candidate—sometimes a madman—with strong support among a minority to win, while more conventional candidates split the rest of the vote. This sort of thing also happens when, as in Canada and the United Kingdom, the executive is the leader of the party that wins a majority of the seats in Parliament. Keir Starmer is the prime minister of the United Kingdom because he leads the Labour Party, which won 411 of the 650 seats in the 2024 election, a huge majority, yet the party received only 33.7 percent of the popular vote. Sometimes, as has happened in Italy, the executive emerges from an alliance of parties, none of them holding a majority of seats. In such situations, the facade of democracy is as thin as lingerie. Backroom deals become the order of the day, a brew of compromise, political imagination, treachery, blackmail, and bribery.
The second line of argument is that the College gives unfair weight to the less populous states, which are represented proportionally in the House of Representatives but equally in the Senate. Let us take the most extreme example of disproportion. In the 2020 census, California had a population of 39.54 million, the most of any state, while Wyoming had a population of 0.59 million, the least of any state. That is a factor of 67, but California has 54 electoral votes to Wyoming’s 3, a factor of 18. To be “just,” if gross numbers alone deliver justice, we should reduce Wyoming’s electoral weight to 1. That would, it is suggested, restore the proper power of Californians over Wyomingites. But let us tease the matter out. California already clobbers Wyoming in the House of Representatives, with 52 members to Wyoming’s mere 1, and what is the great difference, anyway, between the California Cougars going 56–1 against the Wyoming Wildcats and their going 54–3? That is but a slight difference in degrees of overwhelming dominance, a difference in winning percentage of .982 versus .947, or .035. No big deal.
But the real mathematical operation of an Electoral College consists not in ratios but in pathways to victory. To take a trivial case, if California possessed 60 percent of the population but only 51 percent of the electoral vote, it would alone determine the election 100 percent of the time. In our system of 51 elections and a range of values from 54 to 3, with the largest state possessing 20 percent of the 270 votes needed, the mathematics are exceedingly complicated, but, as you should suspect, the large states are not shortchanged. You can see how it may work by simplifying the system. Suppose a nation of states valued at 7–4–1–1–1–1. The large state enjoys 31 of 32 paths to victory, much better than the baseline of 16, exactly half—which is what you get if your state has no effect at all on the outcome. Each of the other states, the four no more than the others, enjoys 17 paths to victory. The influence of “7” is 15 times as great as the influence of any other state. So, where, all other things being equal, do we suppose candidates will spend most of their time, money, and attention?
Let’s spread the votes around more broadly, with states valued so: 8–7–6–5–4–3–2–1–1. By my count, there are 192 paths out of 256 for getting to victory once you have an “8” in hand. That is, by random chance, flipping a coin to decide each state election, the voters in “8” will have voted for the overall winner 191 out of 256 times. Here, the baseline is 128, exactly one-half the line of zero influence; “8” enjoys a margin of 64 paths over non-effect. But the next step is steep: there are only 179 paths for “7,” a margin of 51 paths over non-effect. The slight electoral edge gives an outsized influence to the larger of “8” and “7.” There are 136 paths to victory for “1,” a margin of 8 over non-effect. That is just what the relative sizes of “8” and “1” would require.
Another way to view the influence is to ask in how many of the possible results is the given state decisive: with it, you win; without it, you lose. In my lineup of “states” above, one of the two 1s can be decisive only when the other states split 18–18. That will happen 13 of 256 times. But “8” will be decisive whenever the other states split 11–18 or narrower. By my count, that will be 130 of 256 times, 10 times as often. In any election in which some state is decisive, all states of equal or larger size are also decisive. But we see that a small margin in a large state will mean much more toward victory than will a large margin in a small state. It is merely accidental in the United States that our four largest states, California, Texas, Florida, and New York, have not recently been competitive, with a margin of 20 percent for the winner in California in 2024 and 13 percent for the winner in each of the other three.
I have assumed 51 independent elections, with 50–50 probabilities. But the elections are not independent, and tossups are anomalous. Landslides are common (in my lifetime, 1964, 1972, 1980, and 1984; other resounding victories include 1988, 1992, 1996, 2004, and 2008). In reality, it is far less likely than my example suggests that a small state will be decisive. If someone points to the 2000 election, in which one small state, New Hampshire, with its four electoral votes, tipped the scales for Bush, I note that in that same election, so did the 29 other states that Bush won, from smallest Wyoming to big Florida and Texas.
But this is to treat only of mathematics. The main reason why we should respect states rather than individuals has to do not with mathematics, which, as I said, does not depress the relative influence of the large states over the smaller states. It has to do with human and political realities, embodied in the kind of nation the Founders intended to establish and protect.
We were in the region of the world called America, states, united in a general government. Each state was less than a nation but far more than and other than a province or an administrative district. Even with all the encroachments by the national government on what ought to be regional, municipal, or private matters (such as businesses, schools, and organizations doing work in the public square), we still retain, far more than in Canada and in most other nations, the sense that each large unit is a state, a separate and distinct experiment in self-government, and that the states should present a fairly wide variety of methods for dealing with social problems and the common good. As such, one state stands on the same footing with another, regardless of population. Mississippi’s return to older ways of teaching children to read is reaping great rewards. It is no less valuable because Mississippi has only six electoral votes to California’s 54. States as such deserve equal treatment in at least one department of our government, the Senate, and at least separate and distinct influence, though far from equal, in the Electoral College. This insight ought to unite genuine liberals and conservatives against their common foes, the homogenizers. After all, in the assembly of the United Nations, most-populous China counts no more than does little Luxembourg, nor should she. A mural painting is not more beautiful for being large. Obesity in governments breeds disease—but that is the subject for another essay. The same sense that would protect the small from the oppressive weight of numbers should see in the Electoral College some modest protection of the smaller states from being swallowed up in a homogeneous and undifferentiated generality. That is good not only for Wyoming and Mississippi but for California, too.