Slashdot Mirror
Colorado To Vote on Electoral College Plan
siriuskase writes "Is it too much to ask of our technology/math skills to award electorial votes in proportion to the popular vote? Colorado might be up to the task. From the article:
On Nov. 2, voters will consider a proposal to immediately scrap the state's winner-take-all electoral vote system and allow candidates to keep a proportion of the delegates they win. In theory, a candidate could win 55 percent of the statewide vote and get only five of the state's nine electoral votes.
If the proposal had been in place four years ago, Gore would have earned enough electoral votes to go to the White House.
"
Why is the electoral college good for democracy?
This article (Discover, Nov 1996 [coral cache]) suggests that the mathematics governing elections favors YOUR vote in an electoral college system.
Whatever your political slant, I am sure you would like YOUR vote to be more favored.
Imagine the electoral college as what happens if you're a "swing" voter in your family, your family contributing all its votes with its internal winner to your town's election, in which it is a "swing" voter in your small town, your town being a swing voter in the county election, your county being an important vote in the state election. In this case you weild extreme power. You are more likely to be in "this case" under the electoral college than in a pure vote.
There's nothing partisan in the way in which this empowers YOUR vote - rather, all that happens is that there is a more causative effect between YOUR political idea and what actually HAPPENS. It's rather like playing both sides against each other, with those who are actually making a decision having a huge return on their investment in making that decision. In other words, your decision about how you are going to vote = larger effect on what happens in the election.
I have not reviewed the mathematics myself, but this is how I understand the situation.
Comments from anyone who has reviewed the issue?
How has Natapoff's work held up over the past few years?
Well, that's why it's called a "compromise". Historically, the reason was that New York and Virginia had so many votes that all the other colonies wouldn't join the Constitution unless there was a counterbalance. No election scheme can avoid "disenfranchising*" some number of voters -- at worst, (0.5000 x population) -1.
Here and now, we have the problem that the entire state of Colorado has only half the population of New York City. (I used to work in the WTC -- and that one building had ten times the population of my home town.)
Without the counterbalance, New York and California could vote to move everyone out of Colorado and turn it into a buffalo preserve and we couldn't do anything about it.
There's another reason that we kind of forget having had the aberrant case of a near-perfect split last election: by having a "thresholding" effect, it's much less common for a presidential election to be really close. It is, I believe, a theorem that no election scheme can completely avoid the problems we had last time, but the chances that an election will come down to a couple of thousand disputed votes in three or four counties is damn near zero. Imagine if every election had to be settled by the Supreme Court or the House.
* quotation marks because you've hit a pet peeve: losing an election isn't the same as being "disenfranchised". To be disenfranchised is to be deprived of the right to vote -- not being deprived of having the guy you want, win.