The Electoral College, Explained

The other day I was having a conversation with some friends about the electoral college system. It appears that both of my friends feel that this system is antiquated and unfair to the voting populace. I thought I would write a short article about one aspect of the electoral college: balance popular votes with state populations.

The electoral college system was started for two reasons. One, back in the horse and buggy days, it was difficult for people to travel to vote, so this system of vote representation was devised to represent the vote. Secondly, the system was created in order to balance the sheer number of the majority vote with the ability of the the less populated states to have representation.

In the electoral system, each state has a number of electors equivalent to its total Congressional representation, with the District of Columbia receiving three electors. The reason for this is simple. Let me list some major cities for you:

1	New York City, New York	8,143,197
2	Los Angeles, California	4,324,526
3	Chicago, Illinois	3,158,790
4	Houston, Texas	2,016,582
5	Philadelphia, Pennsylvania	1,463,281
6	Phoenix, Arizona	1,461,575
7	San Antonio, Texas	1,256,509
8	San Diego, California	1,255,540
9	Dallas, Texas	1,213,825
10	San Jose, California	953,679

(Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Us_population)

The population of the top 10 cities in the United States is 25,247,504 (if I punched the numbers in correctly). Now, let us consider that this is 8.4% of the population of 300 million. This does not sound like a big deal, but numbers like this sway the vote. Why else do politicians focus their energies in highly populated areas? Not just for numbers, but electoral votes- they need both. This graphic illustrates this quite well:





These maps show the amount of attention given to each state by the Bush and Kerry campaigns during the final five weeks of the 2004 election. At left, each waving hand represents a visit from a presidential or vice-presidential candidate during the final five weeks. At right, each dollar sign represents one million dollars spent on TV advertising by the campaigns during the same time period. (Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electoral_College_%28United_States%29)

Let's imagine for a minute, for the sake of mathematical simplicity, that there are only 1 million people in the United States. The population is concentrated in two cities, and sparse in the rest of the U.S. Suppose 550 thousand people lived in two cities, New York and Los Angeles. The rest of the population (450 thousand) lived in the rest of the country, evenly distributed in each state, for a total of 9,375 votes per state. Based on this ficitious country's rules of representation, the 48 states would each get three electoral college votes, for a total of 144 electoral votes. The other two states would get 61 votes each, for a total of 122 electoral votes (again, I am trying to prove a point by having close numbers between the states- this is not how numbers are allocated in real life). Now, the balance of power has shifted away from two highly populated areas to a more evenly distributed balance across the nation. The two cities can not decide the president on their own- it takes other smaller states to decide. These two large city-states have their own special interests, good or bad, that may be different from the smaller states. The city-states are still influential, but they are not all-powerful. Plus, the candidates have to give time to the other states to get elected.

In this very simplified form of the electoral college system, one can see the wisdom of our founding fathers in that the electoral system provides equity and protection to the less populated states from the whims of highly populated states. Our founders were intent on preventing tyranny in any form, whether it was the tyranny of the crown or the tyranny of the states.