The Authoritarian Checklist – John Brennan / Peter Strzok update, August 2018
John Brennan’s public service: -CIA station chief in Saudi Arabia -CIA chief of staff -Director of Terrorist Threat Integration Center -Directo...
The Electoral College: Origins, Consequences, and Flaws
I have some thoughts on the Electoral College. I hope you don’t mind the Twitter format!
You can also see a single-page version here thanks to ThreadReaderApp.
Actually, no. For example, in 2016 the minimum number of jurisdictions needed to reach Hillary Clinton’s popular majority was 39 states plus DC.
But let’s get serious. Let’s review origins, consequences, & flaws of the Electoral College.
[here beginneth the thread] https://t.co/zTRiWyfspw
— Sam Wang (@SamWangPhD) January 27, 2019
Topics:
Good analysis. But, why did you exclude the nine presidential elections from 1788 to 1820?
The popular vote wasn’t tabulated in those years. It became an issue with the disputed election of 1824.
Sam – I would have thought your response to the first tweet would be different.
I expected you to rank order all the states by electoral-vote-to-population ratio, then go down the list until you reached 270, and calculate half the population of those states … and then point out “with the EC system you only need n% of the voters to win where n << 50". "Isn't n shockingly low?"
So, I couldn’t resist:
43% of the people who cast votes in 2016 live in states with 270 electoral votes.
Assume a candidate wins those states with, say, 50% of the vote.
Assume the main loser takes 100% of the rest of the country.
In this case, the election can be won with 21.5% of the vote to the loser’s 78.5%.
Well done, and I have no quarrel with your arithmetic. However, there is a whiff of descending to his level of wrongheadedness there!
Yeah, I agree.
By the way, I wasted my time sharpening my pencil because the end result is not really much more shocking than the standard 25/75 argument which applies to all indirect representation systems.
You could make the numbers essentially as extreme as you like by assuming more implausible conditions: suppose almost nobody votes in the states the winner took, but tens of millions vote in the loser’s states; then the winner can win with close to 0%. But more realistic scenarios are probably more convincing, and the real world has provided them.
Related to your point, and interesting:
https://www.fairvote.org/how_to_get_elected_to_congress_with_only_50_595_votes