A More Perfect Electorate: Evaluating Alternatives to the Electoral College
As we come off the heels of the one-term Trump Presidential Administration, voters, politicians, and organizers alike have added fuel to the long-standing debate of electoral reform in the United States. In 2016, President Trump was elected by what is known as an electoral “inversion,” in which the results of the Electoral College contradicted the outcome of the U.S. popular vote.
In many liberally-skewed political circles, elections resulting in electoral inversions have been called unfair. The subversion of democratic principles in favor of republican ones has raised questions about how national elections should be decided, all boiling down to an important one: why should a representative electoral body have more power over determining who takes the most important seat in U.S. government than the people who put them there? Five times in U.S. history, the Electoral College has overruled a decision popular vote victory during a presidential election. This had led many Americans to question the validity of this system.
However, in this article, we argue that it is not only the presence of electoral inversion that best highlights the issues with inequity in American politics. Our criticism of the electoral college system in the U.S. centers around the concept of electoral bias: that importantly, that the contradiction of electoral inversion seems to be biased toward one political party. In each of the two electoral college inversion elections since 2000, the College has favored the Republican candidate, who derived much of his support from Midwestern, Southern, and Rust Belt states that are disproportionately empowered by the structure of the electorate.
This apparent favoring of conservative politics has sparked criticism among Democrats and third-party candidates, as well as calls to abolish the Electoral College entirely. It has also inspired multiple studies on the subject, including one by the National Academy of Sciences that found no evidence of party favoritism within the college. However, such studies have been counterbalanced by journalistic pieces highlighting perverse incentives for academics to deny electoral bias, such as direct political connections and ties to private interests that benefit from the surviving Republican fiscal agenda.
In any case, this analysis will treat favoritism concerns as valid because of their apparent outcome: two elections in less than 20 years in which Republican presidential candidates have lost the popular vote and won the election. Our goal is to explore alternative systems as options for electoral reform and understand to what extent they address this particular issue of partisan inequity. These alternative electoral systems include state proportional representation and the congressional district allocation method.
HISTORICAL BACKGROUND & KEY ISSUES
It’s important to remember a few things about the Electoral College and the legal and political foundations of democratic practices in the United States. The first is that the Electoral College was formed at the drafting of the U.S. Constitution as a system that created a temporary group of electors equal to the total number of representatives in Congress. These electors vote for the president, and today, the first candidate to get 270 of the 538 total electoral votes wins. This was a way for the Founding Fathers to diffuse the executive power of Congress, encourage separation of powers, and reduce incidence of corruption.
The second thing to note about the Electoral College is that it was borne out of a compromise that works around the continuation of slavery in the United States during its founding. The infamous Three Fifths Compromise, which contemplated the population of nonvoting, enslaved African-Americans in allocating electoral power, was the key to ending a long and arduous drafting process by encouraging Southern states to agree on the new system. The implication of this compromise was the contemporaneous establishment of the Electoral College with a system of unequal representation along racial, gender, and geographic lines.
In a modern context (post-Reconstruction Amendments and Voting Rights Act) the U.S. Electoral College system still sustains rampant inequality. With the development of the two party system in the 19th century, lawmakers have advanced electoral reforms that entrench the political supremacy of their own parties. The result of these changes was the eradication of electoral independence (in all but two states, electoral votes are allocated in a winner-takes-all system), and the favoring of whichever political party has historically held a majority in U.S. government.
OUTSTANDING QUESTIONS
A few major conceptual questions loom over any effort to reform the Electoral College: (1) what does a reformed electorate look like? and (2) what does equality and equity look like in a national election? These questions have been asked and answered many times in many different ways by election lawyers, activists, statisticians and professionals of other disciplines. In fact, more Constitutional amendments have been put forth regarding national election law and the electorate than on any other subject. The literature is full of proposals like changes to direct democracy, proportional electoral representation, majoritarian, and ranked-choice voting.
In this analysis, we intend to address the two questions above by applying an anti-partisan concept of equity to a survey of historical election outcomes using two alternative electoral systems. In short, we want to know how state proportional electoral representation and the congressional district method affect the incidence of electoral inversion.
Proportional electoral representation is one of the most popular alternative electoral structures. It divides each state’s electoral votes in accordance with their popular vote percentages, thus increasing representation for third party voters and eliminating the spoiler effect (third-party votes harming the chance of the most similar majority party succeeding in a particular state). The congressional district method divides electoral votes by district, allocating one vote to each district and using the remaining two as a bonus for the winner of the state’s popular vote. This method has been used by Maine and Nebraska since the 1970s and 1990s, respectively.
We used national voter data to model the electoral college maps of the 2004, 2008, and 2016 elections based on each of the two electoral reform methods and projected a winner.
Our research questions are (1) which method, if either, results in electoral inversion at the same rate or higher than resulted under the current system? (2) in cases of electoral inversion, does there appear to be favoritism of one political party?
ANALYSIS
The 2004 Election:
Shown above in the historical map, Bush and Kerry each received more votes than any other candidates in history. During this election, many disputes were encountered about the so-called “swing states”, in this case in particular the dispute was over Ohio. The final results came down to Bush with 286 electoral votes, and Kerry with 251 electoral votes, in total. It was a close race, but Bush came out stronger as the winner.
Proportional Representation
The results through the state proportional electoral method show where each party won the majority of the votes in a given state in proportion of the total votes per candidate (map above). As previously mentioned, John Kerry secured 251 electoral votes while George Bush won the election with 286 electoral votes using the current electoral method. The proportional representation only changed the breakdown by 6 electoral votes. While Bush still won using the proportional method, this method leaned in favor of the democratic party by giving them 6 more electoral votes.
Taking a look at the figure above, we can see that John Kerry did not win the majority of electoral votes (65% of the votes and above) in any state while George Bush was able to do so in 5 states. By looking at the map, we can see that George Bush’s strength in the election through the proportional method was by winning over the majority of states with 51% to 65% of the votes in the given state.
The 2008 Election:
As shown above, John McCain won Nebraska but Obama earned an electoral vote by winning the popular vote in the 2nd Congressional District. This marked the first time that Nebraska has split its electoral vote since it moved away from the winner-take-all method in 1992. During this election, Barack Obama received more votes than any other candidate in history. In the end, the final result of this election was Obama with 365 electoral votes, and McCain with 173 electoral votes in total, making Obama the winner.
Proportional Representation
As previously mentioned, the 2008 election marked Barack Obama with the most votes for a candidate in history. Through our current electoral system, the results showed Obama winning by a landslide. Using the proportional method, the win by Barack Obama was not by as big of a margin as the original results. Senator Barack Obama won the election by 40 electoral votes using the proportional electorate method as opposed to 192 with the electoral college. At first glance, the figure above gives the impression of a close race as both parties only gained a large majority (over 65%) in a couple states and an even proportion of votes between 51% and 65%. This leaves only 3 states within the 2% middle of the votes.
The 2008 election results through the proportional method show that this method has a smaller chance of causing electoral inversion. Senator Obama still won the election through this method, but by a smaller margin which gave way for John McCain to gain some electoral votes in states where their proportion of the votes were closer in some states such as Indiana, Missouri and North Carolina.
The Congressional District Method
Using the congressional district allocation method, Sen. Barack Obama was the predicted winner of the 2008 Presidential Election by a margin of 63 votes out of a total of 535 (map above). This electoral outcome aligns with the popular vote in this election, in which Senator Barack Obama won handily with 52.5% of the vote against Senator John McCain’s 45.7% of the vote. Therefore, it is considered fair under our principle of preferably avoiding electoral inversion.
However, the results of the congressional district method as applied to this election highlight other important considerations. The first is that this method definitively lessens President Obama’s electoral win compared to his victory under the actual Electoral College system. In 2008, the former 56th President of the U.S. beat his opponent by 192 electoral votes. 192 votes is 35% of the electorate. The question remains as to whether a 7% popular vote margin (considered a large margin of victory) should represent 35% of the total available electoral vote. In using the congressional district method, the decisive first-term Obama win was still significant, representing an electoral victory margin of 11%, which is much closer to the 7% popular vote margin by which he won. Based on these metrics, for this election, the congressional district method seems to better represent the will of the voting public.
2016 Election:
As represented above, the 2016 election was one of only 5 elections where the popular vote candidate did not win. It was also the first election where there was a female candidate running for president. Clinton won Maine but Trump earned an electoral vote by winning the popular vote in the 2nd Congressional District. This marked the first time that Maine has split its electoral vote since it moved away from the winner-take-all method in 1972.
Proportional Representation
Taking a look at the proportional method for the 2016 presidential election, we can see that there are many more states split by the popular vote than any of the other elections we have previously analyzed. The 2016 election, being one that with the electoral college did result in electoral inversion, it is important to look at the breakdown through alternative methods. The proportional representation shows that although there are any states that come close to an even split, Donald Trump was able to secure a strong majority (over 65% of the votes) in more states than Hillary Clinton which still concludes a close race.
Hillary Clinton’s win of the popular vote in this election is better represented through this method as she would have won the election by a small margin of 2 electoral votes in comparison to her loss by 77 electoral votes with the current electoral college. Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by almost 3 million votes where she secured 51% of the total votes cast in the 2016 election. This small margin of the popular vote is better represented by proportional representation as this small victory is also seen through the win by 2 electoral votes.
Shown in the map above, using the congressional district allocation method, Sen. Hillary Clinton was the predicted winner of the 2016 Presidential Election by a margin of three votes. This electoral outcome, which contradicts the actual results of the 2016 election, also circumvents the issue of electoral inversion. In 2016, Sen. Hillary Clinton won the popular vote with 48.2% of the popular vote compared to Donald Trump’s 46.1%. However, the Senator lost the election by garnering only 227 votes to President Trump’s 304. President Trump’s margin of victory within the electorate was close to 14%, despite the fact that he lost the popular by 2.1%. This discrepancy really plays to the heart of the issue — that arbitrary geographic allocation of political power can and has usurped power from the voting public.
The results of applying the congressional district method to this election yielded a 0.5% electoral victory for Senator Hillary Clinton, which is much closer to her 2.1% popular vote margin of victory than the 14-point electoral margin in favor of Donald Trump is to his popular vote defeat. In this case, the congressional district method is considered more equitable in terms of representing the will of American voters in the presidential election.
CONCLUSION
As the fairness of national elections becomes an area of increasing concern for the American public, it is important that alternatives to the current electoral college system are evaluated in terms of democratic equity and fairness. Electoral inversion is just one issue on the minds of voting citizens, organizers, and politicians alike, but it represents a fundamental issue in the way representative democracy works in this country. It is in the best interest of all stakeholders in American politics to strive to find an electoral system that strengthens democratic values and does not structurally favor one political party over the other.
In comparing the current electoral vote allocation system for U.S. presidential elections with the two most popular alternatives, both the state proportional and congressional district allocation method appear to yield electoral results that consistently follow the trends of the popular vote. These electoral systems not only reduced the incidence of electoral inversion, but they also draw a finer line under the difference between the electoral college and popular vote margins for each candidate. These methods seem to better represent the will of the U.S. voters, as they not only reversed the electoral inversion of 2016 by a margin that accurately represented the popular vote margin, but also reduced the extreme electoral margin of the 2008 election that was 5 times larger than the popular vote margin. As such, it is our belief that both of these methods have the potential to result in fairer national elections.
METHODS
Proportional electoral representation:
In order to represent the proportional electoral system, 4 datasets were used. The three used in RStudio were taken from the MIT Elections Data Lab with state level popular vote data and two csv files that were created with the electoral college votes per state. Two different electoral college datasets were used to account for the different vote allocation per state between the 2004 and 2008 elections and the 2016 election. While manipulating the data for each, the final electoral votes were calculated in RStudio by taking a sum of the democrat proportions of the vote, and based on the total number of electoral votes, the republican votes were the difference. The data was manipulated in RStudio and exported as a csv file in order to have relative proportions of the votes per candidate in each state and have those percentages represented in QGIS.
The last dataset was state data from the U.S. Census Bureau so that the data that was manipulated in RStudio could be successfully joined and represented on the map. The csv file was joined to the state shapefile and then a graduated symbology was used with the column of the democratic proportion of the votes to visualize the low democratic proportions as high republican proportions and vice versa. The symbology includes 5 categories; two to represent high proportions of republican votes, one for the middle 2% and the last two to represent high proportions of democrat votes.
Congressional District Method:
For this method of electoral vote allocation, the process required three datasets. The first was a spreadsheet containing the vote counts for every precinct in the country provided by the MIT Data Lab. In RStudio, this data was grouped by county so that it could be manipulated in QGIS according to the available shapefiles. It was then filtered by election year and written into separate files that could be joined to vector geometries. This process was repeated twice in order to create separate csv files with (1) the majority candidate votes, (2) the Republican candidate votes, and (3) the Democratic candidate votes.
The second and third datasets were shapefiles that represented the relevant county and congressional district geometries for the election years of interest. For both the 2008 and 2016 elections, the county shapefiles were provided by ArcGIS Hub, and congressional district shapefiles were provided by the U.S. Census Bureau TIGER/Line Database and MapCruzin GIS Consultants, respectively.
In QGIS, the csv file with voter data that was exported from RStudio was first joined to the county shapefile. This file was then geoprocessed with the district shapefile using the Union tool to create a layer that that had both congressional district and county boundaries. Then the resulting union file was aggregated by the congressional district GEOID to allocate the number of republican and democratic votes in each county to the new congressional district boundary. From this point, the new aggregated map could be color-coded in Symbology using conditional statements comparing the number of allocated republican votes and democratic votes. In this case, red is for Republicans and blue is for Democrats.
This method resulted in a tally out of 435 congressional districts for each party, each district containing one vote. Then the extra two bonus points per state were allocated to the candidate who won the most votes per state (this was taken from historical electoral data used in the actual electoral processes). In each case, the candidate with the highest total votes (congressional district plus state bonus points) was the winner.