Bob Hayes Online

I anticipate some caterwauling this election from the Democrats again about the Electoral College. Here is part two of an ongoing series on reasons that we still need the Electoral College.

Reason The Third: It Reduces The Incentive To Commit Vote Fraud

Many areas of the country are solidly in one political camp or another.  Texas is not in play this year.  Everyone knows what Massachusetts is going to do. 

When a place has one highly dominant party, that party naturally controls all of the voting machinery.  All of the voting judges are of that party; all of the ministerial jobs at the state level are held by people who are members of the party.  This makes voter fraud a lot easier than in a scenario where there the area is hotly contested, and people of both parties are in positions of authority.

Under a popular vote system, there would be a strong incentive for such one-party areas to run up the vote count through fraudulent means.  It’s easy to get away with, and there’s a return on the “investment” - all those lovely additional votes.

The Electoral College serves to check this tendency.  Once a state is in the bag for Candidate X, Candidate X’s partisans in the electoral machinery have no incentive to try and run up the count.  They can settle for their honest victory and not feel any pressure (from the national parties, for example) to come up with more votes somehow.

I anticipate some caterwauling this election from the Democrats again about the Electoral College.  Here is part two of an ongoing series on reasons that we still need the Electoral College.

Reason The Second:  It Requires Candidates To Make Their Pitch To Large Parts Of The Country

The EC forces candidates to craft policies that appeal to large sections of the country, not just to one or two cities.  It also forces them to visit large sections of the country.  If we had a popular vote system, candidates would quite logically spend all of their time in NY, Boston, Philadelphia, Chicago, Detroit, LA, and Seattle.  They would do this for the same reason that you rake your leaves into one big pile before bagging them instead of wandering the yard with a sack, bending over to pick up each individual leaf:  transaction costs.  When people are grouped together, it is much easier, faster, and cheaper to pander to them.

Make one stop in NYC and you have access to 10 million voters.  To do the same in rural states you would have to make more like 100 stops, with large distances between each stop.  It’s a lot cheaper per-person to advertise in NYC than it is to advertise in a fifteen-state region.  The electoral college makes those 100 stops a lot more attractive to the candidates, because each stop represents a couple of electoral votes. 

Even if a state doesn’t have many electoral votes, the candidate generally tries to hit it at least once, because if his opponent wins, she gets a small but meaningful boost.  In a popular contest, no such incentive applies.  You don’t really care that your opponent got 90,000 votes in Rhode Island and you only got 80,000; you will make that up with one photo op in Greenwich Village.  The electoral system makes that 10,000 vote margin worth 3 EC votes, and you can’t really afford to just blow off any particular state.  It’s better to forget about running up the score in NYC and start bolstering your support in other parts of the nation.

I anticipate some caterwauling this election from the Democrats again about the Electoral College.  Here is part one of a to-be-ongoing series on reasons that we still need the Electoral College.

Reason The First: Because Otherwise We’d Have Another Civil War

If the voting was done on a direct popular basis, the rural areas of the United States would have no effective voice.  There would be no political point in them remaining in the Union, and they would secede again (and with considerably more justification this time); the cities wouldn’t be able or willing to let them go.  To avoid just that kind of sectionalism, secession, and war, the Founders (angel choir) decided to compromise with a system that gives major populaton centers a large voice, but not an overwhelming one. (And you’ll note that while the South went south anyway, under-representation in the Federal government was not the reason.  So the Founders weren’t perfect, sue ‘em.)

Let’s use one of my colorful homespun analogies.  This one has liquor and prostitutes, so pay attention.  Say you have two men running a boat.  Both of them have skills that are absolutely necessary to operate the boat, and that neither of them can do it alone.  One of them weighs 315 pounds, and the other weighs 85 pounds.  A case could be made that the shipping company should pay the fat man 315/400ths of the salary budget, and the skinny man 85/400ths, because the fat man has to buy a lot more food, his clothes are more expensive, he needs more bourbon to get liquored up, etc.  But if you did that, the skinny man would quit and go find work with another shipping company, and the boat would sink.  The fat man can’t leave; berths for 315-pound seamen are hard to find.  (They keep breaking hammocks.)  So if there’s to be “injustice”, measured by weight:dollar ratios, in the salary arrangement, it is going to end up being at the fat man’s expense.

So the fat man of the cities gets boned in the ear, to an extent, but he IS getting paid, so he doesn’t quit.  He just grumbles once in a while that he’s spending an awful lot of his salary on crates of Snack Ramen while his skinny rural coworker nibbles the occasional sandwich and has a lot more for dockside whoring expenses.  It isn’t FAIR, but it works.  The “fair” alternative wouldn’t.

The likelihood of a civil war scenario may be low, but the costs of it are very high.