Old School: The Electoral College

This presidential election is going to be close, and because it is this close, there is a greater probability now than there has been since 1960 that the Electoral College will provide us with a president who has garnered fewer votes than the opposition.

Yes, the ancient and quirky electoral system has been known to award the reins of power to the candidate with fewer popular votes. When Grover S. Cleveland beat out Benjamin Harrison in 1888 by a scant 0.7 percent of votes cast, his supporters did not engage in bacchanalian post-election festivities because Cleveland did not become president. The Electoral College ended up choosing Harrison (Cleveland did, however, win in a subsequent election).

If something similar happens in this election, will the electorate become incensed that this strange and poorly understood "technicality" has given them a second-rated president? Will they rise up and demand a constitutional amendment, or will they become even more apathetic than they are already, questioning the point of voting if the more popular candidate isn't even elected?

But what is the effect of the Electoral College on the power of the people? Is an individual's vote more or less powerful in a straight popular election or an electoral college system? MIT physicist Alan Natapoff attempts to give us an answer. First he defines "vote power" as the probability that your vote will break a tie and directly cause one candidate to be elected over another. Ridiculous as this definition may seem, when you watch the election returns in November you will realize that unless the popular vote in your state is split right down the middle with one vote more to the candidate you voted for, your vote has done nothing but impotently increment the one's digit in your chosen candidate's column. So the better a voting system, the greater probability of a deadlock broken by your vote, making your vote truly "count."

Natapoff developed a method to determine the best system given two inputs: First, one must know the number of voters. Second, one must know the probabilities of a random voter voting for each candidate (i.e. polling numbers). For example, a deadlock in the polls does not mean that exactly 50 percent of people will vote for one candidate and 50 percent for another, but rather that any random person's vote behaves like the flipping of a coin. So just as you would be surprised to get exactly 50 million heads out of 100 million tosses, you would be equally surprised by a voting deadlock. Of course, as the polls become more uneven, the coin becomes lopsided and the probability that a tie will occur decreases drastically (because the number of voters is so large).

As it turns out, vote power for a dead-even election is optimized by a straight popular vote, but as the polls put one candidate in front of another the vote power in an electoral system begins to increase until it overtakes the popular vote system. But interestingly, as the number of voters increases, the "lopsidedness" needed to make the electoral system better for the average voter decreases to basically zero. In other words, as the number of voters increases, it takes a smaller and smaller imbalance in the polls for voter power to be increased by an electoral college-type system. With voters numbering in the millions, it is nearly always desirable for the idealized self-interested voter to vote in an electoral college-like system, because of the greater probability of breaking an important tie in your state, giving its electors to your candidate and actually deciding the election.

But some say that Natapoff's definition of voting power invalidates this whole analysis. With this definition, one easy way to generate a large vote-power would be to have everyone vote, shuffle the ballots and draw one ballot that decides the election. Thus in every election one person is guaranteed to have cast the deciding vote, and the vote-power for an individual is one divided by the number of voters, a number almost always larger than either the voting power of a straight popular election or an electoral system. But if this invalidates Natapoff's point (and people are still debating this), others point to more obvious and understandable perks of the Electoral College.

Many would credit the system with actually protecting our popular sovereignty by hindering voter fraud. They reason that in states, minority party voter fraud is quite unlikely because the minority party would have to fool the majority party into believing that they had beaten the odds and won an unlikely election. However, majority party fraud is much easier because the party with the power can make it happen, and people are expecting the general division of votes to be in the majority's favor anyway. So inflating vote totals in a certain area from 60 percent to say 70 percent would be much easier than from 45 percent to 55 percent. But under an electoral system, unlike a straight popular system, this sort of majority vote inflation has no effect on the presidential election as a whole, because electoral votes are not awarded as a proportion of the state's vote totals but in a lump-sum. The Electoral College prevents "one bad apple" from spoiling the harvest by splitting the harvest into different baskets, ensuring the integrity of the election.

So will we ever be rid of the electoral system? Do we even want to be? While our reasoning about voter power generally tends to be deontological (i.e. one person, one vote is inherently right), these arguments are quite utilitarian in their appeal, which seems to at once make them suspect. But if the price of freedom truly is eternal vigilance, we need to explore these practical effects of the Electoral College before we decide to dismantle a central part of our federal election system.

B.J. Greenleaf '01 is a physics concentrator in Mather House. His column appears on alternate Tuesdays.