Reminder of how Trump can win with a tiny minority of the vote

By Best In Moderation

A while back I posted a long detailed analysis of the systemic unrepresentative method that is the Electoral College. I used a lot of math and data and it ended up causing more confusion than it did inform people. As such, I have condensed the argument below and want to remind people that this is a thing, and that Trump 2.0 has a real chance of happening not because the people want it, but because the system is very clearly in his favor.

So sit back, enjoy the despair that settles around you, and I dunno, maybe encourage people to vote like their freedom, sanity and justice depends on it, cause it just might.

Right out the gate, let's define what I'm talking about. The Electoral College is a method of selecting the President of the United States. Every state gets a certain amount of electors, supposedly based on population. These electors are chosen, in most states, by the party who wins the most in a popular vote. Electors are pressured to vote as told to by that party, but have no Constitutional duty to do so. However it is rare to have them go against the will of those who picked them.

Already you can perhaps see some problems here. No third party will ever select an elector. If one party wins by a single vote, they still get to pick all the electors. And the range of population to EC vote varies greatly.

Take for example California and Wyoming.

California is the most populous state, with 40 million people, 12% of the US population. They have 55 Electoral votes.

Wyoming is the least populous state, with 579 thousand people, 0.17% of the US population. They have 3 electoral votes.

Do the math and you find that it takes 192,920 Wyoming people per electoral vote, and 718,404 Californian people per electoral vote. That is almost 4 times more people required per EC vote.

But maybe it's not so bad, and in elections this plays out different as not every inhabitant can or does vote. Taking a look back at the 2016 election, the most votes were cast by California, at 13,237,598. The least was again Wyoming, at 230,392. For reference that is 33.5% of California's population and 39% of Wyoming's population.

(As an aside, that doesn't necessarily mean they had more turnout; it can also mean there are more voters in WY than in CA. But it does hold for 2016: CA had a 53.8% turnout, Wy had a 60.1% turnout).

Now let's do the same math we did for population and see if there still exists the problem noted.

Wyoming requires 76,797 voters per Electoral College vote. California requires 240,684 voters per Electoral College vote.

So let's say the USA was just those two states. In the most unbalanced possible scenario, it would take just 20.7 million people to get to 270 EC votes if based on Wyoming, and 65 million people to get to 270 votes if based in California.

Solution A

It's pretty simple: the votes as allocated now are not allocated based on population. The simple average population per state is 6,551,896. The lowest population is 578,759. Both are a potential basis for counting EC votes, but let's make it a bit more accurate by allocating 1 EC vote per 10,000 people. The lower that number gets, the more accurately it will reflect the will of the people.

In that new setup, Wyoming would get 58 EC votes, and California would get 3951. This reflects the population difference in a much better way. WY has 1.46% of the population of CA, but 5.45% of their EC total. Under this new model, they would have 1.46% of the EC vote as well.

Resistance

Why would we not want this? Well, some people argue that the EC, like the Senate, allows the minority opinion to have power and not be overruled by the larger states. This is a very anti-Federalist idea, with each State requiring protection from one another, rather than a Federalist idea that the Executive of the USA be chosen equally by the people (one person, one vote principle).  

The Framers did not want one state to be able to constantly overrule another, and thus built in safeguards that at the time gave a slight advantage to less populated states. It was not a equitable solution, but rather an incentive for less populated states to accept majority decisions. Thus each states got 2 senators and one EC vote per Congressperson. 

Both of these items are still important. It is true that small states are often at the mercy of larger ones, and candidates have little incentive to reach out to small states if they don't have real choosing power. We like to think of the USA as one, but it isn't. It's a federation of 50 states working together, and not always for the same goals.

The EC method we use now isn't working as we designed it to.

When the nation began, the half least populated states made up 22% of the US population. Now they make up 17%. They had 40 Electoral votes out of 162 (25%). Now they have 120 out of 528 (23%). While they dropped in 5% of population, they only lost 2% in voting power. 

The most populous made up 71.43%, now they make up 81.82%. They had 98 Electoral votes out of 162 (60.5%). Now they have 408 out of 528 (77%). While the grew 10% in population, they gained 17% in voting power.

So for those small states resisting a change to how we count EC votes, note that while you keep 60% of your voting power for every 1% population drop, the larger states still gain 10% for every 1% population gain. Neither side is based on population or one person one vote. 

Solution B

So if we don't want a pure representative system but we also don't want a failing weighted system, what are we left with?

The Senate is so skewed that we currently have 16% of the US population deciding 50% of the Senate. While 54% of the states used to be under the national average in population, now 66% are. It takes 7 CA voters to equal 1 WY voter for EC vote totals.

So what if we try this? Every state which doubles the average population of the states gets one more senator for each double. That way you preserve the minority state's power but not to such a ridiculous degree.

If we do this then we balance both the power of the Senate and the EC to the levels they were at the time of the nation's founding. And most people seem to like those guys, so maybe we should try to emulate their levels?

Conclusion

Anyone who tells you the EC votes are based on population and are thus fair isn't doing the math. Anyone who says it is one person= one vote hasn't read the law. 

So long as voting power is so extremely ranged, we will always see less populous red states hold outsized power over large population blue states. So find another 45 million people to vote this time if you want to beat Trump, because that's what it might take to overcome the systemic advantage.