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June 15, 2004

And Another Thing

Further electoral college commentary. The absolute worst idea of the bunch is to just assign the votes by congressional district. This is a terrible idea for a number of reasons, the most immediate that comes to mind is gerrymandering. If you think redistricting is already bad just wait until its outcome decides the Presidency. You'd have a state like Pennsylvania that both Gore and Rendell (their Democratic governor) won but Bush probably picks up a majority of the electoral college votes done by Congressional district because the lines are drawn to heavily favor Republicans.

Regional voting like this is ok for a representative body but statewide or nationwide elections aren't representative because the Congress already takes care of that. Furthermore, you punish people who vote similarly for living in close proximity of each other. Imagine a state with 2 rural Congressional districts and 1 urban one. The Republican wins each rural district 60-40 and loses the urban one 75-25. The way Nebraska and Maine already do it the Republican gets 2 EV's and the Democrat gets 1. But the Democrat would have actually won the statewide vote 52-48.

Combine that with gerrymandered districts and you've got serious potential for a very flawed system. Additionally, I realize that when you extrapolate this argument it is eventually an argument against a non-proportional (ie electoral college) method of electing statewide or nationwide officers.

Finally, it's important to remember that while the electoral college may give Montana 3 times the voting power of California the old county unit system gave some small Georgia counties 30 to 50 times the voting power of Fulton and DeKalb counties.

Posted by Chris at June 15, 2004 04:56 PM

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