Civic Unicorn Math

The Myth of the "National Popular Vote"

One unfortunate casualty of the decline in civics education in this country is a misunderstanding of how it was actually designed; "Hamilton" the musical aside, I fear much of the country has never touched the Federalist Papers.  So it comes as no surprise to hear people talking about the United States as a "democracy," when that is precisely the form of government it was designed to avoid.  The Founding Fathers knew the work of the Roman political philosopher Polybius backwards and forwards, especially the inevitable descent of democracies into mob rule.  From this was born a vision: A constitutional republic, governed by policymakers who themselves are elected by the people, but which has no national election.

In that mix then were forged compromises to create what has scaled upward to the system we have now: 51 separate elections, and a weighting scheme designed to aggregated their results in a meaningful way the preserves the integrity and rights of smaller states.  There's no shortage of advocacy, especially this week, for attempting to subvert that model with an amendment to dignify the unicorn of arithmetic called the "National Popular Vote" -- a mythical creature with about as much real value as the average temperature of the whole United States at any given time -- despite the obvious realpolitik that there's no way 38 states could be persuaded to surrender their sovereignty so fundamentally as to ratify such an amendment.

Properly Contextualizing Each State's Results

Nuance and context are -- as is the case in most situations -- key to understanding how deeply flawed the brazen act of simply totaling the individual outcomes of 51 separate elections and attempting to infer meaning can be.  For example, in some states, there were four choices on the ballot, whereas in others, there were dozens.  This year, Evan McMullin was on the ballot in eight states; absent single-transferable-vote, how do you interpret his net impact on an overall total in the context of attempting to infer the absence or presence of a "mandate" for another particular candidate?  In such a scenario, does the absence of any candidate winning an actual "majority" really allow for any kind of legitimacy inferences between a pair of narrowly-competitive pluralities? A majority of the voters voted *against* each.

Worse are the opportunities to rig an election two orders of magnitude worse than the compartmentalized results we have today; someone puts their finger on the scale in Florida, they flip Florida.  Imagine dozens of independent opportunities for election officials across the country to find ways to puff-up vote totals incrementally in favor of one candidate or another.

The Electoral College Then and Now

One thing to keep in mind: The impact of Senatorial Electors (the two each state gets just for playing) was substantially higher in the 18th Century than it is today. In the original design of the republic, there were 65 Congressmen and 26 Senators, so 26 of the 91 electors (28.57%) were part of that not-population-apportioned skew.  By way of comparison, and with DC treated by Constitutional amendment as if it were Wyoming, today 102 of the 538 electors (18.96%) are "Senatorial" in origin.

An alternative way forward then: Rather than trying to undo 228 years of a system designed for scalability and durability in the face of challenges, why not challenge some of the larger states to break themselves up and claim their missing Senators (and their respective electors) in the process. Again, using 1788-era ratios, the size of the House would suggest we should have 87 states, not 50.