First, one of the causes of the Electoral College becoming increasingly skewed to the per-state side of the calculation vs. the per-person side is that the Electoral College calculation for electoral votes based on population is (mostly) held to the 435 congressional member limit imposed by the 1929 Permanent Apportionment Act. (The exception is that D.C. gets real Electoral College votes on top of the 435 but only one nonvoting congressional representative.) If we instead used the population of the smallest state as a denominator and around 330 million as the total U.S. population, the 436 (435 plus one for D.C.) becomes approximately 578 (plus or minus the rounding effect). The smallest state, Wyoming, would retain its one population-based elector, while the largest, California, would increase from 52 population-based votes to around 69. (To the writer who thinks this overly favors blue California, the second- and third-largest states are Texas and Florida, which would increase from a combined population-based 66 electors to around 89). Then, when you add in the 102 state- and D.C.-based electors, the total size of the Electoral College would go from 538 to 680. This would restore the state vs. population weighting to something closer to what the framers (minus the three-fifths abomination) were aiming for.
Second, to get even closer to original intent, we could also require apportionment of each state’s electors based on the state voting split, which is what all the states did originally, instead of a winner-take-all system. (One would need to do this by state totals, not by congressional district, as the two are no longer synced, but this has the added benefit of taking gerrymandering out of the calculation.) But we could also compromise on this and have the population-based electors be apportioned while the state- and D.C.-based electors be winner-take-all for each state.
Miles Anderson, Minneapolis
The time to squabble about the Electoral College has arrived with quadrennial regularity, and Tice has revisited his defense of the indefensible college — interrupting his argument to throw shade at Gov. Tim Walz, “pedantic” former schoolteachers and “well-coiffed” California Democratic donors. Others have adroitly rebutted his reasoning but haven’t invited us to peer into the truly anti-democratic black hole at the heart of the Electoral College arrangement. If no one wins a majority of the electors (270), the House elects the president with each state casting a single vote — one vote for Wyoming with its 580,000 or so residents, one vote for California’s nearly 40 million (some “well-coiffed”) folks and so on. Given the states’ current political leanings, this virtually assures a Republican victory — regardless of the popular vote. Far-fetched? It didn’t seem so in 1968 when the avowedly racist George Wallace mounted a strong third-party challenge, apparently hoping to throw the election into the House, where he would have sufficient influence over like-minded Congressmen to gain concessions. Teetering on the edge of the black hole was sufficiently disturbing to both Democrats and Republicans that in 1969 the House voted 338-70 to send an amendment to the Senate to dismantle the Electoral College. A contemporary poll found that 80% of the public favored direct election of the president. But a group of Southern senators killed the amendment with a filibuster.
