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More Than You Ever Wanted To Know About The Electoral College
Okay kids, with all this debate going around about the electoral college,
it occured to me that I really didn't know too much about it, so I asked
someone who does know alot. My best friends father is an investigative
journalist, and has written several politically themed books. This is
what he had to say....
jen
ps. he included a map, but when forwarding this onto you, I was unable to
attach it to the email. If anyone is particularly interested, e-mail me
privately and I'll send it to you that way.
> Jen,
>
> Caoilt called and left a message asking me to explain the importance
> of
> the electoral college to you. So, that's what this is all about.
>
> Before I begin, though, there's one other idea I ought to explain
> and
> that's what an MSA is.
>
> Let me be a little long-winded here. If you think back in history
> to
> ancient and medieval times and think of cities the image you'll
> probably
> picture a place that is surrounded by walls with all of the citizens
> living inside the walls. In fact, walls were so important to
> cities,
> the Latin word for city was urbs which literally means walls.
>
> Now this doesn't mean there weren't suburbs in those days. There
> were.
> Matter of fact, if you look at the word suburb you can see that it's
> made up of two Latin words -- sub which means under and urbs.
> Suburbs,
> in other words literally meant "under the (city's) walls." And
> that's
> what they were. They were houses and buildings and eventually whole
> neighborhoods built right up against (or under) the city's walls.
>
> In other words, up through the middle ages cities were very compact,
> enclosed places.
>
> Starting in the 17th and 18th centuries cities began to tear down
> their
> old walls and move on out into the countryside. But, even though
> the
> city grew larger and expanded, it still stayed quite compact. Part
> of
> this was for protection, partly because means of transportation and
> communication were still fairly primitive and partly because land
> was
> scarce and expensive.
>
> This is the way things stayed for two hundred and fifty years or so.
> But by the mid 20th century all of that had changed. By then,
> especially in the United States, all of that had changed. While the
> old
> city centers still remained in most places, the actual functioning
> city
> had sprawled out from the old center to include suburbs further and
> further from the old central city. In addition, with the
> improvements
> of transportation and communication the rural areas around the old
> central cities and its suburbs became more and more closely
> integrated
> with the economy and social life of the old city.
>
> So, if you wanted to describe the new kinds of cities made up of the
> old
> center city, its suburbs and the surrounding countryside, you had to
> come up with a new construct.
>
> Geographers and other social scientists -- and through them, the
> U.S.
> Census Bureau -- developed the idea of the Metropolitan Statistical
> Area
> (i.e. MSA). The MSA is a center city (usually) of at least 50
> thousand
> population plus the county that it's in plus other counties that are
> closely connected to it. For instance, the Akron MSA includes
> Summit
> County plus Medina County to its west and Portage County to its
> east.
> For all practical purposes, these three counties form one functional
> city centered on the old center city of Akron.
>
> Pheww. I told you this would be long-winded, didn't I.
>
> Okay, now I've attached to this e-mail a file that shows you what
> states
> Al Gore carried in this election. If you look at it closely, you'll
> notice that with the exception of Oregon, Washington, Iowa,
> Wisconsin,
> Minnesota and Vermont, you'll see that these are all states that we
> think of as highly urbanized.
>
> On Thursday, USA Today had a map that broke this idea down even
> further. It showed which counties Gore carried. Here the contrast
> was
> even more striking because you could see that in the state of
> Pennsylvania which Gore carried, he carried only a small proportion
> of
> the counties within the state -- in this case the counties that made
> up
> the Pittsburgh and Philadelphia and Erie MSAs. Likewise, in New
> York,
> California, Michigan, Illinois, Ohio and so on and on. In other
> words,
> Gore carried the urban metropolitan areas and nothing else. Of
> course,
> to Gore's advantage, these areas include nearly half of the
> country's
> population.
>
> The question then is, why did Gore carry these areas. The answer
> lies
> in what people in these areas voted for him. Basically, it comes
> down
> to three groups.
>
> The first are the minorities, especially the blacks. Though the
> Democrats were the party of slavery from the time of its founding in
> the
> late 1700s down to the end of the Civil War and then the party of
> segregation up until the mid-1960s, since that time the Democrats
> (and,
> hence, Al Gore) have been able to capture the votes of the
> AfricanAmerican community by supplying it with numerous benefits
> such as
> welfare and affirmative action programs in return for their votes.
> Now, while blacks make up only about 12% of the national population
> and
> Hispanics about 5%, in the larger MSAs they make up a much larger
> proportion, say somewhere around a third of the people on the
> average --
> in other words, about twice their representation in the population
> of
> the country as a whole. Since Gore carried about 90% of their
> votes,
> their importance can be easily seen.
>
> The second important group to Gore in winning the MSAs are the labor
> unions. These were important in two ways.
>
> First, they supply large numbers of voters -- though they no longer
> represent much more than one out of five industrial workers, they
> now
> represent nearly all of local, county, state and federal government
> employees. Add to their numbers their immediate family members and
> you're talking of something like 15% of the national population.
> But
> even this doesn't show their true importance.
>
> Remember, manufacturing, the service industries and, most
> importantly,
> government are all heavily concentrated in urban areas. So, union
> members form a nationally disproportional number of voters in MSAs.
> They account for something like a quarter of the population in these
> areas.
>
> But the impact of unions does not stop there. Unions are the only
> organizations in the country that can by fiat take money from their
> members and use it to finance whatever political actions they desire
> regardless of the wishes of the individual members. A number of
> studies
> over the past few years show that while all union members contribute
> to
> the Democratic party, only about 60 to 70% of their members actually
> support Democrat candidates. This money is then used mostly for
> advertising to promote largely Democrat politicians. In this
> election
> unions are estimated to have spent somewhere between $500 million
> and $1
> billion dollars on their candidates, the single largest block of
> funding
> in the election. Again, most of this was targeted at voters in the
> larger MSAs in support of Gore.
>
> Finally, the unions are able to turn out large numbers of workers to
> help with all of the chores that are necessary to run a modern
> presidential election campaign -- everything from providing
> background
> cheerers at televised candidate speeches to people to staple up and
> place lawn signs to telephone bank callers to drivers to transport
> voters to the polls on election day. Again, most of these efforts
> are
> concentrated in the larger MSAs.
>
> The third group of people that were important to Gore's election
> were
> the urban intellectuals.
>
> Now by this I don't necessarily mean college professors. I include
> at
> least two distinct groups. On the one hand you have folks like the
> Cap'n
> Brady's regulars. These are people who by inclination and other
> reasons have chosen a sort of bohemian life style and in order to be
> accepted into that lifestyle (just as with anyone who wants to take
> on
> some particular lifestyle be it ROTC or drugdealer or Jesus freak or
> fraternity girl) they blend themselves into the manners and belief
> system of other members of that group. (Sociology does a lot of
> describing of this sort of adaptation to reference groups.) In
> America
> at least from the mid-1950s on, the bohemians have affected a
> leftish
> political posture. (In Germany and Italy and France in the 1920s
> and
> 1930s they chose fascism.) So, the Cap'n Brady-types largely became
> Gore supporters -- or in a few instances, Nader supporters.
>
> But the urban intellectual group is not limited to the Brady-types.
> There is a much larger component -- larger by maybe 10 or 20 times
> or
> more -- that spent an important part of their college life in a
> Brady-like milieu and then went on to jobs in the mainstream
> economy.
> For the most part, these jobs involve working with their minds and
> not
> their hands and pay far more than what the typical worker makes.
> Therefore, the urban intellectual group, non-Brady species is a very
> affluent segment of the economy. For a great number of reasons
> that I
> won't even try to go into here, they feel it important to use some
> of
> their affluence as well as their positions of relative power within
> society to support their old ideals. Therefore, they contribute
> disproportionately of their time and money and skills to political
> causes -- most recently primarily to Gore.
>
> So, these three key groups of people are key to understanding the
> importance of the electoral college in the current election.
> Remember
> this and now I'll go back and explain how we came to get an
> electoral
> college and why it worked out the way it did.
>
> Okay, think back to the time of the American Revolution and the half
> decade after it.
>
> When the Revolution began, every nation on earth was ruled by a
> monarch
> of one sort or another and virtually all of these monarchs claimed
> that
> they ruled directly at the behest of God Himself.
>
> There was only one possible exception to this. That was the mother
> country itself, England, which had a Parliament that claimed itself
> sovereign. But most politicians of the day -- both American and
> British
> -- agreed that Parliament was nothing more than a facade that King
> George III used to control his country.
>
> The Framers of the Constitution were very aware of their lonely
> position
> in the world.
>
> There was even more. Remember the Framers came from 13 separate
> states,
> each of which saw itself as pretty much sovereign when it came to
> governing. Each of the states saw itself as capable of running its
> own
> affairs.
>
> More importantly, each state thought that removing sovereignty to a
> central government would inevitably take power away from where it
> was
> best originated and best located, among the individual voters
> themselves.
>
> As proof of this, they pointed to France and Spain and England where
> the
> governing power was centered in one major city, far removed from
> most of
> the people of the country. In fact, in all three of those
> countries,
> between a third and a half of the country's population lived within
> the
> capital city and its immediate environs.
>
> This, the Framers argued, meant inevitably a tremendous disconnect
> between the central power and the rest of the people of the nation.
>
> There was more. Besides being men of the world and acute observers
> of
> that which was going on in the world around them, most of the
> Framers
> were students of history. They read and knew well the history of
> republics that had preceded them in Holland and Switzerland and,
> most
> importantly, Rome where power had gradually been allowed to
> concentrate
> in one capital and as a consequence intolerable corruption had set
> in
> and with it loss of liberty to the citizens.
>
> Something else. Many of the Framers pointed to some common factors
> in
> the populace of these failed and imperial capital cities. First,
> they
> pointed to the presence in each of them of a mob of poor,
> unlettered,
> social disorganized persons. Second, they pointed to huge numbers
> of
> governmental workers and bureaucrats in these cities. Finally, they
> pointed out that each of them were also home to large numbers of
> intellectuals, individuals separated from the grubby details of
> making a
> living by the sweat of their brow, individuals who were thus
> completely
> cut off from the daily life and standards of the ordinary citizenry.
> In
> short, the Framers saw the citizens of the capital as, on the one
> hand
> running the government and lives of the people of the country at
> large,
> while at the same time being completely removed in one way or
> another
> from those people.
>
> To the Framers, concentration of power in a single capital
> therefore
> was tantamount to signing the death warrant for liberty and for
> opening
> the door and inviting corruption to reign supreme among the
> governors of
> the land.
>
> At the same time, they Framers had a major problem. The halfway
> measure
> that they had invented to deal with this problem -- the Articles of
> Confederation -- was not working. Rebellion flared everywhere
> throughout the land among unhappy citizens and no one state had the
> effective power to put it down. Nor was the national government
> authorized to do so. Financial affairs were in total chaos because
> there was no way to establish and distribute an effective monetary
> system. Many states had undertaken their own foreign policies,
> often to
> the detriment of their neighbors; all three major European powers
> --
> England, France and Spain -- each aided by the powerful American
> Indian
> tribes on the new country's western borders were trying to destroy
> and
> dismantle the new country and the Confederation had no effective
> military, naval or diplomatic forces with which to defend itself.
>
> The problem then became how to meet these challenges with a central
> government sufficiently strong to deal with them, yet at the same
> time
> not strong enough to do away with the personal liberty of its
> citizens.
>
> Part of the solution was the familiar system of checks and balances
> in
> which each of the three major segments of the new government was
> more or
> less at continuous political war with the other two.
>
> In brief, the executive branch could not ever enact a law. All laws
> had
> to come from the legislative. Likewise, the executive could not
> raise
> taxes. Those too had to come from the legislative. On the other
> hand,
> even though the legislature could enact laws it could not enforce
> them.
> And even enacting laws was difficult. If the executive did not like
> any
> particular law, he could veto it, sending it back to the legislature
> and
> making it almost impossible for the law to re-enacted over his veto.
> Finally, the judicial branch set the rules by which any law could be
> enforced and could in any showdown declare a law to be null and void
> and
> therefore unenforceable. But, then, you know all of this.
>
> There was one other key part to the balance of power arrangement --
> and
> that was balancing the power between the new federal government and
> the
> power of the individual states. There were three important segments
> to
> this state-federal balancing.
>
> First, the price that was required for the approval of the Federal
> Constitution by the states was the promise they extracted from the
> Framers to add 10 new sections to the Constitution, each of the
> sections
> called individually an amendment and all of them collectively called
> the
> Bill of Rights. The 10th Amendments stated specifically that all
> functions not specifically given to the Federal Government by the
> original Constitution were specifically reserved to the individual
> states. For example, the Constitution makes no specific mention of
> the
> Federal Government's role in education. Therefore, traditionally,
> education has been a function of state governments and not the
> national
> government.
>
> Second, the Framers divided the legislature into two separate
> Houses.
> One, the House of Representatives, was designed to stay close to the
> people, to reflect their interests, needs and passions, and to be on
> the
> whole a rather wild and woolly operation. The other, the Senate,
> was
> supposed to be much more serious, to take a long view of the issues,
> and
> to reflect a calm, detached approach to the problems of the country.
> Because the House of Representatives was supposed to be close to the
> people, it was to be elected directly by the people in each state.
> But
> because the Senate was to be more contemplative, appointment --
> notice,
> not election -- of Senators was to be done not by direct vote of the
> people but by vote of the people's representatives in the various
> state
> legislatures. This made the election of each Senator hinge upon his
> relationship with the government of his home state and, it was
> assumed,
> would give each state government more influence over its Federal
> Senator.
>
> The final leg of this balance of the states versus the Federal
> government is the electoral college.
>
> But before I explain how this works, let me add that there was a
> second,
> more mundane reason for the establishment of the electoral college.
>
> At the time that the Constitution was written and adopted in 1787,
> remember, travel time between Philadelphia which was then the
> capital of
> the United States and Boston was more than two weeks. Travel time
> to
> New Hampshire and Georgia was closer to a month. So, political
> campaigning as we now know it was an impossibility. With the
> exception
> of Washington who was elected president in 1788 and again in 1792,
> most
> voters knew fairly little about the candidates for president. The
> professional politicians in each state, on the other hand, kept in
> close
> touch and everyone who was prominent in each state knew most
> everyone
> else in each other state at least by reputation. So, the individual
> voters in each state voted for men to represent him whose judgment
> and
> reputation he trusted to vote for president. It was kind of like
> electing a special legislator to act on only one issue -- that is,
> who
> was to be president.
>
> Also because of the difficulty with travel and communication it was
> decided that it would be easier to bring each of these men together
> in
> their various state capitals to make their choice and then send a
> small
> delegation to the national capital to present their decisions.
>
> Now, when critics of the electoral college make their cases, this is
> usually the part that they concentrate on. And if the whole
> argument
> depended simply on the difference in communications and
> transportation
> between 1787 and the year 2000, they'd be right. Absolutely and
> definitely right. There'd be no reason whatsoever to keep the
> electoral
> college.
>
> Of course, this argument is a canard. Literally, a false duck.
> Just as
> a canard is the French word for the lures that duck hunters use to
> fool
> their prey, so is the transportation-communication argument a ruse
> with
> which to kill the unwise and the ignorant.
>
> The real reason the Framers instituted the electoral college was to
> protect the nation from a corrupt, tyrannical central government.
>
> Remember, the Framers saw large population centers as places that
> were
> the seed-beds of both tyranny and corruption. Not only did they
> point
> to London and Paris and Madrid and Amsterdam and Rome as these sorts
> of
> sinkholes, they also pointed to their own Boston and New York and
> Philadelphia. They would show time and again that the big colonial
> cities were cesspools in the years before the Revolution, during the
> Revolution and in the years since the Revolution.
>
> A large part of this, they said, was due to the mix of poor and
> minorities, of government office holders and bureaucrats, and of
> anomic
> intellectuals.
>
> However, since these types were not found -- or at least not found
> with
> the same intensity -- in smaller cities and towns, the problems they
> seemed to generate tended to be less in the smaller states. I won't
> go
> through all the steps of this reasoning here but the end point of it
> all
> was that if you wanted to maintain a republic that did not unduly
> interfere with man's liberty and was not unduly corrupt, then the
> governmental balance of power needed to be kept with the states and,
> if
> at all possible, the smaller states should have proportionately more
> power when it came to electing the president of the United States.
>
> To do this, the Framers set up a system whereby each state would
> choose
> electors in a two-step way. First, each state would get two
> electors,
> just as they got two senators. Second, each state would get
> additional
> electors equal to the number of members it had in the U.S. House of
> Representatives. Since the number of House representatives was
> already
> proportional to each state's population, that meant that the second
> part
> of the elector choice formula was also proportional to each state's
> population.
>
> Let's take a contemporary for instance. North Dakota has
> approximately
> 700,000 people. That gives it one representative in the U.S. House.
> That means that according to the second part of the above formula,
> North
> Dakota starts out with one elector. Add to that the fact that North
> Dakota, like every other state, has two more electors -- equivalent
> to
> its number of U.S. Senators. That gives North Dakota 3 electors.
> Not
> very many at first glance.
>
> Now consider the largest state, California, with about 32,000,000
> people
> and, consequently, 52 representatives in the U.S. House. That
> gives
> California a start of 52 electors. To this number are added two
> more
> electors, equivalent to the number of U.S. Senators it has.
> Altogether, then, California has a total of 54 electors for a
> population
> of 32 million people.
>
> Now compare this to the case of North Dakota.
>
> With a little bit of arithmetic we find that California has 53 times
> as
> many people as does North Dakota. However it has only 18 times as
> many
> electors. That means that proportionately North Dakota has nearly
> three
> time (3 X) the amount of power in the electoral college as does
> California.
>
> If we are thinking strictly in terms of one man, one vote, then, the
> electoral college is blatantly unfair. But that's not what the
> Framers
> were aiming at. Instead, they were desperately trying to skew the
> election of the president towards the smaller and, presumably more
> virtuous states.
>
> Whether the smaller states are more civicly virtuous and more likely
> to
> preserve and protect individual liberty is open to dispute.
>
> Now we're going to skip around here a bit, so follow closely.
>
> Remember that I said that Gore won mostly the states with big
> metropolitan areas -- e.g. Illinois, Pennsylvania, California, etc.
> But
> I also pointed out that he had also apparently won a number of
> smaller
> states as well-- for example, Iowa, Wisconsin, Washington, etc.
> Now
> why would that happen?
>
> The answer is simple. Each of these predominantly rural states has
> one
> or two cities whose residents fit the same profile as do cities such
> as
> New York or Boston or Philadelphia. Also, these metropolitan
> populations, though only taking up two or three of the counties in
> each
> state, tends to account for nearly half or more of the voting
> population
> of the state.
>
> So, in terms of metropolitan population characteristics, these
> states
> are much more like the other big Gore states than they are like the
> rest
> of the country.
>
> Now here's where the argument gets tricky, so follow closely.
>
> Remember, I said that most of the Gore states are dominated in terms
> of
> population by one or two of what geographers call primate cities.
> Politically, these primate metropolitan areas are big enough that if
> a
> candidate can carry them with a majority of, say, 80% and then get
> about
> a fourth of the vote in the rest of the state -- a very, very small
> percentage politically speaking -- then he can get at least a
> plurality
> of the votes in that state.
>
> This is very important because with the exception of two states, all
> of
> the states in the U.S. are winner takes all when it comes to the
> electoral college. That means that whoever gets a plurality of the
> votes in the general election then gets all of the state's electoral
> votes.
>
> Following this logic a step further, this means that whoever can get
> a
> majority of the votes in the primate MSAs can win all of the
> electoral
> votes in a state.
>
> Now, when you see that this majority in the MSAs can be cobbled
> together
> basically from winning the support of minorities, union members and
> the
> intellectual class, you can see how they are the key to winning all
> of
> the electoral votes in certain large states.
>
> Finally, when you add up the electoral votes from these states, it's
> nearly enough to win the electoral college.
>
> While it's theoretically possible to win the electoral college this
> way
> with a minority of the national popular vote, it's not easy.
> Furthermore, winning the presidency on the basis of the electoral
> college vote alone tends to undermine the legitimacy of the
> candidate's
> election.
>
> So, candidates are, practically speaking, forced to go outside the
> largest dozen states to extend their popular mandate and to protect
> themselves in the electoral college.
>
> Now take away the electoral college.
>
> With that gone, the candidates wouldn't have to worry about the
> disproportional influence that the smaller states have in the
> election
> of the president.
>
> Basic economics would practically dictate that the candidates could
> more
> efficiently concentrate their effort and money on places with the
> largest concentration of voters. That would mean that they would
> more
> or less ignore the smaller states.
>
> It's an iron law of politics that people in places where there is no
> active campaign tend not to vote. So, by failing to campaign in the
> smaller states, the candidates would drive down the vote there even
> more. They would then put more of their efforts into the relatively
> few
> large MSAs.
> This in turn would drive down the non-large MSA voting even more.
> You
> get the idea. There would be a deadly spiral with the practical
> effect
> being the virtual disenfranchisement of huge parts of this country.
>
> The effect would not be just on the presidential race. The
> presidential
> campaign is the big show among all elections. It draws out the most
> voters. With the presidential campaign basically ignoring large
> parts
> of the population, the turnouts for everyone else from dog-catchers
> and
> members of the local boards of election to state governors and U.S.
> Senators would fail, perhaps precipitously. This would be a major
> blow
> to democracy on a local and state level.
> It would also weaken these levels of government vis-a-vis the
> Federal
> government.
>
> In the meantime, the atypical voters of the MSAs would gain more and
> more control over the national government, further alienating the
> rest
> of the people from the Federal government.
>
> Finally, if past history is any guide, you could expect the level of
> corruption and tyranny in the government to increase considerably.
>
>
--------------------------
if i'm screaming in your sky and tell you all
hear me, hear me
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