“The way we run presidential elections in this country is archaic.” The person who said this then proceeded to start a diatribe on why they hated the electoral college system. To make sure that readers understand exactly why this made me want to beat my head against the wall, I would like to point out that the person who said this lives in West Virginia.

Let’s look at the numbers:

The United States has just over 300 million. West Virginia has about 1.8 million people. The population of West Virginia is approximately 0.6% of the total population of the United States. Every single person (for the sake of this argument, we’ll assume that everyone can vote, disregarding age restrictions and such) in the entire state could vote for the same candidate in a presidential election and we would barely make a blip on the popular vote^[a].

On the other hand, we have 5 of the 538 votes in the electoral college, which makes our votes worth just under 1% of the current election system. We’re still small, but we have more of an influence under the electoral system than we would otherwise have.

The electoral college was designed by the founders of this country for a reason. Namely, they did not want the popular vote to determine who won an election. The founders wanted the politicians who ran the country to care not only about population centers, but also about the people in the less populous states. In fact, the Constitution is pretty clear about the fact that the people don’t elect the President at all (Article II, Section 1):

The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America. He shall hold his Office during the Term of four Years, and, together with the Vice President, chosen for the same Term, be elected, as follows:

Each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors, equal to the whole Number of Senators and Representatives to which the State may be entitled in the Congress…

Emphasis mine.

In 2004, Discover Magazine reran an article that they had originally run in 1996 that explained why this “archaic, unnecessary system” is neither archaic nor unnecessary, titled “Math Against Tyranny^[b]:

Natapoff’s self-chosen labor has taken him more than two decades. But now that the journal Public Choice is about to publish his groundbreaking article, he can finally relax a bit; he might even take a vacation. In addition to this nontechnical article, which skimps on the math, he’s worked out a formal theorem that demonstrates, he claims, why our complex electoral system is “provably” better than a simple, direct election. Furthermore, he adds, without this quirky glitch in the system, our democracy might well have fallen apart long ago into warring factions.

The whole thing is worth reading, but I especially liked this part, which (I think) is a nice analogy:

The more Natapoff looked into the nitty-gritty of real elections, the more parallels he found with another American institution that stirs up wild passions in the populace. The same logic that governs our electoral system, he saw, also applies to many sports–which Americans do, intuitively, understand. In baseball’s World Series, for example, the team that scores the most runs overall is like a candidate who gets the most votes. But to become champion, that team must win the most games. In 1960, during a World Series as nail-bitingly close as that year’s presidential battle between Kennedy and Nixon, the New York Yankees, with the awesome slugging combination of Mickey Mantle, Roger Maris, and Bill “Moose” Skowron, scored more than twice as many total runs as the Pittsburgh Pirates, 55 to 27. Yet the Yankees lost the series, four games to three. Even Natapoff, who grew up in the shadow of Yankee Stadium, conceded that Pittsburgh deserved to win. “Nobody walked away saying it was unfair,” he says.

Sore losers will always try to claim that the electoral college is “unfair” (despite the fact that candidates and the electorate all know the rules going into the “game”), but it is designed to be that way, because it avoids the tyranny of the majority. There is a reason this country is not a democracy, and people need to understand that before they start trying to change it into one.

1. For comparison, Nader got 2.9 million votes in 2004, which is 33% more than we could have given him if all of West Virginia voted his way [↩]
2. someone recently linked this article, and I’ve had it up on my browser for a couple of weeks now with the intention of writing about it — unfortunately, I’ve since forgotten who linked it, or I would have given a hat tip to them. Oops. [↩]