Presidential Lottery: The Reckless Gamble in Our Electoral System

by James A. Michener

  With these two reasonable alternatives available, I can see no reason why the present dangerous system should be extended. This change, too, we should be able to complete in time for the 1972 election.

  Step III. We must encourage Congress to give immediate consideration to the four proposed plans for changing our total Presidential election system. Hearings should continue until it is possible to offer the people one amendment which would abolish all parts of the old system and initiate a new.

  Obviously, if we could accomplish this quickly, it would make Steps I and II unnecessary, for it would absorb them and automatically put them into operation.

  Whether an amendment of such far-reaching purpose could be activated in time to govern the 1972 election is debatable, but if we want the change even as late as 1976 or 1980, we must start now. Committees should be formed across the nation, pressing for an inclusive amendment, and Congress should be reminded at every session that action is obligatory. If immediate results are impossible, and if stop-gap amendments have to be accepted so as to achieve Steps I and II, this should not be allowed to serve as an excuse for halting action on Step III, which must remain our ultimate goal.

  Whether or not we can put into operation the three steps I have proposed will depend upon the degree of apathy that will quickly settle upon us, now that we have escaped a situation that might have ended disastrously. No sinner forgets his vows of repentance so quickly as one whose fortunes have made a dramatic improvement.

  Also, historical reasons for avoiding reform will again come into play to block any efforts at changing the present system. Smaller states have long believed that since they were assured more electoral votes than their population warranted, they were the gainers from the present system, and for this reason have blocked reform. At first glance they appear to be right. Consider, for example, the 1968 population of the following states, each of which has three electoral votes:

  A larger state like Colorado, with about the same total population as the five states combined, gets not 15 electoral votes but 6. And a state like Massachusetts, which has almost three times the population of the five small states combined, receives not three times as many electoral votes, which would be 45, but only 14.

  You can appreciate why the smaller states, looking at these figures, prefer to keep the system as it is. But they have read the figures wrong. For many years political experts have suspected that these extra votes which small states receive are illusory, but the mathematical equations to prove this suspicion have been too involved to solve. Nevertheless, Presidential candidates have intuitively known that to win they had to carry the big states. Many believe that Richard Nixon lost the 1960 election because he was sidetracked into fighting for Alaska’s 3 votes instead of battling for New York, which then had 45.

  I first became interested in this abstract problem of how apparently equal votes actually varied in weight and leverage, because of something that was happening in my home county, which was divided into a large northern area of relatively sparsely settled Republicans and a small southern area of densely concentrated Democrats. In any unprejudiced system of apportionment the five seats to which we were entitled in the state House of Representatives would have been divided about three Republicans in the northern end to two Democrats in the southern, and this would have been the result had the county been divided into five equal districts, each electing one representative. But the Republicans in control of apportionment saw a way to engineer an adroit but perfectly legal gerrymander, and this they did. In the southern end of the county they inscribed one district so that it contained an overwhelming preponderance of Democratic voters. Now, if on the borders of this first district they had carved a second of like dimension, it would have been a swing district, inclining toward the Democratic column; but the canny Republicans did not do this. They lumped the remaining four districts of our county together into one superdistrict, from which they elected four representatives-at-large. Thus our county, instead of returning three Republicans and two Democrats as registrations would have warranted, now elected four Republicans and one Democrat.

  At first sight there is nothing much wrong with this. State and federal law alike permitted such gerrymanders at that time, and this one was not particularly offensive, except that many good Democratic votes were effectively submerged in a sea of Republicanism.

  I must report that as a Democrat thus submerged, I did not complain, for we play rough politics in Pennsylvania and I felt that if the Republicans were smart enough to devise such a scheme, they were entitled to profit from it. I felt so for two reasons. First, the gerrymander was legal; and second, I looked forward to that day when we Democrats took control of apportionment, for then we intended to throw all the Republicans into two separate and segregated districts in the northern end of the county and to elect three representatives-at-large from an undivided district in the southern end, where the Democrats would predominate. By this trick alone we would switch the county from four Republicans and one Democrat to a more palatable three Democrats and two Republicans. I hoped the Republicans would not protest this legal maneuver, since they had raped us for so many decades.

  But the more I studied the problem the more I began to suspect that the real injustice in this situation lay not in party battles between Republicans and Democrats, which my side happened to be losing at the moment, but in the larger moral issue arising from the fact that theoretically equal citizens in my county were in practice very unequal indeed. And the crux of the matter was that the Democrats in the single district, even though each had one vote, were sorely underrepresented as compared to the Republicans in the large district from which four representatives were chosen. I was not able to prove my point mathematically, for as I have said, the formulae were too complicated to be solved at that time, but this did not prevent me from concluding that a grave inequity was being perpetrated.

  Consider the figures:

  One one-member district 50,000 population

  One four-member district 200,000 population

  At first glance it would seem that no injustice was involved. But consider a close election, say one in which in each district only a hundred votes separated the two parties. How these final 100 votes were applied in the one-member district would determine one vote in the house; but how the final 100 votes were applied in the four-man constituency would determine four votes in the house. And when the election was over, each citizen among the 50,000 in the first district would be able to bring pressure to bear on his one house member, while each citizen in the larger district had four members whom he might influence.

  Recent Supreme Court decisions have, of course, made it possible for citizens to challenge such inequities, and in my county, at least, they have been stopped, for now we elect all our representatives from single-member districts, it having been held that a state could elect all its representatives from multiple-member districts if it wished, but that it could not pick and choose districts for such treatment; and certainly it could not split a single county into some single-member districts and other multiple-member districts, for even though mathematical proof of the injustice of this discrimination was not yet at hand, the suspicion persisted that large blocs of votes carried with them large advantages.

  At about the time I was pondering these problems, John F. Banzhaf III, a politically-minded lawyer, had begun working on them with a staff of mathematicians backed up by a battery of computers, and they were able to state and solve the intricate equations which demonstrated the amount of discrimination built into our system and whom it discriminated against. Banzhaf began his analysis with a simplified example:

  Consider the election of a congressman from a single electoral district. Every voter has 1 vote and, therefore, has equal voting power in this election. Suppose, however, that 3 voters, A, B, and C, were for some reason required to vote as a group and that a bloc of 3 votes would be cast in accordance with the majority vote of A, B, and C. There are 8 different vo
ting combinations in which A, B, and C may cast their votes. In 4 of these A can alter the way in which the bloc of 3 votes will be cast by changing his own vote. The situation is the same for B and for C; each can change the outcome in half of the total number of combinations. Thus, each of the three can, by changing his own vote, affect the way in which the bloc of 3 votes will be cast in 50% of the cases. In contrast, any single elector in the district has 100% control over how his smaller “bloc” of 1 vote should be cast. Since the bloc of 3 votes is three times as effective from the point of view of affecting the election as any single vote, and since A can affect the way in which the bloc of 3 votes will be cast in 50% of the cases, A has more voting power than other voters who have only 100% control over 1 vote; i.e., 50% of 3 votes is greater than 100% of 1 vote. The voting power of A, B, and C has been increased by requiring them to cast their votes as a bloc. Bloc or unit-voting can, therefore, be identified as the crucial factor resulting in the disparities in voting power under the present system [i.e., voting for President by states on a winner-take-all basis].

  Progressing to ever larger total groups of voters and to correspondingly larger blocs within those groups, Banzhaf proved that “the voting power of an individual voter increases as the size of his voting group increases,” and that in general “the voting power is proportional to the square root of the group’s population.” He then proceeded to the heart of the matter with this analysis:

  As an example of the operation of these principles in their application to the Electoral College, consider the states of New York and Alaska. New York has approximately seventy-four times the population of Alaska. One might suppose that a citizen of New York would have one-seventy-fourth the chance of affecting New York’s 43 electoral votes as a voter in Alaska would have of affecting Alaska’s 3 votes. However, as has been shown, the relative effectiveness of the two voters depends instead on the ratio of the square roots of the populations, and, therefore, a New Yorker has about one-ninth as much chance of affecting his state’s electoral votes as a voter in Alaska has of affecting his. But, because a New Yorker may potentially affect 43 votes as compared with the Alaskan’s potential effect on only 3 votes, the New Yorker’s decrease in effectiveness with respect to his state’s electoral votes is far outweighed by the vastly larger number of electoral votes he may potentially affect. Actually, a New Yorker has almost twice the potential for affecting the overall election as does an Alaskan voting on the same day in the same election (3.312 compared with 1.838).

  The gross inequities of our present system are summarized in Appendix C, Table 1, where it can be seen that in the winner-take-all system, it is the big states like New York, California, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Illinois, and Texas that profit, while smaller states like Maine, New Mexico, Nebraska and Utah suffer. Thus the very states which have emotionally resisted reform have been the heavy losers under the system they were defending.*

  Table 2 shows that it is the proportional plan which produces the largest discrepancies between small states and large. If you take California as a base of 1.000, Alaska has 5.212 times the leverage and Nevada 4.132 times. This really sizable imbalance arises from the fact that whereas the state’s votes are distributed proportionally, and thus more justly as within the state, the small states have those extra electoral votes for their senators, regardless of size, which produces for them an unjustified power.

  Table 3 of the Banzhaf study proves that the district plan produces a much narrower spread of differences than the plan we are now using, but with the relative relationships reversed. Now it is small-population states like Alaska, Nevada, Wyoming, Vermont, and Delaware that prosper, while large-population states like New York, California, Pennsylvania, and Texas are sharply penalized, which explains why the district plan has been called a boon for rural areas and a defeat for urban.

  Table 4 proves rather graphically that all these imbalances and leverages disappear when you switch to a direct popular vote. If Alaska has 277,000 people, of whom 82,975 voted for the three principal candidates in 1968, they would have the precise leverage provided by that number of votes and no more. They are thus in an equal position of proportional influence with all the other forty-nine states, and none has a just complaint that he is being penalized or his neighbor rewarded.*

  With these facts in mind, we are prepared to look at the four proposed reforms to see how each would affect the regions of our country, the elements of our population, and the fortunes of our political parties, for as Senator Bayh has correctly pointed out, “Electoral systems are rarely, if ever, neutral. The present electoral voting system is no exception.” First I must discuss the political elements common to all four, after which I will try to pinpoint where these four proposals stray from neutrality.

  The Electoral College. The complete vacuity of this College is proved by the fact that it provides no advantage to either party, nor to any segment of the society, nor to the nation as a whole. Since it is an excrescence it could be abolished without harm to anyone. If it operated today in its original conception of learned citizens of prominence meeting to select a leader, it would probably favor Republicans in placid times, since Republicans would appeal to the solid reputations of the electors, who would be men of similar character, and the Democrats in time of trouble, since then the electors would, being men of good sense, be prepared to espouse new or even radical reforms. At times in the fall of 1968 I occasionally felt that in a radical and undefined situation such as the one we might have faced, the inherent discipline of the Republican party might have given it an advantage in a chaotic Electoral College; ostracism from the Union League Club, the country club, the bankers association, and the channels of suburban society would have been a much more severe penalty to the straying Republican than any ostracism I could have suffered, simply because like many Democrats I belonged to little from which I could have been ostracized.

  The electoral system. At the moment one accepts an electoral system in which each state is given so many votes to dispose of as it wishes, one introduces two basic inequalities from which he never recovers. First, the award of two votes for the state’s two senators, regardless of population, establishes a small bias in favor of the small states (if one takes into account election by the House). Second, whenever a state’s total number of votes is cast as a bloc, the state with the larger number of votes to manipulate will be at an advantage, and this has to create a large bias in favor of the large states. Furthermore, when the winner-take-all system becomes a tradition across the country, this inherent bias is enshrined and inescapable. I will defer an analysis of who wins and loses by this system until the next paragraph.

  The winner-take-all system of allocating a state’s electoral votes. This arbitrary system which grew up by custom and is not sanctioned by the Constitution provides substantial advantage to large states, to minorities who through concentrated voting can swing those large states, and to the states who restrict their suffrage, in that it doesn’t matter how many citizens vote, so long as a plurality of one Republican or one Democrat or one Wallace supporter votes; the state’s entire electoral vote goes the way that one man decided and the state gains no advantage from getting out a large vote. Because of a whole constellation of factors this system probably favors the Democrats, although this advantage is offset by a collateral component of the system, which is considered next.

  Choosing a President in the House. Here the smaller states have an enormous advantage, so vast that I have not seen numerical evaluations of it. The inherent discrepancies were illustrated on this page, where the comparison of Alaska with California was made. The system favors small states, rural areas as opposed to urban, conservatives rather than liberals, majority population groups rather than minorities, and Republicans rather than Democrats, but only slightly. It is, however, a part of the basic compromise on which our nation was founded and none of the imbalances I point out were accidental or unforeseen.

  Nationwide primaries. These would repr
esent a considerable advantage to smaller states, and a corresponding loss to large ones, in that a party could risk running a man from a state of any size rather than concentrating on candidates from large states in hopes of picking up their big blocs of votes. The publicity advantage now enjoyed by states like New Hampshire and Oregon, who run notorious but rarely definitive primaries, would be lost. I suspect that one party or the other would gain some advantage from nationwide primaries, but I cannot detect what it would be.