It seems so fundamentally unfair to me. I was looking around on the Internet this morning for a particular map of the electoral college, one that I've never seen, but would like to. I never did find it, but here's what I wanted: a map that shows the size of the states not based on their geographic area, but on their population. A distorted map, geographically speaking, but what I'm looking for is to see if we look at from the population point of view, does the country looks way more blue than red? Right now, it looks overwhelmingly red, but so much of that is just empty space where there are plains and mountains but no people. The population of my county here in New Jersey is greater than the population of the state of Wyoming, after all.
What I did find were some arguments about why the Electoral College is still a good thing in the here and now. They were very intelligently written and seemed reasonable, but I have concluded that they are not.
The essence of these articles is that the EC is what prevents the cities from overwhelming the rural areas, since the population is centered in the cities. And since cities tend to be, by and large, more liberal, it means that the more conservative-tending rural dwellers would have no chance. They wouldn't have equal say in electing a president.
Now. It's true that the EC distributes the voting so that it's not centered in the cities. I got that. That's why Wyoming gets three whole EC ballots; its population wouldn't entitle it to that many, not in comparison to New Jersey, let's say. What this turns out to mean is that each voter in Wyoming has more power than each voter in New Jersey. Here's the math:
The population of Wyoming is 493,782. Wyoming has 3 EC ballots. Each EC ballot in Wyoming represents 164,594 people.
The population of New Jersey is 8,049,313. New Jersey has 15 EC ballots. Each EC ballot in New Jersey represents 536,621 people.
(Population figures are from The World Almanac, 2004.)
I represent .0000018 of an EC ballot. If I lived in Wyoming, I would represent .000006 of a ballot. Which means that if I lived in Wyoming, my ballot would count for more than it does in New Jersey.
The exception to this would be if I happened to vote -- in either state -- for the candidate who received fewer popular votes than his opponent. In this case, my vote would count 100% for nothing at all. It would be the same if I had chosen not to vote. Unless you are casting your ballot for the winner in your state, you might as well not bother. (Except in those very few states were electors can be divided up based on the popular vote.) This is true whether you are living in a city or on a farm.
This tells me that the Electoral College is not a good thing. At the time the country was founded, each state was very concerned about protecting its sovereignty and its indendence from the country as a whole, and so things were set up so that the states, not the people, elected the president and senators. States' rights is an issue that was largely settled by the Civil War -- the outcome of which determined that they don't have as many as they thought they did -- and our country today is much less concerned with the sovereignty of individual states. Senators have been elected directly by the people for about a hundred years, with no noticeable downfall of civilization. (Well, at least, not for that reason.)
If we want everyone to vote, and we believe in the principle of one man, one vote, then the Electoral College has got to go. If we want to preserve the power of the people in rural America, well then, get more people out there, or something. The right of a rancher in Wyoming to have his vote count does not and should not be greater than my right to have my suburban New Jersey vote count. If we are equal in the eyes of the law, then we are equal. According to the Electoral College, truly, some animals are more equal than others. Gotta let it go.
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I'm watching Gilmore Girls
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