An Electoral College Proposal

[MeDotOrg]

Instead of winner take all, Electors would be allocated by the percentage of the vote they represent.

Example: State X gets 10 electoral votes. Donald Trump won 48.6.% and Biden won 49.2%. Donald Trump would get 4 electors casting 1 vote and one elector casting 86% of 1 vote. Joe Biden would have 4 delegates with 1 vote and 1 elector with 92% of 1 vote.

This makes every vote in every state valuable. State that are solid red or solid blue cannot be ignored.

[Some Schmo]

Can you expand on the math, MeDot? (Show your work). How are you arriving at those percentages?

And then, once you have a bunch of states with an elector with a partial vote, what happens next? All elector percentages are multiplied together and the highest percentage wins?

[MeDotOrg]

The math is simply the Percentage of the Vote times the number of electoral votes. California has 55 votes. Currently Biden 65.2% of the vote. 55 x 0.652 = 35.86, so Biden would get 35 electors with 1 vote, and 1 elector with .86% of 1 vote. Trump currently has 32.9% of the vote. 55 x 0.329 = 18.095 = 18 votes plus .095% of 1 vote.

[subgenius]

You understand that you are just displacing a popular vote model with needless math, right?
The whole purpose of the electoral college is to give the minority a voice and meaningful influence. By definition a true "democracy" suppresses the minority because it is a product of majority rules...a.k.a. the most votes wins.
Ironic how so many people that claim to be members of the "party protecting minorities" is opposed to an election system that does just that.

[Nomomo]

You understand that you are just displacing a popular vote model with needless math, right?
The whole purpose of the electoral college is to give the minority a voice and meaningful influence. By definition a true "democracy" suppresses the minority because it is a product of majority rules...a.k.a. the most votes wins.
Ironic how so many people that claim to be members of the "party protecting minorities" is opposed to an election system that does just that.

[subgenius]

You understand that you are just displacing a popular vote model with needless math, right?
The whole purpose of the electoral college is to give the minority a voice and meaningful influence. By definition a true "democracy" suppresses the minority because it is a product of majority rules...a.k.a. the most votes wins.
Ironic how so many people that claim to be members of the "party protecting minorities" is opposed to an election system that does just that.

Kewl, but unfortunately in my State they taught American history and allowed us to read the US Constitution.

[Icarus]

You understand that you are just displacing a popular vote model with needless math, right?

My thought exactly.

[Analytics]

You understand that...

I suppose it shouldn’t be surprising that literally everything you said in this post is factually wrong.

…you are just displacing a popular vote model with needless math, right?

That is false. MeDotOrg's excellent proposal is NOT mathematically equivalent to a popular vote. In a popular vote, every vote is worth the same as every other vote. In MeDotOrg's model, voters in smaller states still get an outsized vote, i.e. the 580,000 voters in Wyoming would still jointly control 3 EC votes, while the 39.5 million voters in California would still only jointly control 55 EC votes. Thus, one single vote from Wyoming would still be worth 3.7 votes from California.

The whole purpose of the electoral college is to give the minority a voice and meaningful influence.

That is false. The purpose of the electoral college is to give outsized influence to smaller states and to provide a circuit breaker where the statesmen in the EC could effectually overrule the voice of the people if the people voted for an incompetent fraud like, well, Donald J. Trump.

States can and have made it illegal to be a "faithless elector", and somehow the Supreme Court thinks this is Constitutional. So even when somebody has the moral and civic duty to be a faithless elector, they are forbidden from doing their duty. So one of the purposes of the EC is now moot.

The unfortunate consequences of the way the EC currently works is that because of winner-take-all within a state (or a NE/ME congressional district), most votes do not to matter. The EC failed at making the votes of small states more important. What it does is make the votes of swing states more important. That is why presidential candidates went on dozens of trips to the large state of PA and totally ignored small states.

If we moved to MeDotOrg's system, all votes would matter, and candidates would much rather pick up an extra vote in Wyoming or Alaska than pick up another vote in Pennsylvania or Florida. That is because individual votes in small states would actually be worth more than votes in large states. This would cause attention, love, TV ads, and mass mailings to be sent to all voters, with commensurately more money be spent on voters from smaller states.

By definition a true "democracy" suppresses the minority because it is a product of majority rules...a.k.a. the most votes wins.

That is false. A true democracy doesn't suppress "the minority," unless you define "minority" as the people who lose. By your definition, the white, middle-class men who voted for Trump are "the minority" are being "suppressed." What stupid redefinitions of the words "minority" and "suppressed"!

Ironic how so many people that claim to be members of the "party protecting minorities" is opposed to an election system that does just that.

That is false. Most people aren't from swing states so you could say that the current system protects the elite status of voters from swing states. But that isn't what most people think of when you refer to a minority.

[Analytics]

I like your proposal, MeDotOrg. Explaining the math differently, say state X has 10 EC votes.

Within that state, say:

Candidate X received 55% of the vote
Candidate Y received 40% of the vote
Candidate Z received 5% of the vote

The state's 10 EC votes would be divided up proportional to the votes received by the candidates within the state:

Candidate X receives 5.5 EC votes (i.e. 55% of the vote multiplied by the state's 10 EC votes)
Candidate Y receives 4.0 EC votes
Candidate Z receives 0.5 EC votes

This would retain smaller states receiving outsized influence in the EC, but the outsized power would filter down to the voters within the state rather than being aggregated at the state level under winner-takes-all. Thus, all votes would matter, regardless of whether or not you are in a swing state. And votes from smaller states would be worth more, because they control more EC votes. This would dramatically shift attention away from swing states, make all votes matter, and make votes from smaller states matter much more.

[MeDotOrg]

The whole purpose of the electoral college is to give the minority a voice and meaningful influence. By definition a true "democracy" suppresses the minority because it is a product of majority rules...a.k.a. the most votes wins.

Alright, take the example of a landslide victory: Franklin Roosevelt v. Alf Landon, 1936:



Look at the percentage of the popular vote that Landon received compared the amount of electoral votes he received. How is the minority protected in that situation?