Austin Guest
National Popular Vote: A Civil Rights Issue
Every four years about this time of year, we hear the usual complaints about states like Iowa and New Hampshire and the super-sized influence they enjoy in deciding the presidential nomination for everyone else in the country. But we never hear quite enough about the far more outlandish distortion of democracy foisted on us by the Electoral College.
Sure, we know all too well that under the Electoral College system a candidate can lose the popular vote and still sneak into the White House. But what we don’t talk about nearly enough is the profoundly repressive effects on voter turn-out and civil rights produced by this flawed and outmoded system.
This week, on the heels of New Jersey’s passage of legislation entering the state into the growing National Popular Vote interstate compact, Progressive States Network posted a Stateside Dispatch outlining the ways in which the Electoral College adversely affects voter turnout broadly and communities of color more specifically.
The argument is simple: since votes under the Electoral College are awarded on a winner-take-all basis, and since only about 13 states are within a competitive margin, there is a huge incentive for campaigns to focus exclusively on turning out voters in these states, not to mention crafting policy initiatives that appeal to the interests of these voters to the exclusion of others.
So who gets ignored?
As is unfortunately the case with so many aspects of our electoral system, it is people of color who wind up disenfranchised and underrepresented. Since most non-white voters (79% of African Americans and 81% of Latinos according to a report from FairVote.org) are concentrated in pre-decided “red” or “blue” states, their districts rarely see a dime of campaign spending. As a result, voter turnout in these districts lags almost 10% behind turnout in swing states.
Recent studies show the problem is only getting worse. The number of swing states has been cut nearly in half since 1960, while the number of African American swing voters is less than a quarter of what it was in 1976. In the last election cycle, while more than half of all campaign resources were dedicated to just three states (Florida, Ohio and Pennsylvania), eighteen states received no candidate visits and no TV advertising spending. In that same cycle, Florida received more TV ad spending than 45 other states and the District of Columbia combined.
The upshot is that in districts across America, where working families are feeling the brunt of economic and racial inequality the most, candidates don’t show up, and neither do voters. And we wonder why the concerns of these communities go unaddressed in election cycle after election cycle.
Fortunately, a solution is on the horizon. With support from the National Black Caucus of State Legislators, the National Latino Congress and the Asian American Action Fund, National Popular Vote legislation is gathering momentum in statehouses across the country.
Under the new “interstate compact” plan, states would use their constitutionally granted authority to bestow their electoral votes however they see fit in order to grant all of their electoral votes to whichever candidate carries a majority of the national vote. Once enough states have signed on to ensure a majority in the Electoral College, the pact would go into effect.
While it may seem like a Herculean task to do away with such an entrenched and hefty dinosaur as the Electoral College, we aren’t as far off as you might think. Just two weeks ago, New Jersey Governor John Corzine signed a bill making his state the second after Maryland to sign on to the National Popular Vote interstate compact. While the pact, in its current form, is not yet two years old, it has already garnered approval in legislative bodies in Arkansas, California, Hawaii, and North Carolina, with a bill in Illinois having passed both houses and currently awaiting Governor Rod Blagojevich's signature.
With such a long history of promoting disenfranchisement and inequality, the wonder is not that the Electoral College is moving so quickly toward its demise, but that it was not killed off a long time ago. Lest we forget, one of the reasons the country’s founders settled on the Electoral College in the first place was to ensure that southern states, with their heavy concentration of non-voting “3/5” people, received “fair” representation in national government and could continue to perpetuate the monstrosity of slavery.
While our country has come a long way since those days, the forces of electoral inequity are still joining forces with the powers of racial and economic injustice. It’s high time we put that tag-team duo out of business.
Posted at 7:30 AM, Feb 04, 2008 in Voting Rights | Permalink | Comments (7)
Comments
I completely understand the arguement for a popular vote election, but I am hesitant to believer that such an entrenched system can be so easily changed. Would a straight popular vote lead candidates to focus on solely large cities instead of swing states replacing one problem with another?
I was curious if anyone has thoughts about splitting the electoral college votes. We still allow for the smallest states to have a voice but the "votes" from each state may be split meaning that in a race for 10 electoral votes, the candidate that recieved say 60% only gets 6 votes as opposed to 10. Simplistically this seems a more fair system to me, but I haven't read up on it. Does anyone know of a website that would be a good start or have arguements for or against?
Posted by: Jennifer Smith | February 4, 2008 12:11 PM
Jennifer:
One of the beauties of the "interstate compact" approach is that it is a much quicker and simpler an alternative to instituting the national popular vote than a constitutional amendment would be. It only takes enough states to constitute 270 electoral votes in order to put it into effect, versus the 2/3 Congressional supermajority followed by a 3/4 supermajority of state legislatures required for a constitutional amendment.
On the question of rural centers losing importance, you kind of have to take a look at the current lay of the land and realize that there are cities like Miami and Cleveland that currently get disproportionate amount of attention from candidates and rural states like South Dakota and Indiana that get completely ignored. A national popular vote would ensure that the votes of urban or rural voters in one area of the country count just as much as the votes of urban or rural voters in any other section of the country.
As for the "splitting" or district-by-district approach that you mention: such plans have recently been proposed by Republicans in the (blue) state of California and by Dems in (red) North Carolina. The practical problem with these proposals, is that instituted unilaterally they simply amount to a power grab by the particular minority party in either state. For example: in California where a ballot initiative proposing a district-by-district vote apportionment system was recently being mulled over, critics pointed out that its approval would amount to simply throwing 22 of the state's 53 electoral votes to the Republican Party. From this practical perspective, the problem is not so much that a district-by-district approach would be a bad idea in and of itself, but rather that implementing piecemeal reforms in any one section of the country without also instituting them elsewhere is inherently unfair and will only exacerbate the problem of the disproportionate representation of one state over others.
However, many argue that the district-by-district approach -- even if adopted wholesale by every state -- would not be sufficient to address the problem of disproportionate representation. As FairVote points out, apportioning Electoral Votes by district would lead to (1) the replacement of a handful of swing states with a thimbleful of swing districts, thus concentrating voting power even more densely than currently and (2) the intensified use of corrupt redistricting or "gerrymandering" as a means of influencing national election results.
There are even indicators that a district-by-district system would produce even more drastic variances between the Electoral College and popular vote tallies than the ones we see under the current winner take all system. For example, if a district-by-district system was applied to the 2000 elections, Bush, with 49.7% of the popular vote, would have carried the Electoral College vote by a 6.8% margin over Gore instead of the 0.8% margin with which he actually "won."
A good resource for these and many other questions regarding national popular vote are NationalPopularVote.org's FAQ page (http://www.nationalpopularvote.com/pages/faq.php) and FairVote.org's extensive section on the Electoral College (http://www.fairvote.org/?page=964).
Posted by: Austin Guest | February 4, 2008 05:26 PM
I'm going to go even further than August and say it's a good thing to devote more attention to cities than to rural areas and swing states. Right now, money flows from city centers outward. Cities like New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Houston are subsidizing the rest of the country through tax imbalance. This is in part due to higher costs of living in coastal cities and oil revenue in Texas. But maybe Presidential candidates might suggest having your tax bracket depend on your area's cost of living once a vote in New York has the same importance as in Cleveland.
Conversely, swing states often get disproportionate attention. Iowa has browbeaten the rest of the country into subsidizing corn-based ethanol, one of the least energy-efficient fuels in existence. Ohio, Florida, and Pennsylvania are the only three states among the top nine that are net tax recipients. And overall, among the fifteen most populous states, ten are net tax donors; among the fifteen least populous, only two are (though to be fair, one of these is New Hampshire. But New Hampshire's interests tend to be shared with safely blue suburban states and be in opposition to those in Ohio and Pennsylvania).
Posted by: Alon Levy | February 5, 2008 03:12 AM
And of course, by "August" I mean Austin. Sorry for misreading your name...
Posted by: Alon Levy | February 5, 2008 03:17 AM
Hm, all very interesting gentlemen.
Although I'm not sure I agree that cities should be recieving preference, the arguement about gerrymandering and the like is compelling. Urban areas account for most voters and obviously most people. I would hate for them to be under or overrepresented because unlike Alon, I don't feel that they should have preference because of their tax input, their preference should be based on numbers of people. Although related, they cannot be considered causitive on such a simple level.
There's got to be some other way to make the system fair, but what is it? I don't want to see a temporary fix to the problem. A solution is much preferable, but no one seems to have one yet.
Posted by: Jennifer Smith | February 5, 2008 02:36 PM
Just to parse what you're saying Jennifer... You seem to come down on the side that representing people "by numbers" is the fairest way to go, since you don't want to see urban centers over- or under-represented. But, on a simple level, isn't that exactly what a straight NPV system would do?
On a slightly more complex level of analysis, one would have to cede the fact that in an open race in which all votes counted equally, it would seem tactically advantageous to concentrate TV ad spending in cities' densely populated media markets. However, when you consider the fact that advertising costs are inflated well above market rates in these cities (take New York for example!), this argument fades. A candidate could do just as well buying more ads in less densely populated rural communities than buying fewer ads in the cities.
At the end of the day, I'd say that an NPV system could hypothetically swing attention toward urban centers, but only if candidates decided to run urban-based campaigns. Since votes would count equally and costs of advertising would be lower in rural areas, a candidate could potentially do very well by running on a rural advocacy agenda and distributing his or her spending and visits in small locations across the country. Because the candidate would not have to accumulate a majority of votes in any one state, you could see issue-based alliances form in blocs that can't currently coalesce under the current hyper-concentrated winner-take-all swing state system.
Of course, you could also see campaigns do quite well by focusing on urban areas, but only if that's the way they chose to run their campaigns. The point I'm trying to make is that in this system, the choice would be up to candidates, and ultimately up to ALL (not just some voters) as to what issues they chose to focus on. It would not be mandatory that all campaigns and voters accept as absolute necessity whatever limited set of policy positions deemed desirable by the Ohio, Florida, et. Al.
And in that at least, I think we can agree that we'd all be better off.
Posted by: Austin Guest | February 5, 2008 03:33 PM
I'd also add a national primary day as an important civil rights issue. Iowa and New Hampshire aren't models for diversity. Would Obama have become the black candidate if the first contest had been in New York, where Clinton led among blacks right until the pre-New Hampshire racial comments?
Posted by: Alon Levy | February 5, 2008 09:58 PM