[EM] In defense of the Electoral College (was Re: Making a Bad Thing Worse)

[Markus Schulze]

Hallo,

in my opinion, the electoral college has two
advantages to the popular vote.

First: It gives more power to the voters in
smaller states.

[In the USA, the Senate is significantly stronger
than the House of Representatives.

For example: To appoint a Cabinet member or some
other federal officer, the President needs the
approval of the Senate, but not of the House of
Representatives.

Therefore, a deadlock between the President and the
Senate would be more harmful than a deadlock between
the President and the House of Representatives.
Therefore, it makes sense to elect the President
in a manner that corresponds more to the election
of the Senate than to the election of the House
of Representatives.]

Second: It makes it possible that the elections
are run by the governments of the individual
states and don't have to be run by the central
government.

[Currently, to guarantee that the Equal Protection
Clause is fulfilled, it is only necessary to
guarantee that all the voters within the same
state are treated equally.

A popular vote would make it necessary that also
all the voters across the USA are treated equally.
This would mean that also the regulations on
eligibility, absentee ballots, early voting,
voting machines, opening hours of the polling
stations etc. would have to be harmonized across
the USA.]

*********

In section 8 of the current version (3 November
2008) of my paper, I explain how the electoral
college should be combined with Condorcet voting:

http://m-schulze.webhop.net/schulze1.pdf

The basic ideas are:

1. Each voter gets a complete list of all candidates
   and ranks these candidates in order of preference.
   The individual voter may give the same preference
   to more than one candidate and he may keep
   candidates unranked.

2. For each pair of candidates A and B separately,
   we determine how many electoral votes Elect[A,B]
   candidate A would get and how many electoral votes
   Elect[B,A] candidate B would get when only these
   two candidates were running. To determine the
   final winner, we apply a Condorcet method to the
   matrix Elect[X,Y].

3. To calculate Elect[A,B] and Elect[B,A], the
   electoral votes of a state should be distributed
   to candidate A and candidate B in proportion
   of the number of voters who strictly prefer
   candidate A to candidate B and the number of
   voters who strictly prefer candidate B to
   candidate A.

Markus Schulze