* Frank Schmidt ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) wrote:
> However, the fact that no system is perfect doesn't mean no system is
> better than the current one.
Who claimed otherwise? The problem is with deciding criteria. You didn't
explain what criteria you were using to decide what is "better", and
why.
> As for electors, back when they were introduced they were important
> people in their states, which the people knew, which would then vote
> for a president, which the people didn't know. In the present, the
> people know who runs for president, but not the electors. There still
> are electors, but they don't have anything to decide anymore these
> days.
The electors themselves are mostly irrelevant (although they could
conceivably suprise someday) but the Electoral College itself does have
some interesting properties as compared to a straight majority vote:
From the Archive: Math Against Tyranny
By Will Hively
September 30, 2004
This article about the electoral college originally appeared in the
November 1996 issue of Discover. Some of our readers thought it would be
a good idea to feature it again this election year. We agree.
--The editors
When you cast your vote this month, you're not directly electing the
president.you're electing members of the electoral college. They elect
the president. An archaic, unnecessary system? Mathematics shows, says
one concerned American, that by giving your vote to another, you're
ensuring the future of our democracy.
***
"Math Against Tyranny " Discover, Nov. 1996
"One morning at two o'clock," Alan Natapoff recalls, "I realized that I
was the only person willing to see this problem through to the end." The
morning in question was back in the late 1970s. Then as now, Natapoff,
a physicist, was spending his days doing research at mit's Man-Vehicle
Laboratory, investigating how the human brain responds to acceleration,
weightless floating, and other vexations of contemporary transport. But
the problem he was working on so late involved larger and grander
issues. He was contemplating the survival of our nation as we know it.
Not long before Natapoff's epiphany, Congress had teetered on the
verge of wrecking the electoral college, an institution that has no
equal anywhere in the world. This group of ordinary citizens, elected
by all who vote, elects, in turn, the nation's president and vice
president. Though the college still stood, Natapoff worried that
sometime soon, well-meaning reformers might try again to destroy it. The
only way to prevent such a tragedy, he thought, would be to get people
to understand the real but hidden value of our peculiar, roundabout
voting procedure. He'd have to dig down to basic principles. He'd have
to give them a mathematical explanation of why we need the electoral
college.
Natapoff's self-chosen labor has taken him more than two decades. But
now that the journal Public Choice is about to publish his
groundbreaking article, he can finally relax a bit; he might even take
a vacation. In addition to this nontechnical article, which skimps on
the math, he's worked out a formal theorem that demonstrates, he claims,
why our complex electoral system is "provably" better than a simple,
direct election. Furthermore, he adds, without this quirky glitch in the
system, our democracy might well have fallen apart long ago into warring
factions.
This month many of us are playing our allotted role in the drama that's
haunted Natapoff for so long. Ostensibly, by voting on November 5, we
are choosing the next president of the United States. Nine weeks after
the apparent winner celebrates victory, however, Congress will count
not our votes but those of 538 "electors," distributed proportionally
among the states. Each state gets as many electoral votes as it has
seats in Congress--California has 54, New York has 33, the seven least
populated states have 3 each; the District of Columbia also has 3. These
538 votes actually elect the president. And the electors who cast them
don't always choose the popular-vote winner. In 1888, the classic
example, Grover Cleveland got 48.6 percent of the popular vote versus
Benjamin Harrison's 47.9 percent. Cleveland won by 100,456 votes. But
the electors chose Harrison, overwhelmingly (233 to 168). They were not
acting perversely. According to the rules laid out in the Constitution,
Harrison was the winner.
Some reversals have been more complicated. In 1824, Andrew Jackson beat
his rival, John Quincy Adams, by more popular and then more electoral
votes--99 versus 84--but still lost the election because he didn't win
a majority of electoral votes (78 went to other candidates). When that
happens, the House of Representatives picks the winner. In 1876, Samuel
J. Tilden lost to Rutherford B. Hayes by one electoral vote, though
he received 50.9 percent of the popular vote to Hayes's 47.9 percent;
an extraordinary commission awarded 20 disputed electoral votes to
Hayes. We've also had some famous close calls. In 1960, John F. Kennedy
narrowly beat Richard Nixon in the popular voting, 49.7 percent to
49.5 percent, a smaller margin than Cleveland had over Harrison. But
wait: Nixon won more states (Nixon 26, Kennedy and others 24). But
no: Kennedy, who won bigger states, went on to win the electoral
balloting, 303 to 219. This time we, the people, did not strike out. The
popular-vote winner became president.
Clearly, in U.S. presidential elections, it ain't over till it's
over. A popular-vote loser in the big national contest can still win
by scoring more points in the smaller electoral college. But isn't
this undemocratic? Isn't it somehow wrong that a few hundred obscure
electors, foisted on a new republic by men of property in powdered wigs,
should be allowed to reverse the people's choice?
By 1969, Congress was beginning to think so. After Nixon defeated Hubert
Humphrey with a popular margin, again, of less than 1 percent, the
possibility of a modern-day winner's being denied the presidency had
become so obnoxious to the House of Representatives that it approved a
constitutional amendment to abolish the electoral college. The American
Bar Association supported the move, calling our current electoral system
"archaic, undemocratic, complex, ambiguous, indirect, and dangerous." In
the Senate, too, the amendment had broad support. What could be simpler
or fairer than electing the president by direct popular vote? Over
the next few years the issue lost momentum, but Jimmy Carter's narrow
victory over Gerald Ford in 1976 brought it back to life. The League
of Women Voters, a host of political scientists, and a large majority
of American citizens, according to various polls, all agreed that the
electoral college should be abolished. In 1977, though, among those
testifying against the amendment was a self-described political nobody
from Massachusetts: Alan Natapoff.
Leafing now through the Congressional Record, Natapoff laughs. "The
impact of my testimony," he says, "was negligible." He hadn't yet proved
his theorem, and the mathematical argument he did present was edited
to a "blunted" paraphrase, leaving out some of his most important
arguments. The electoral college survived, of course, but not because
of anything Natapoff said. After a decade of sporadic debate and 4,395
pages of testimony, the bill died in the Senate. It had majority
support, but not the two-thirds majority required to pass it.
The issue will likely catch fire again, though, the moment another
popular winner fails to muster the 270 electoral votes needed to clinch
victory. "Raw voting, having the president elected by a popular vote,
is deep in the American psyche," Natapoff says. It's been around since
Andrew Jackson finally won the presidency--four years later than he
should have, according to 153,544 raw, frustrated voters. "My theorem,"
Natapoff admits, "contradicts the common wisdom of our time. Everybody
gets this wrong. Everybody. Because we were taught incorrectly."
Natapoff included. How could a boy who grew up in the Bronx, played
ball in the streets, and attended public schools in New York City not
have absorbed the common wisdom? Natapoff went on to study particle
physics at Berkeley. Later, at mit, he changed his field of research
but not his belief in raw, popular democracy. Then one day in the
1960s, he saw an article in Life that changed his mind. It quoted
political experts who said the electoral college robs voters of their
power. But the mathematics these experts were using seemed too simple
to support their conclusion. Natapoff looked into the math, and pretty
soon he reached the opposite conclusion. Almost always, he convinced
himself, our electoral system increases voters' power. The experts had
not considered enough cases; they looked only at unbelievably close
elections with two candidates running neck and neck everywhere in the
country. Real elections are almost never that closely contested. Some
states tilt sharply toward one candidate or another, and the voting
power of individuals in each state changes in ways the reformers'
arguments ignored.
The more Natapoff looked into the nitty-gritty of real elections, the
more parallels he found with another American institution that stirs
up wild passions in the populace. The same logic that governs our
electoral system, he saw, also applies to many sports--which Americans
do, intuitively, understand. In baseballs World Series, for example,
the team that scores the most runs overall is like a candidate who gets
the most votes. But to become champion, that team must win the most
games. In 1960, during a World Series as nail-bitingly close as that
year's presidential battle between Kennedy and Nixon, the New York
Yankees, with the awesome slugging combination of Mickey Mantle, Roger
Maris, and Bill "Moose" Skowron, scored more than twice as many total
runs as the Pittsburgh Pirates, 55 to 27. Yet the Yankees lost the
series, four games to three. Even Natapoff, who grew up in the shadow of
Yankee Stadium, conceded that Pittsburgh deserved to win. "Nobody walked
away saying it was unfair," he says.
Runs must be grouped in a way that wins games, just as popular votes
must be grouped in a way that wins states. The Yankees won three
blowouts (16-3, 10-0, 12-0), but they couldn't come up with the
runs they needed in the other four games, which were close. "And
that's exactly how Cleveland lost the series of 1888," Natapoff
continues. "Grover Cleveland. He lost the five largest states by a
close margin, though he carried Texas, which was a thinly populated
state then, by a large margin. So he scored more runs, but he lost the
five biggies." And that was fair, too. In sports, we accept that a true
champion should be more consistent than the 1960 Yankees. A champion
should be able to win at least some of the tough, close contests by
every means available--bunting, stealing, brilliant pitching, dazzling
plays in the field--and not just smack home runs against second-best
pitchers. A presidential candidate worthy of office, by the same logic,
should have broad appeal across the whole nation, and not just play
strongly on a single issue to isolated blocs of voters.
"Experts, scholars, deep thinkers could make errors on electoral
reform," Natapoff decided, "but nine-year-olds could explain to a
Martian why the Yankees lost in 1960, and why it was right. And both
have the same underlying abstract principle."
These insights came quickly, but it was many years before Natapoff
devised his formal mathematical proof. His starting point was the
concept of voting power. In a fair election, he saw, each voter's power
boils down to this: What is the probability that one person's vote
will be able to turn a national election? The higher the probability,
the more power each voter commands. To figure out these probabilities,
Natapoff devised his own model of a national electorate--a more
realistic model, he thought, than the ones the quoted experts were
always using. Almost always, he found, individual voting power is higher
when funneled through districts--such as states--than when pooled in one
large, direct election. It is more likely, in other words, that your one
vote will determine the outcome in your state and your state will then
turn the outcome of the electoral college, than that your vote will turn
the outcome of a direct national election. A voter therefore, Natapoff
found, has more power under the current electoral system.
Why worry how easily one vote can turn an election, so long as each
voter has equal power? One person, one vote--that's all the math anyone
needs to know in a simple, direct election. Natapoff agrees that voters
should have equal power. "The idea," he says, "is to give every voter
the largest equal share of national voting power possible." Here's a
classic example of equal voting power: under a tyranny, everyone's power
is equal to zero. Clearly, equality alone is not enough. In a democracy,
individuals become less vulnerable to tyranny as their voting power
increases.
James Madison, chief architect of our nation's electoral college, wanted
to protect each citizen against the most insidious tyranny that arises
in democracies: the massed power of fellow citizens banded together in
a dominant bloc. As Madison explained in The Federalist Papers (Number
X), "a well-constructed Union" must, above all else, "break and control
the violence of faction," especially "the superior force of an . . .
overbearing majority." In any democracy, a majority's power threatens
minorities. It threatens their rights, their property, and sometimes
their lives.
A well-designed electoral system might include obstacles to thwart
an overbearing majority. But direct, national voting has none. Under
raw voting, a candidate has every incentive to woo only the largest
bloc-- say, Serbs in Yugoslavia. If a Serb party wins national power,
minorities have no prospect of throwing them out; 49 percent will never
beat 51 percent. Knowing this, the majority can do as it pleases
(lacking other effective checks and balances). But in a districted
election, no one becomes president without winning a large number of
districts, or "states"- -say, two of the following three: Serbia,
Bosnia, and Croatia. Candidates thus have an incentive to campaign
for non-Serb votes in at least some of those states and to tone down
extreme positions--in short, to make elections less risky events for
the losers. The result, as George Wallace used to say, may often be a
race without "a dime's worth of difference" between two main candidates,
which he viewed as a weakness but others view as a strength of our
system.
The founding fathers were not experts on voting power. Many wanted
an electoral college simply because they distrusted the mob. A large
electorate, they believed, falls prey to passions, rumors, and "tumult."
Electors were supposed to consider each candidate's merits more
judiciously, not blindly follow the popular will. Nowadays, of course,
whoever wins the popular vote in any state wins all the electoral
votes in that state automatically (except in Maine, which divides its
electoral votes). We no longer need human bodies to cast electoral
ballots, Natapoff says. That part of the system is indeed archaic. But
it has worked beautifully, he insists, as a formula for converting one
large national contest into 51 smaller elections in which individual
voters have more clout. The Madisonian system, by requiring candidates
to win states on the way to winning the nation, has forced majorities
to win the consent of minorities, checked the violence of factions,
and held the country together. "We have stumbled onto something that
not everyone appreciates," Natapoff says. "People should understand it
before they decide to change it."
Which is why, late one night a couple of decades back, with a minimum of
fanfare, Natapoff appointed himself unofficial mathematician for one of
the least popular institutions in America.
Two variables, Natapoff realized, profoundly affect each citizen's
voting power. One is the size of the electorate, a factor that political
scientists already recognized. The other is the closeness of the
contest, which most experts hadn't taken into account.
It's easy to see the effect of size. Your vote matters less in a larger
pool of votes: it's the same drop in a bigger bucket and less likely
to change the outcome of an election. However, in a ridiculously small
nation of, say, three voters, your vote would carry immense power. An
election would turn on your ballot 50 percent of the time. For a simple
example, let's assume that only two candidates are running, A versus B,
and each vote is like a random coin toss, with a 50 percent chance of
going either way. In your nation of three, there's a 50 percent chance
that the other two voters will split, one for A and the other for B,
and thus a 50 percent chance that your single vote will determine the
election. There's also, of course, a 25 percent chance both will vote
for A and a 25 percent chance both will vote for B, making your vote
unimportant. But that potential tie-splitting power puts all voters in a
powerful position; candidates will give each of you a lot of respect.
As a nation gets larger, each citizen's voting power shrinks. When
Natapoff computes voting power--the probability that one vote will
turn the election--he is really computing the probability that the
rest of the nation will deadlock. If you are part of a five-voter
nation, the other four voters would have to split--two for A and two
for B--for your vote to turn the election. The probability of that
happening is 3 in 8, or 37.5 percent. (The other possibilities are
three votes for A and one for B, a 25 percent probability; three for
B and one for A, also 25 percent; four for A, 6.25 percent; and four
for B, 6.25 percent.) As the nation's size goes up, individual voting
power continues to drop, roughly as the square root of size. Among 135
citizens, for instance, there are so many ways the others can divide
and make your vote meaningless--say, 66 for A and 68 for B--that the
probability of deadlock drops to 6.9 percent. In the 1960 presidential
race, one of the closest ever, more than 68 million voters went to the
polls. A deadlock would have been 34,167,371 votes for Kennedy and the
same for Nixon (also-rans not included). Instead, Kennedy squeaked
past Nixon 34,227,096 to 34,107,646. You might as well try to balance
a pencil on its point as try to swing a modern U.S. election with one
vote. In a typical large election, individuals or small groups of voters
have little chance of being critical to a raw-vote victory, and they
therefore have little bargaining power with a prospective president.
So, does this historic example demonstrate how the electoral college
compensates for our individual insignificance? Wasn't each vote for
Kennedy or Nixon actually more important than the raw vote count
suggests, being funneled through the electoral college? If a couple
thousand votes had changed in a key state or two. . . ? Actually,
no--if the experts' assumptions are true. If each vote really is like
a toss of those perfectly balanced coins so beloved by theorists,
then districting never boosts voting power. It's actually a useless
complication; it slightly reduces individual power. You can see this
in a small electorate. If you district a nation of nine into three
states with three voters each, with each vote a perfect toss-up, the
probability of a deadlock in your state is 50 percent. Your vote would
then decide the outcome in your state. Beyond that, the other two states
must also deadlock, one going for A and one for B, to make your state's
outcome decisive for the nation. The probability of that is also 50
percent. So the compound probability of the whole election hinging on
your vote is 25 percent. In a simple, direct election, on the other
hand, the national pool of eight other voters would have to split
four against four to make your vote decisive. The probability of that
happening is 27.3 percent (35/128), giving you more power in a direct
election. Districting doesn't help this nation of nine, and it doesn't
help any electorate of any size when the contest is perfectly even.
Thus the experts who wanted to reform our system were right, but only
if you grant them one large assumption. An electoral college does rob
voters of power if everyone, in effect, walks into a voting booth
and flips a coin to decide between two equally appealing candidates,
Tweedledee and Tweedledum. "But this is an inaccurate model," Natapoff
counters. "They were going to change the Constitution based on a narrow
finding."
Natapoff decided to push the analysis further, even though the math got
harder as he shed convenient, simplifying assumptions. He wanted to know
what happens when voters stop acting like ideal, perfect coins and begin
to favor one candidate over the other. He could see right away that
everyone's voting power shrinks, because the probability goes down that
the electorate will deadlock. The national tally is more likely to be
lopsided, just as a tail-heavy coin is more likely to come up, say, 60
heads and 40 tails than 50-50.
A general preference for one candidate over the other is like a house
advantage in gambling. "If candidate A has a 1 percent edge on every
vote," Natapoff says, "in 100,000 votes he's almost sure to win. And
that's bad for the individual voter, whose vote then doesn't make any
difference in the outcome. The leading candidate becomes the house."
Of course, you might object, voters aren't really roulette wheels. When
you walk into the voting booth, you've probably already made up your
mind which candidate you'll vote for. If it's A, the probability that
you'll pull the lever for B instead isn't 45 percent, it's more like
0 percent. Similarly, if your brother-in-law is a strong supporter
of B, the probability that he'll actually vote for B is close to 100
percent, not 45 percent. Although many people get hung up on this part
of Natapoff's argument, it's not really that hard to understand. Imagine
for a moment that you're not a person at all, but a voting booth. When
someone steps in to cast a vote, you have no idea whether that vote
will be for A or for B. The voter may have made up her mind long ago,
but until she actually pulls the lever, you won't know whom she's
chosen. All you know is that of the people whose votes you count today,
about 55 percent will vote for A and about 45 percent for B. Similarly,
a spin of the roulette wheel isn't really random. The laws of physics,
the shape of the ball, the currents in the air, and other factors will
all determine where the ball lands. But a gambler can't calculate
those factors any more than a voting booth can know which candidate an
individual voter will choose.
In a nation of 135 citizens, says Natapoff, one person's probability
of turning an election is 6.9 percent in a dead-even contest. But
if voter preference for candidate A jumps to, say, 55 percent, the
probability of deadlock, and of your one vote turning the election,
falls below .4 percent, a huge drop. If candidate A goes out in front by
61 percent, the probability that one vote will matter whooshes down to
.024 percent. And it keeps on dropping, faster and faster, as candidate
A keeps pulling ahead.
The next step is the kicker. The effect of lopsided preferences,
Natapoff discovered, is far more important than the size effect. In a
dead- even contest, remember, voting power shrinks as the electorate
becomes larger. But a 1 or 2 percent change in electorate size, by
itself, doesn't matter much to the individual voter. When one candidate
gains an edge over another, however, a 1 or 2 percent change can make a
huge difference to everyone's voting power, giving candidates less of
a motive to keep the losers happy. And the larger the electorate, the
more telling a candidate's lead becomes, like a house advantage.
Some people know this from ordinary experience. If you're gambling in
a casino, for instance, you had better keep your session as short as
possible; the longer you play, the less likely you are to beat the
house odds and break even (let alone win). By the same principle, if
you're flipping a lopsided coin yet looking for an equal number of
heads and tails (a deadlock), you had better keep the number of coin
flips low; the longer you try with lopsided coins, the more the law
of averages works against a 50-50 outcome. And if you're voting in an
uneven election, you had better keep the electorate's size as small as
possible. "If the law of averages has got an edge," Natapoff says, "it's
going to tell in the long run. And so the idea is not to allow any very
large elections if you are a voter. Unless the contest is perfectly
even, you want to keep the size of elections small." The founding
fathers unwittingly did this when they divided the national election
into smaller, state-size contests.
So even though districting doesn't help in an ideal, dead-even contest,
with voters acting the same all over the country, it does help, Natapoff
saw, in a realistic, uneven contest. Sports fans, again, vaguely
understand the underlying principle. In a championship series, the
contest becomes more equal, and the underdog has a better chance, when a
team has to win more games, not just score more points. Similarly, when
contesting 50 states, the leading candidate has more ways to lose than
when running in a large, raw national election--there are more ways for
votes to cluster in harmless blowouts, just as there are more ways for
runs or goals to cluster in the seven games of the World Series or the
Stanley Cup play-offs. In a big, raw national contest, those clusters
wouldn't matter.
The degree to which districting helps, Natapoff found, depends on just
how close a contest is. Take as an illustration our model nation of
135, divided into, say, three states of 45 citizens each. When the race
is dead even, of course, no districting scheme helps: voting power
starts off at 6.9 percent in a direct election versus 6.0 percent in a
districted election. But when candidate A jumps ahead with a lead of
54.5 percent, individual voting power is roughly the same whether the
nation uses districts or not. And as the contest becomes more lopsided,
voting power shrinks faster in the direct-voting nation than it does
in the districted nation. If candidate A grabs a 61.1 percent share of
voter preference, voters in the districted nation have twice as much
power as those in the direct-voting nation. If A's share reaches 64.8
percent, voters in the districted nation have four times as much power,
and so on. The advantage of districting over direct voting keeps growing
quickly as the contest becomes more lopsided.
Natapoff now had a two-part result. A districted voting scheme can
either decrease individual voting power or boost it, depending on
how lopsided the coin being tossed for each voter becomes. He found
the crossover point interesting. For a nation of 135, that point is
right around a 55-45 percent split in voter preference between two
candidates. In any contest closer than this, voters would have more
power in a simple, direct election. In any contest more lopsided than
this, they would be better off voting by districts. How does that
crossover point shift, Natapoff wondered, as electorate size changes?
For very small electorates--nine people, say--he found that the gap
between candidates must be very large, at least 66.6 to 33.3 percent,
before districting will help. That's why raw voting works well at town
meetings, where electorates are so small. As the number of voters gets
larger, the crossover point moves closer to 50-50. For a nation of 135,
voters are better off with districting in any race more lopsided than
55- 45. For a nation with millions of voters, the gap between candidates
must be razor-thin for districting not to help. In the real world of
large nations and uneven contests, voters get more bang for their ballot
when they set up a districted, Madisonian electoral system--usually a
lot more.
Now, try to imagine a bleary-eyed Natapoff working through the math for
case after case. He finds out what happens as the size of the electorate
changes, as the contest gets more or less lopsided, or as the method
of districting changes (in his most favored nation of 135, you could
have 3 states of 45 citizens each, 45 states of 3 citizens each--even
5 states of 20 and 7 states of 5). All these things affect voting
power. Natapoff's theorem now covers all cases. "The theorem," he sums
up, "essentially says that you're better off districted in any large
election, unless every voter in the country is alike and very closely
balanced between candidates A and B. In that very extraordinary case,
which rarely if ever occurs in our elections, it would be better to have
a simple national election."
Natapoff had finally answered, to his satisfaction, the question that
had nagged him for decades. But what size, shape, and composition
should our districts have? Like everyone else who delves into electoral
politics, Natapoff could see that the actual, historic United States is
not a perfectly districted nation. For one thing, states vary enormously
in size. Natapoff can solve his equations to find an ideal district
size for the purpose of national elections, assuming that each vote,
like a coin toss, is statistically independent--but the answer depends
on an election's closeness. The districts could all be the same size,
but only if the preference for one candidate over another is the same
everywhere in the country. In general, the more lopsided the contest,
the smaller each district, or state, needs to be to give individual
voters the best chance of local deadlock. So in close elections, voters
in larger states would have more power; in lopsided elections, voters in
smaller states would. Since some campaigns run neck and neck to the wire
while others become blowouts, we will probably never have an ideally
districted nation for any particular election, even with equal-size
states.
Ideally, too, no bloc should dominate any district. This consideration,
by itself, probably makes the 50 states a grid that's closer to ideal
for electoral voting than, say, the 435 congressional districts. For
example, in heavily black districts, no single white or black person's
vote would be likely to change the outcome, if blacks in that district
tend to vote as a bloc. Each of those voters, black and white, would
have more national power in a districting scheme more closely balanced
between black and white. For this reason, Natapoff says, gerrymandering
can be counterproductive even when undertaken with the intention of
boosting some national minority's power. The gerrymandered district
might guarantee one seat in Congress to this minority, but those voters
might actually wield more national bargaining power with no seat in
Congress if representatives from, say, three separate districts viewed
their votes as potentially swinging an election. Anyway, Natapoff says,
the point of districting is to reduce the death grip of blocs on the
outcome. "This is a nonpartisan proposition," he says. "The idea is to
be sure all votes in a district have power." Ideally no single party,
race, ethnic group, or other bloc, nationally large or nationally small,
will dominate any of the districts-- which for now happen to be the 50
states plus Washington, D.C.
Natapoff concedes that the Madisonian system does contain within it one
small, unavoidable paradox. Every once in a while, if we use districting
to jack up individual voting power, we'll have an electoral "anomaly"--a
loser like Harrison will nudge out a slightly more popular Cleveland. He
sees those anomalies, as well as the more frequent close calls, not
as defects but as signs that the system is working. It is protecting
individual voting power by preserving the threat that small numbers of
votes in this or that district can turn the election. "We were blinded
by its minor vices," he says. "All that happens is someone with fewer
votes gets elected," temporarily. What doesn't happen may be far more
important. In 1888, victorious Republicans didn't celebrate by jailing
or killing Democrats, and Democrats didn't find Harrison so intolerable
that they took up arms. Cleveland came back to win four years later,
beating Harrison under the same rules as before. The republic survived.
One other benefit attributed by Natapoff to our electoral college seems
almost aesthetic. As usual, it's easier to appreciate in sports. In
1960, under simpler rules, the Yankees might have been champions. They
might have won, for instance, if there were no World Series but only
the scheduled 154-game season, with one large baseball nation of 16
teams instead of two separate leagues. The team winning the most games
all year long would simply pick up its prize in October. Instead, here
is what happened. By the ninth inning in game seven of the series,
the Yankees and Pirates had fought to a standstill--the ultimate
deadlock. Each team had won three games. The Yankees had led throughout
much of game seven, but Pittsburgh astonished everyone by scoring five
runs in the eighth inning, after a Yankee fielding error, to go ahead
9-7. They couldn't, of course, hold their lead. The Yankees answered
with two more runs in the top of the ninth to tie the score at 9-9.
Then, in the bottom of the ninth, Bill Mazeroski, an average hitter
without much power, stepped to the plate for Pittsburgh. He seemed a
mere placeholder--until his long fly ball just cleared the left-field
wall. Rounding second base, halfway home, Mazeroski was leaping for
joy, and Pittsburgh fans were pouring from their seats, racing to
meet him at the plate. The Yankees had finally toppled. There they
were, ahead in the polls, piling up votes like nobody's business,
until one last swing of one player's bat turned the whole season
around. "Everybody regarded it as one of the most glorious World Series
ever," Natapoff says. "To do it any other way would totally destroy the
degree of competition and excitement that's essential to all sports."
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