The Electoral College: still a bad idea (part III)

Yesterday I went through a laundry list of supposed advantages to the Electoral College. One that I forgot to cover (astutely noted by friend-of-the-blog, Brian) goes as follows:

The Electoral College provides a more manageable mechanism to resolve election disputes, and reduces some of the problems of election monitoring. For example, in a razor-thin election you only have to do a recount in a couple states rather than the whole nation, which would be a much larger bureaucratic issue to manage.

In addition, the Electoral College reduces incentives to conduct electoral shenanigans in the states where it is easiest to manage (ones on the extreme edge of the spectrums which are therefore more likely to be dominated by one party). Right now there is no benefit to running up the score in Massachusetts or Illinois or Oklahoma or Texas. But once every vote counts, that would change.

This argument, while reasonable, has both uniqueness and impact problems. Most of these problems already exist. Witness Florida in 2000 for a bureaucratic nightmare of a recount. And while there’s no incentive to run up the score in the presidential election, there is very much an incentive for statewide offices. In Massachusetts, for example, whatever party factors might incentivize election-rigging efforts should already be triggered by the Brown-Warren race. The spate of voter ID laws being pushed around the country suggest that Republicans are very much willing to use state-level power to manage election turnout. And so on.

In fact, it seems pretty likely to me that a national popular vote for presidency would incentivize the federal government to actually institute some meaningful comprehensive election laws. Which might very well produce a net-positive result in terms of election shenanigans.

If you instinctively distrust the federal government and its ability to manage things, you might not buy that argument. But it sure seems to me like nationalizing regulation of fundamental rights tends to work a lot better than leaving them to states.

Another point made by Brian, which I had never considered, is that a national popular vote would strongly encourage states to facilitate maximum voter participation. It would probably be better for you (as, say, an Oklahoma state legislator) to simply get as many Oklahomans to the polls as possible and let the conservative tilt of your state do the magic, rather than screwing around with illegal vote management schemes.

A final point on all this: my preferred solution is just a constitutional amendment. But the National Popular Vote state compact is a pretty solid example of how easily we could find a constitutional workaround. The basic idea is that states commit to send their Electoral Votes to the national popular vote winner – but only once enough states have signed onto the compact to control the election. That is: once you get 270 Electoral Votes worth of states, the compact enters into force.

It would produce some screwy results in terms of the final numbers. But it would certainly work.

Unsurprisingly, all of the states that have signed on so far are Blue. Which is a shame because there really is no strong reason this should be a partisan issue.