Contents

1 Introduction to Presidential Selection Lectures 1

2 The Electoral College: What is it and Why? 2

2.1 State Unit Voting . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
2.2 Fixing the Game . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5

3 History of Structure: Electoral College 5

3.1 Does it Ever Change Outcomes? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5

4 Some Elementary Mathematics and non-Elementary Politics 6

4.1 What kinds of voters are benefited? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9

5 Florida 2000 Postscript 10

5.1 And the Supreme Court Decision . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11

6 What the Constitution Says 12

9/21. Presidential Selection: The Electoral College

1 Introduction to Presidential Selection Lectures

1. Today: The Electoral College

2. Thursday: The nomination process

Selection; it matters not only for who sits in the White House, but

• what kinds of politicians can’t succeed (e.g., no President Colin Powell)

• who the election is owed to

• what the President must do to be reelected

• and for political theory: It violates the fundamental belief in equal treatment for all
citizens

Theme: We want a presidential recruitment system to be (1) democratic and to be (2)

competent.

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We keep changing the rules in order to achieve (1), but it is not clear that we know how
to achieve that goal, and we aren’t at all good at (2) devising a process that simply and
effectively brings forward the most favored candidate.

Every four years, with dreary regularity, people on the street and commentators will say
that choice comes down to lesser of two evils, etc.

no “good” candidate to vote for

Implication is “they used to be better.”

Largely this is illusion: The only way to be considered a “good” candidate is to win.

Why?

2 The Electoral College: What is it and Why?

Electors: Each state gets #House seats + 2.

What? Whichever candidate wins the most votes in each state wins all that state’s Electoral
College votes. (Except Maine and Nebraska, which assign by congressional district.)

Whichever candidate wins an absolute majority of Electoral College votes is elected presi-
dent, (majority, not plurality).

Electoral Vote Arithmetic

House Seats 435
Senate Seats 100
DC 3
Total 538

Thus 270 is a majority (269 is exactly 50%, not a majority). George W. Bush received 271
in 2000.

In lieu of a majority, the election is decided in the House, where each “state” casts one vote.
And if the state is split???

Original Design: The Compromise

1. Between representing “states” and representing “people”

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 2. between elites and democratic mobs

What the Founders Intended: In the original vision, someone would select “Electors”—
presumed to be well known figures in the communities of prudent judgment.

In the constitutional design electors would meet to discuss who should be President and elect
him—and since only males could be President then, saying “him” is not an oversight.

The founder’s idea was that prudent men would sit around a table and talk about who
should be president—like the way the College of cardinals selects a pope.

That was the procedure followed for George Washington. To the best of my knowledge, no
citizen ever cast a vote for George—he was entirely selected by the Electoral College.

How electors would be chosen was left up to the states. They could be appointed by governor,
by the legislature, or whatever. Popular vote wasn’t ruled out as a possibility, but it definitely
was not required.

• That long-ignored provision came back to haunt the 2000 Florida recount issue. Re-
publicans in the Florida legislature said that they were ready to throw out all six
million votes and appoint a slate of electors who would vote for George W. Bush . So
while the Supreme Court abandoned two centuries of staying out of partisan politics
in Bush v. Gore, the outcome might have been even worse for democracy than the
court decision was.
• And then imagine that a Democratic controlled legislature in a state won by Bush (NC
for example) did the same?

If a vote were held, the idea was to pick some notable figure who would use his independent
judgment when the College met,

• Not be pledged to vote for particular candidate, and

• Not cast vote automatically.

(And, since the Constitution has never been changed to reflect practice, even now electors
are usually free to vote however they wish. Every now and then one votes for someone other
than the winning candidate in the state. NC Nixon elector voted for George Wallace in
1968.)

That’s mainly an historical curiosity. But there are circumstances that could make it im-
portant.

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In 2000 two Bush electors voting for Gore would have produced a tie, sending the election
to the House. Three would have produced a Gore win.

Or two Bush electors voting for anyone else, for example, Buchanon or Nader, would have
thrown the election into the House.

If for example, Ross Perot was more successful than he was in fact in 1992 or 1996 and got
enough electoral votes to deny a majority to either candidate.

What happens then?

You could wait and settle it in the House. But also there is a fair likelihood of some kind of
deal being struck before the Electoral College met.

Say Clinton got 45% of Electoral votes, Dole 40%, Perot 15%. Then elementary knowledge
of coalitions tells you that Perot would have approached either—maybe even both—Clinton
and Dole, and offered to have his electors change in return for the vice presidency, some
policy promise, or something like that. That’s how coalition governments normally work.

And if he didn’t, the electors themselves might put their votes up for sale. They know their
guy will lose, so why not get something out of it?

The ideas that (1) electors would be ciphers pledged to vote for who the voters wanted, and
(2) that they would be elected by party slates and all vote for the party winner are not in
the Constitution. They came later, from convention and state law.

Political parties did not exist when the Electoral College was designed, and so the founders
never anticipated the idea that electors would run as slates, and never even thought of the
possibility that all electors from one state would be pledged to vote for a single candidate.

2.1 State Unit Voting

Not in the Constitution. This was a strategic adaptation, initially by the largest states, to
maximize their voting leverage.

Imagine California: 55 Electoral votes and presidential outcomes that are usually close to
50-50. So what happens? Say Obama wins CA and gets his proportion of the vote, say 30
and McCain gets 25. So CA worth +5? Why bother with CA?

But if law and custom have all 55 running as a party slate, then CA is so important that it’s
votes—moved from one column to other—could change about half of all modern presidential
elections!

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In 2000, switching any state from Bush to Gore would have made Gore the winner. Even
Wyoming with 3 electoral votes. The Gore people must have been very frustrated about the
fight over Florida’s 25 votes to know that they only needed 3!

So it is strongly in the interest of big states to have electors vote as a committed block. After
some started doing that, then everybody else had to go along.

2.2 Fixing the Game

There was a proposed initiative in California last year that would have electors selected by
congressional district, with the statewide winner receiving only the two “bonus” votes. This
was a partisan move by Republicans, who assume that Democrats will henceforth always
win California, to neutralize the value of winning California.

3 History of Structure: Electoral College

The obvious question to ask about this strange—really bizarre—institution is how it changes
politics from what they would be if we just elected candidates by plurality of the popular
vote.

That is really two questions:

1. Does the College change outcomes, winners and losers?

2. Does it change the way candidates run for the presidency—what they do?, where they
go?, who they try most to court?, and so forth.

3.1 Does it Ever Change Outcomes?

Since 1828, when we have the first reliable estimates of popular votes, on three occasions the
plurality winner in the popular vote lost in the Electoral College.

On only one occasion, 1876, was a majority popular winner denied victory in the Electoral
College.

So, yes it can happen, but 1/54 doesn’t suggest that it is very likely.

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 Table 1: Three Elections in Which the Plurality Winner was not Elected

Election Popular Vote Electoral Vote

1876 Tilden 51.0% 184
Hayes 47.9% 185

1888 Cleveland 48.6% 168

Harrison 47.8% 233

2000 Gore 48.3% 267

Bush 48.0% 271

4 Some Elementary Mathematics and non-Elementary

Politics

Apportionment: as many to each state as there are senators plus members of congress

Thus 2 Senators per state: equal representation for states.

House based on population: equal representation for people.

Who is favored ? Start with a simple answer—that turns out to be wrong. Obvious: smaller
states get more Electoral College votes per voter.

Table 2: Popular and Electoral Votes in the 2008 Election for Two States

Electoral Electoral Votes

State Votes Votes Cast per Million Voters
Wyoming 3 247,826 12.1
California 54 11,733,151 4.7

Ratio: WY/CA = 12.1/4.7 = 2.57

But “states” aren’t very important actors in American national politics. Whether they are
or are not fairly represented just doesn’t matter much.

But if you ask the more important question which kinds of voters gain/lose, it is not so
simple.

If you are an “important voter” then candidates will do more, promise more, to win your

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vote.

Here the really important mathematics is unit block voting.

p1 What is probability of your state tipping the outcome?

p2 What is probability of your vote tipping state?

Then, for each voter, Importance = p1 *p2

Illustration: If you voted in NC in 2004, then your importance was the product of two
probabilities:

1. the probability that the election would hang on NC’s block of votes (small, but not
trivial).
As it happened Bush got 286 electoral votes, so taking away NC’s 15 would almost,
but not quite, have changed the outcome.

2. the probability that the NC outcome would have been a tie if you didn’t vote (this one
is really small).
The actual outcome was 56% to 44%, a 427,000 vote Bush margin, which was similar
to 2000 and 1996 results

These are very small numbers, but they become important when candidates add them up
across groups of voters to see who it is most worthwhile to go after.

Put it another way: Presume you owned a block of say 10,000 votes and you could put them
in any one state of your choice. Where would you put them?

No, not Florida in 2000, where before the fact?

Consider Wyoming:

1. Probability of tipping Electoral College outcome with 3 votes? Very small. Not close
in any 20th Century contest except 2000. Average splits greater than 100 Electoral
College votes.

2. How about tipping state? Not good either, because Wyoming is heavily Republican
(167,000 to 70,000 in 2004), and if elections are never close, then 10,000 votes are not
worth much.

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North Carolina?: Not good either: 1,911,000 to 1,484,000 (56%-44%). Result, virtually no
campaign in NC. NC voters not “important” because the state was not expected to be close.

Who then is strategically situated?

1. Voters in big states. Because those blocks of votes are crucial prizes, candidates give
them disproportionate attention.

2. Regardless of size, more influence where outcome is expected to be close.

Table 3: Importance Index for the Ten Most Influential States in the Electoral College
Ranked by 2004 Outcome
Rank State Electoral Votes
1 Pennsylvania 21
2 Ohio 20
3 Florida 27
4 Michigan 17
5 Illinois 21
6 New Jersey 15
7 Minnesota 10
8 Wisconsin 10
9 Virginia 13
10 California 55

Note the dominance of rust belt states. That is where current American politics is close
enough and populations large enough that electoral college victories are won and lost.

The ten least important: DC, WY, ND, AK, SD, MT, VT, ID, UT, RI

Two Big States That Don’t Matter: New York is big, but so Democratic that it will
only go Republican in years the Republicans win so big they don’t need New York’s votes
anyhow.

So Republicans don’t give it much attention because they can win without it.

Democrats don’t give it much attention, because if NY is close, they’ve already lost the
national election.

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Texas: same scenario in reverse. Democrats can win the presidency without it. Republicans,
if they lose the state, have already lost the election.

How the candidates see it. Divide the states into Democratic base, Republican base, and
battlegrounds. The voters in battleground states have all the influence.

If you track (a) where the candidates go to campaign, (b) where the campaigns spend money
on advertising and get out the vote campaigns, and (c) where they focus special issue appeals,
it will be almost entirely in the battlegrounds.

4.1 What kinds of voters are benefited?

Begin by saying that living in key states benefits you. But what beyond that?

The ability to move as a block then becomes crucial. You can’t court voters one at a time,
so you have to look for some group that might be moved from one side to the other by a
special appeal.

Again, party loyalty undercuts importance. Any group that always votes for the same party
is not going to be courted by either side. So that excludes the basic constituencies of both
sides.

Ideological voters, for example, are not up for grabs. Republicans never appeal to liberals;
Democrats never appeal to conservatives.

So important voters become people not too strongly rooted, which almost immediately means
people who have limited involvement in politics (because the involved are loyal).

Then you start thinking about a single issue position that might influence the votes of people
not normally very political.

Industries: One way to appeal for votes is to support the industries that are crucial in
the most important states. For the rust belt, that means, coal, steel, autos—and the myriad
of support industries for autos, electric power.

Example of EC influence: Electric power generation from coal is concentrated in the Ohio
river valley, the heart of the rust belt. Its byproduct is acid rain that falls in the Northeast
and New England and is ruining forests and depopulating lakes.

Because of the strategic importance of the rust belt—and Ohio in particular—the Bush
Adminstration has relaxed emission control laws that call for installing “scrubber” technology
on power plants. The law says that “new” plants must have scrubbers. The Bush rule

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allowed power companies to rebuild old plants and grandfather them as “old” under the
law. Companies can spend up to 20% of the value of the plant each year—i.e., build a new
plant in five years—and claim that it is “old” under the law. Thus no “scrubbers” are being
installed.

The Ohio Valley is of key importance to the EC and the Northeast, which suffers the effects,
is the least influential region in America. The EC matters.

5 Florida 2000 Postscript

Begin with official ballots, as certified by Katherine Harris, Secretary of State (and Co-chair,
Florida Citizens for Bush-Cheney).

That is make no assumptions about overvotes that didn’t count (e.g. Palm Beach butterfly
ballot) or undervotes on punch cards not recorded. It includes the recounts that the Secretary
of State allowed and not the ones that she disallowed (e.g., Palm Beach) or that were in
progress when the Supreme Court stopped the recount.

These things are very important, but the debate is almost 100% partisan and pointless to
get into.

Table 4: The Officially Certified Florida Vote by When Votes Cast and recorded

Gore Bush Bush Margin

Ballots cast on or received by Nov. 7 2,911,417 2,911,215 -202
Late overseas absentee ballots 836 1,575 739
Total 2,912,253 2,912,790 537
Source: http://gking.harvard.edu/files/ballots.pdf

The presidency in the end was decided by late overseas absentee ballots (Al Gore would
have won the certified vote counted on election day). Florida law allows the counting of
late absentee ballots if they are postmarked outside the United States and they are signed,
witnessed, and postmarked before election day. Of those 680 were illegally counted according
to a New York Times study.

What were the 680 illegals?

• 344 Late, illegible, or missing postmarks

• 183 postmarked in the United States (i.e. not overseas absentees)

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 • 169 not registered voters or did not sign the envelope or did not request a ballot

• 96 lacked witness signature or address

• 19 included two ballots, both of which counted

• 5 were received after the final (Nov. 17) deadline, but were counted

Source: New York Times July 15, 2001

So the presidency was decided by those 2,411 people whose ballots arrived after the polls
closed.

Did those 680 ballots decide the election? We don’t know who the ballots were for (but only
in which county they were cast). Conclusion: probably not, but we can’t say certainly not.

Of the overseas absentee ballots received on or before election day—when the postmark had
no legal relevance—over 99% were postmarked.

Of those received late, 20% came with no postmark. The clear implication is that they were
fraudulent, that people voted after watching the returns and then talked someone into not
postmarking their ballots.

5.1 And the Supreme Court Decision

The irony: The Times analysis shows that if the Gore campaign had gotten the recounts
in three counties that it requested there were not enough uncounted punch card votes to
produce a victory. But if the whole state had been recounted Gore would have won because
where he really picked up votes was in rural counties where hand or optically scanned ballots
which were discarded as overvotes (multiple votes) would have counted because Florida law
counts an overvote (even if the machine rejects it) if the voter puts some mark on it that
indicates his/her intention.

Who are the good guys and bad guys in this story? Choose for yourself on the partisan
issue. On the question of political structure, what produced this madness was the electoral
college. If we had just counted the votes, we would have elected a president on election day
and without controversy.

And it will cause chaos again some time in the future.

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6 What the Constitution Says

Clause 2: Each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct,
a Number of Electors, equal to the whole Number of Senators and Representatives to which
the State may be entitled in the Congress: but no Senator or Representative, or Person
holding an Office of Trust or Profit under the United States, shall be appointed an Elector.

Clause 3: The Electors shall meet in their respective States, and vote by Ballot for two
Persons, of whom one at least shall not be an Inhabitant of the same State with themselves.
And they shall make a List of all the Persons voted for, and of the Number of Votes for each;
which List they shall sign and certify, and transmit sealed to the Seat of the Government of
the United States, directed to the President of the Senate. The President of the Senate shall,
in the Presence of the Senate and House of Representatives, open all the Certificates, and
the Votes shall then be counted. The Person having the greatest Number of Votes shall be
the President, if such Number be a Majority of the whole Number of Electors appointed; and
if there be more than one who have such Majority, and have an equal Number of Votes, then
the House of Representatives shall immediately chuse by Ballot one of them for President;
and if no Person have a Majority, then from the five highest on the List the said House shall
in like Manner chuse the President. But in chusing the President, the Votes shall be taken
by States, the Representation from each State having one Vote; A quorum for this Purpose
shall consist of a Member or Members from two thirds of the States, and a Majority of all
the States shall be necessary to a Choice. In every Case, after the Choice of the President,
the Person having the greatest Number of Votes of the Electors shall be the Vice President.
But if there should remain two or more who have equal Votes, the Senate shall chuse from
them by Ballot the Vice President. (See Note 8)

Clause 4: The Congress may determine the Time of chusing the Electors, and the Day
on which they shall give their Votes; which Day shall be the same throughout the United
States.

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