Letter to Congress

To Whom It May Concern: I would like to address the issue of the Electoral College and unfaithful voters. Some states such as Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Florida have a winner-take-all system, in which the candidate with the most votes in that state receives all of the state’s electoral votes. This gives candidates an incentive to pay the most attention to states without a clear favorite. On the other hand states such as California, Texas, and New York, in spite of having the largest populations, have in recent elections been considered safe only for a particular party (Democratic for California and New York; Republican for Texas), therefore candidates typically devote relatively few resources, in both time and money, to such states.

Reformers argue that the Electoral College hampers democracy in a manner inconsistent with modern American practices. All votes are not counted equally under the Electoral College. Tiny Wyoming has an inflated number of electoral votes, three, because every state is awarded a minimum of three (one for its member of Congress and two for each senator). California, with a population over fifty times as large as Wyoming, has only a little more than eighteen times as many electoral votes. This means that a vote in Wyoming counts about three times more than a vote in California.

Another untoward effect of the Electoral College is the emphasis placed upon so-called swing states, which leads to the neglect of the voters in the majority of states. In the election of 2004, for example, George W. Bush spent little time in California as it was expected to vote Democratic. By contrast, he made more than forty visits to the swing state of Pennsylvania during his term. The larger the swing state, the more attention it receives from the candidates from both parties.

A surprising number of presidents have lined up behind proposals to reform or abolish the Electoral College: James Madison, Andrew Jackson, Richard Nixon, and Gerald Ford. Madison was present at the Constitutional Convention, yet he was dissatisfied with the compromise between the large states and the small states that gave rise to the Electoral College