That's an excellent observation; I never thought about that. I keep meaning to sit down with some election datasets and experiment with different reforms to see if anything might have made a difference in certain close elections.
For example, as a *very* rough (but easily calculated) approximation of what you're talking about, we can im…
That's an excellent observation; I never thought about that. I keep meaning to sit down with some election datasets and experiment with different reforms to see if anything might have made a difference in certain close elections.
For example, as a *very* rough (but easily calculated) approximation of what you're talking about, we can imagine what would happen if we just removed the +2 spotting of electors each state gets because of the Senate (which would require a Constitutional amendment). While this would not have changed the outcome of the 2016 election, it would have altered the 2000 election, giving Al Gore a 225-211 Electoral College victory (and maybe then, who knows, we never get Trump 2016).
I keep planning on running some Excel sheets doing the same thing. My screen name here is my email address -- if you come up with anything please share, and I'll do the same.
I'm a whole lot less concerned about the two vote Senate spot, which was part of the Founders' basic federalism design, than I am with the effect of the 435 ceiling on an election like 2016. If the population of one House district were defined as always equal to the population of the least populous state, instead of 55 electoral votes in 2016, California would have had over 80. Now, Texas and Florida would also had had more, but so would've Illinois and New York.
It was never part of the Founders' plan for the Electoral Vote to diverge so far from the popular vote. It would have been particularly anathema to them that a state could LOSE House members and Electors simply because, although it had increased in population since the last Census, it had increased more slowly than other states. But we've come to accept that as a given since 1929.
That's an excellent observation; I never thought about that. I keep meaning to sit down with some election datasets and experiment with different reforms to see if anything might have made a difference in certain close elections.
For example, as a *very* rough (but easily calculated) approximation of what you're talking about, we can imagine what would happen if we just removed the +2 spotting of electors each state gets because of the Senate (which would require a Constitutional amendment). While this would not have changed the outcome of the 2016 election, it would have altered the 2000 election, giving Al Gore a 225-211 Electoral College victory (and maybe then, who knows, we never get Trump 2016).
I keep planning on running some Excel sheets doing the same thing. My screen name here is my email address -- if you come up with anything please share, and I'll do the same.
I'm a whole lot less concerned about the two vote Senate spot, which was part of the Founders' basic federalism design, than I am with the effect of the 435 ceiling on an election like 2016. If the population of one House district were defined as always equal to the population of the least populous state, instead of 55 electoral votes in 2016, California would have had over 80. Now, Texas and Florida would also had had more, but so would've Illinois and New York.
It was never part of the Founders' plan for the Electoral Vote to diverge so far from the popular vote. It would have been particularly anathema to them that a state could LOSE House members and Electors simply because, although it had increased in population since the last Census, it had increased more slowly than other states. But we've come to accept that as a given since 1929.