An Unorthodox Proposal

First off, a nod to Jonathan Swift for providing the inspiration for this post's title.  Now, on with the show.

Alright, look. It's obvious that America's current system of choosing a president isn't working.  320 million people, and one of the final two candidates we could come up with - the one who went on to win* - was Donald Trump? That was the best we could do? Really, America?!?

You'll notice I didn't mention Hillary Clinton in the above paragraph. That was intentional.  I didn't want to lump her in with Trump.  Sure, Hillary Clinton had a fair amount of political baggage.  Some of it was deserved and of her own doing, but the overwhelming majority of it turned out to be baseless accusations peddled by the right-wing smear machine.  But she was also the most qualified candidate, by far, and she was certainly miles ahead of the walking, breathing dumpster fire currently occupying the White House.

Whoops, I got distracted and went off on a tangent there.

Back to my main point, which is that the current process for electing a president is in desperate need of reform. I don't want to get too into the weeds talking about how the institutional mechanisms in place need to be modified, although I will say that the Electoral College needs to be revamped, the Voting Rights Act needs to be restored, and alternative ideas like ranked-choice voting and holding primaries on weekends (when more people can participate) need to be at least looked at.

No, the change I propose is more tonal than structural.  Here's my idea.  Instead of the current handful of campaign debates, which are nearly worthless spectacles, we have each party's candidate (it would have to be after the primaries, because in the past couple presidential elections there would be too many candidates for this to work) undergo some kind of exam by a select panel of experts in various relevant areas.

For example, say we want to evaluate a candidate's knowledge on foreign policy. We gather a team of experts in all the areas foreign policy could be expected to cover: economics & trade, science, military strategy, and so on.  Then these experts ask the candidates a bunch of questions, to gauge their knowledge. Now, the questions could take any kind of format - I'm not too choosy.  It could be an in-person panel, like a job interview; or it could be like a college-level exam. 

The point - and this is the important part - is that the results of the Q & A are made public, to see just how much a certain candidate knows (or doesn't know.) If it's a panel interview, record it and play it on all the news networks later.  If it's a written test, publish it in a special insert in every major newspaper, and post it online. Also, just like any other test (which is essentially what this is), the candidate's performance is scored.  1 - 100, just like most tests.  Any candidate who scores too low is disqualified from running.

And that's it.  We wouldn't change anything else about how votes are cast or counted, we'd just replace debates with a process that (hopefully) prevented the country from electing a complete idiot.

I don't expect this to be adopted, of course.  It's pretty much got a snowball's chance in hell.  But I don't think anyone will dispute that elections have become way too much like a popularity contest - a certain level of that is always expected, but it's getting ridiculous. 

Anyway, I was just throwing this idea out there.

* Russia helped Trump win

The Push to Abolish the Electoral College, Part 2: Possible Solutions

I wanted to include all this at the end of yesterday's post, but that piece took a lot longer to write than I expected.  I'm chalking it up to a healthy dose of writer's block plus lots of writing something, striking it out, writing something new, then going back to what I originally wrote.  Repeat until insane.  That post was an absolute grind to write.  Plus, I got distracted by Atlanta's beat-down of the Packers.

Anyway, here are a handful of off-the-cuff suggestions I have for improving the Electoral College.

First, eliminate "winner take all" districts.  There's something deeply wrong with a rule that lets my vote contribute to Candidate A's electoral vote tally even if I voted for Candidate B.  Unfortunately, forty-eight states play by "winner take all" rules.  This practice is truly undemocratic, because it invalidates the votes of everyone but the people who picked the winning candidate.  I propose that all of the states adopt a proportional allocation system: the number of electoral votes a candidate gets is based on the percentage of the popular vote they received.  I didn't come up with this idea, but I think it makes a lot more sense than the "winner take all" rule.

Second, redraw the outrageously gerrymandered districts to make them more reflective of their inhabitants.  Gerrymandering has been a problem for a long time, and has been derisively described as "politicians getting to choose their voters." The Supreme Court is hearing a case about partisan gerrymandering right now, and I'm glad to see the practice is being challenged in court.  I just hope SCOTUS rules against gerrymandering.

Third, let's take a look at mandatory voting as a stop-gap solution while we figure out why so few people are voting.  (Hey now! Whoa! I said we should just consider it.  Stop yelling at me.)  I was going to suggest implementing mandatory voting and leaving it at that (so maybe that yelling is justified), because it would solve the problem of low voter turnout, therefore making election results more reflective of the overall population.  Unfortunately, this is like a kid shoving all their toys, stray clothes, etc into the closet instead of actually cleaning their room.  It gives the appearance of everything being fine while ignoring the issue.  Something is wrong when 41% of eligible voters didn't vote in the 2016 election.  Maybe those people don't feel represented, and that's a symptom of bigger issues.  I was going to write about those bigger issues, at least as I saw them; but I realized pretty quickly that those issues were a lot more than I was prepared to tackle right now.  I haven't done enough research or thinking to write about them, and besides they're outside the scope of this post, so I'm tabling them for another day. 

Those are a few quick and simple solutions I came up with off the top of my head.  They probably have flaws, but I wanted to offer up some ideas, even imperfect ones. I don't think the Electoral College is perfect, but I think these changes could improve it a lot.  But even with its flaws, I think the Electoral College is a better system than a direct popular vote.  Let's not throw the baby out with the bath water.

The Push to Abolish the Electoral College

"Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to eat for lunch." - Marvin Simkin

Ever since Hillary Clinton signaled her support for abolition of the Electoral College, the number of people echoing that sentiment has grown and gotten louder.  Posts like this one have popped up on Twitter:

It's easy to understand why.  A lot of Americans are furious with Donald Trump, and not in a "He's implementing policies I don't like" way.  It's more of a "He's a complete disaster" way, and with good reason.  Trump will likely be remembered as one of the worst presidents in history.  Maybe the worst president.  The push to abolish the Electoral College is built on an urge to prevent this from happening in the future, because if the Electoral College had been eliminated before 2016, Clinton would be president and we'd all be spared the ongoing Trump fiasco.  It's a justifiable and well-meaning movement, but I'm going to make the case for keeping it.

Let's start with an easy one.  First, there are about 320 million people in America.  Not all of them are eligible to vote, but if you crunch the numbers, only 59% of the eligible population voted (for any candidate).  This is just my opinion, but it doesn't make sense to switch to a popular vote system when 2/5 of the population stays home on election day (a greater number of people than either Clinton's or Trump's voters). 

Second, people are generally pretty decent, but they're vulnerable to a lot of tricks: things like tribalism, their own cognitive biases, emotion-based choices, misleading information, and so on.  They also vote based on superficial reasons.  A common piece of conventional wisdom is that people vote for candidates based on their likeability rather than any of the candidate's policies - that a vote comes down to which candidate a voter identifies with, or would like to have a beer with.  Then there are the people with "out there" beliefs: anti-vaxxers, racists, conspiracy theorists.  Would you want an any of them to have a direct say in electing the president? To have that person's vote be equal to yours? People, even rational ones, don't always make wise decisions at the ballot box.  A large population can diminish a fringe idea's reach, but it can just as easily amplify it; and historically, people with radical ideas have had this pesky habit of gravitating toward each other to form influential movements.  Does the Electoral College prevent this from happening? No.  But a popular vote system increases the chances of this happening.  This isn't some idle concern, either; here's what James Madison wrote in Federalist #10:

"The two great points of difference between a democracy and a republic are: first, the delegation of the government, in the latter, to a small number of citizens elected by the rest; secondly, the greater number of citizens, and greater sphere of country, over which the latter may be extended.  The effect of the first difference is, on the one hand, to refine and enlarge the public views, by passing them through the medium of a chosen body of citizens, whose wisdom may best discern the true interest of their country, and whose patriotism and love of justice will be least likely to sacrifice it to temporary or partial considerations.  Under such a regulation, it may well happen that the public voice, pronounced by the representatives of the people, will be more consonant to the public good than if pronounced by the people themselves, convened for the purpose."

Third, let's look at a popular vote system as a whole.  I'm going to provide some reasons for why it's a bad idea.  Let's start with a hypothetical.  Imagine that at the start of every NFL season, the entire country voted on which team they wanted to watch.  One team all season long, for the entire country.  Now look at this map.

(Picture courtesy of USA Today)

I'm guesstimating here, but it looks like Denver occupies the biggest swath of land on that map.  (Woo-hoo! Go Broncos!) That's great if you're a Broncos fan, but not so much for fans of the other thirty-one teams; and if you're a fan of the Texans, Jaguars, or Bucs, for example, you'll probably never get to watch a game in this fictional scenario.

So how does this relate to the 2016 presidential election? Here are a few other images to look at.  The top one is a breakdown of the election based on the counties each candidate won, and the bottom one is the same county-by-county map adjusted to account for population.

(Courtesy of Wikipedia)

(Courtesy of University of Michigan)

Do you notice anything peculiar? There are a lot more solid red squares than blue ones on that top map - 2,623 to 489 - but the red and blue areas appear to be about equal in the bottom map.  Which they are, approximately.  The popular vote results confirm that.  Here's another way of looking at it.  As of 2013, California's population was over 38 million while seven states had populations of less than a million.  That popular vote proposal looks a lot less fair now, doesn't it? It pretty much guarantees that the 5-10 most populated states will get all the attention (remember how lopsided Trump's tallies were until they called California), and the least populated states will be virtually ignored.  This problem has gone mostly unnoticed, but a popular vote system will only make it worse, because candidates focus on areas that get them the most votes.  So, if you live in a major city that has a higher population than an entire state, you're probably in good shape.  But if you don't, a popular vote system will make your vote worth less.  I'll say that again: your vote will count for less in a popular vote system.  

A president is supposed to govern for the entire country.  A popular vote system makes that less likely.