Mark has an excellent post. Go read it, this reply will wait.
Ok, I have a couple of thoughts here. One of them is that the electoral college is actually a surprisingly good design. I know, I know -- it did create 2016. But that was a sin of many parents. But in a more general sense, I am not sure that the benefit of precise representation is ever as clear as one would like it to be and no system follows the popular vote perfectly.
In the US the congressional districts are supposed to be evenly divided by population, but both the largest and smallest deviations in 2020 were in the same state. In Canada, which has no elected head of state, the difference in riding size is as big as a factor of eight, as the government tries to allow sparsely populated hinterlands to have some say in government (the US uses the Senate for this purpose).
What is nice about electoral districts is that challenges to an election will hinge on state by state recounts. There is no way to discover a huge bolus of votes in one state that changes the national total. Outstanding votes are only impactful in a handful of places. Further, it tends to increase margins of victory. The margin with electoral votes is often much larger than with actual votes, making it easier to discern a victor.
The place that this went really wrong was in 2000. There it really was a single state and a small number of votes (in absolute terms) that made the difference and this is always going to be a problem. But imagine how much worse this would have been with a national popular vote in 1888. The vote total was 5,443,892 to 5,534,488 (a 0.8% margin). But votes take time to arrive. Vote by mail, military ballots, absentee ballots, and provisional ballots all take time to process. If the vote was extremely close, one could imagine issues with just how closely ballots were studied.
But here comes another advantage. Elections are run by states. The states partisan control is likely very correlated with their presidential vote bias. So padding the vote in California, now, isn't really helpful because this isn't going to change the likely allocation of presidential votes. A last minute ruling on post-marks isn't going to change anything. But with 50 separate elections processes, the potential for an "appearance of impropriety" is actually higher.
Now you could make presidential elections and election boundary drawing federal tasks. But that is a big change. The system will always be vulnerable to close elections in swing states.
Now, Bush vs Gore has two parts. The 7-2 decision is actually not all that bad -- the process in Florida had fallen apart. What I object to is the 5-4 decision certifying the election for Bush on equal protection grounds. No person is entitled to an electoral office and having an unelected court decide the issue was a problem. The constitution has a process for this, which was used in 1824, where congress votes for the president (with the winner of the most electoral votes not winning the one time this happened). It is not a great process, but it has the virtue of elected politicians needing to weigh in, who can be held accountable by their voters.
In any case, I don't think Mark and I will agree on the electoral college but it is good that the blog has a diversity of opinions. But that's my defense of the electoral college. It is true that we could be like France and it would probably be ok, but my question is whether this is the point where reforms are most urgently needed. The, uh, imperial supreme court is looking like a much bigger deal in my view these days.
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