Dwindling Democracy: The way the U.S. elects its leaders is unfair and outdated
The electoral system is riddled with complexity, arcane rules and structures that prioritize some votes over others.
Over the past month, 7 journalists from the Ithaca College community have investigated the 2016 election. What follows is the second in the “Dwindling Democracy” series of three stories about voter suppression; the electoral system and the media’s role in electing Donald Trump. We recommend reading them in order, but each story can be read independent of all other parts. Part 1: Voter suppression undermines a fair election Part 3: The media’s hand in the 2016 election is proven to be heavy
By Isabella Grullón Paz & Evan Popp
January 20, 2017 is a day history will remember. No one knows exactly what to expect after Donald Trump takes the oath of office, except that his presidency won’t be good for the country’s marginalized. But no matter what happens over the next four years, it’s clear Trump’s victory has exposed fault lines in our electoral system.
The electoral system is riddled with complexity, arcane rules and structures that prioritize some votes over others. It’s not just something that can be blamed on one part of the system: it’s all of it. These different components stitch together a system with disturbing ramifications for the future of democracy.
Not a national election
After Trump won the presidency despite losing the popular vote by over 2.5 million to Hillary Clinton, the use of the Electoral College has come under renewed attack. Many, particularly supporters of Hillary Clinton along with other political commentators, have pointed out that Trump’s victory is the fifth time a candidate has won the Electoral College but lost the popular vote.
But while it is undemocratic that a candidate can win an election while losing the popular vote, there are more subtle issues with the Electoral College — such as its origin as a racist system meant to increase the power of Southern slaveholding states.
“One of the motivations for the Electoral College was to give slave states more power,” said George C. Edwards III, distinguished professor of Political Science at Texas A&M University.
States counted slaves as three-fifths of a person, instead of not counting them at all, gaining increased population and electoral votes as a result. While the three-fifths compromise was abolished along with slavery, it doesn’t mean the Electoral College has completely moved past its racist legacy. Because one aspect of this system that has remained under the radar is its tendency to give more weight to the white vote.
One simply has to do the math.
Every state gets at least three representatives in Congress — and therefore at least three electoral votes — regardless of their population. Therefore, small states, which are generally heavily white, receive disproportionate power in the Electoral College.
Wyoming, with its population of 586,000 people and its three electoral votes, receives one electoral vote for roughly every 195,000 citizens.
However, California — which gets 55 electoral votes and has a population of about 39 million — gets just one electoral vote for every 711,000 people.
As the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) noted, because smaller states are given greater power in the Electoral College than is proportional to their size, white people’s votes end up mattering more, as small rural states are often white.
Wyoming, with its one electoral vote per 195,000 people, is 84 percent white. North Dakota, which gets one electoral vote for every 252,000 people, is 86 percent white. Montana gets an electoral vote for every 344,300 people and is 89 percent white.
The three whitest states in the country — Maine, Vermont and New Hampshire — also get disproportionate representation. Maine gets an electoral vote for every 332,300 people, Vermont gets an electoral vote for every 215,347 people, and New Hampshire gets one for every 332,600.
In comparison, states with fewer white people and more people of color get fewer electoral votes per person. California has one electoral vote per 711,000 people and is just 38 percent white. Other diverse states with lower percentages of white people are Florida, which is 55 percent white and receives one electoral vote per every 699,000 people; Texas, which is 43 percent white with an electoral vote for every 723,000 residents; and Maryland, 59 percent white with an electoral vote for every 600,000 citizens. Each of those states gets less power in the Electoral College than more homogenous, white states.
CEPR studied this, finding that African-American votes are worth 5 percent less than white votes, while Asian-American votes are 7 percent less, and Hispanic votes are 9 percent less valuable. That may not seem like a huge difference, but it’s significant that the Electoral College makes certain demographics’ votes more valuable.
Additionally, in the three states where a person’s vote is worth the most in the Electoral College system — Wyoming, Vermont, and North Dakota — the overall population is about 92 percent white. In the three states where votes are worth the least — Florida, California, and New York — the overall population is about 52 percent white.
This seems like it would benefit Republicans, as white people tend to vote for the GOP more than Democrats. Fifty-eight percent of white voters went for Trump in 2016 and 59 percent favored Mitt Romney in 2012.
But the problems with the Electoral College stem from more than just a prioritization of white votes. Vikram Amar, dean of the University of Illinois College of Law, said swing states receive much more attention from presidential candidates than safe states.
“Because states almost always give their electors on a winner-take-all basis, the candidates have an incentive to spend time in, and make promises in, only a small number of decent size and large swing states,” Amar said. “So the election is not really a national election.”
This leads to candidates camping out in swing states while largely ignoring the rest of the country. According to the organization National Popular Vote (NPV), two-thirds of 2016 general election campaign events were held in just six states and 94 percent were held in just 12.
Swing states also benefit after the election.
According to the Sightline Institute, swing states receive 7 percent more presidentially controlled grants, double the number of disaster declarations, and more “Superfund” and education requirement exemptions than non-swing states.
For this reason, Hans Noel, associate professor of political science at Georgetown University, said swing states will resist any movement toward a national popular vote, as that would reduce their power. He used Pennsylvania as an example of this.
“Right now the candidates spend a lot of attention in Pennsylvania because they have to win it because it’s a lot of electoral votes,” Noel said.
Despite this, there are efforts underway to reform the Electoral College. NPV advocates for a solution called the “National Popular Vote Interstate Compact.”
Patrick Rosenstiel, a member of the NPV, said the compact mandates that states that sign on give their electoral votes to the candidate who wins the national popular vote. When states whose electoral votes are equal to 270 or more — the amount needed to win the presidency — sign on, the compact is enacted. Because those states give their electoral votes to whichever candidate wins the national popular vote, that candidate is guaranteed to win the election.
Rosenstiel said this alternative is the best way to reform the Electoral College because it wouldn’t require a Constitutional amendment. So far, NPV has successfully gotten 10 states and Washington D.C to sign onto the compact, which equals a total of 165 electoral votes.
However, all the adopters thus far are Democratic strongholds, although Rosenstiel noted that the GOP-controlled Arizona House and Oklahoma Senate recently passed the initiative.
One of the worries some have about moving away from the Electoral College and toward a national popular vote is that candidates would only focus on voters in cities, ignoring those in rural areas, because cities have more people. However, this critique ignores the fact that every other election in the U.S. is decided by a popular vote.
However, Candice Nelson — a professor in the Department of Government at American University — said no electoral system will ever be perfect.
“Under any system, some voters are going to see more of the candidates and some are going to see less,” she said.
However, under a popular vote system, she said at least the candidate with the most votes will always win.
Death by a thousand cuts
Along with the Electoral College, another electoral structure many believe needs reform is the primary system, which has garnered a lot of negative attention this year.
Drew Penrose, legal director at FairVote — an organization that advocates for fairer democracy — said the problems with primaries stem from the two-party system. He said many other countries have a multi-party system, so if voters don’t like the nominee of a party, there are other options. In the U.S., however, there are limited numbers of alternatives for a voter who doesn’t like their party’s nominee.
“It would be pretty bitter medicine to tell people if they aren’t happy with the Republican nominee they should just vote for the Democrat or vice versa,” Penrose said.
Pat Garofalo, assistant managing editor for opinion at U.S. News & World Report, who wrote a piece titled “The U.S. Has a Primary Problem” in February 2016, said another issue with the primary system are draconian deadlines for having to register to vote.
“In some places, like New York, you have to register months and months in advance to vote,” he said. “I find that’s not great because you don’t even know who the candidates are.”
Norman Solomon, a media critic who was a delegate for Bernie Sanders during the 2016 presidential primary and for Barack Obama in 2008, said strict rules for who can vote and deadlines for registering to vote long in advance of primaries combine to ensure that certain kinds of people often can’t vote in them.
“The structure of elections have hurdles for lower-income people to have an impact,” Solomon said. According to the Pew Research Center, those with incomes under $20,000 are less likely to be regular voters than those with higher incomes.
Solomon added that one aspect of the primary process that doesn’t get enough attention is the media’s role. He said an example of the pernicious impact the media had during the primary was when the media consistently gave Clinton a larger lead over Sanders than she actually had because they counted superdelegates. But superdelegates don’t actually vote until the convention. This made it seem like Clinton’s nomination was inevitable even though Sanders still had a chance of winning.
The use of superdelegates in this year’s Democratic primary was a hotly contested issue. Superdelegates consist of 712 elected officials and Democratic party insiders whose votes count as another delegate for a candidate. Superdelegates are used to ensure a candidate isn’t nominated without support from the party elite. In the 2016 primary, these delegates overwhelmingly went for Clinton.
While Sanders still wouldn’t have won the nomination if there were no superdelegates, it’s important that a candidate can win more votes but lose the nomination. To be fair, after the uproar during the primary about superdelegates, the Democratic National Committee did reduce their power by binding two-thirds of superdelegate votes to their state’s primary results.
However, Paul Street, an activist, historian and author, said the continued use of superdelegates undercuts the fairness of elections.
“[Superdelegates] are as absurdly and explicitly anti-democratic as the electoral college,” Street said.
While superdelegates are only used in the Democratic primary, the GOP primary system also has its own unique problem. In eight states in the Republican primary, the candidate with the most votes gets all that state’s delegates instead of getting an amount proportional to the number of votes they received.
The problem with this system, Penrose noted, is it rewards a candidate who may not have gotten a majority of the vote. Trump is a perfect example of this. By winning many of the winner-take-all states, Trump disproportionality upped his delegate count even though he often won less than 50 percent of a state’s votes.
An additional problem with both party’s primaries is the use of caucuses, Street said. During the 2016 primary, a total of 12 states and three territories used caucuses, which consist of voters going to a central location, debating and then voting.
Street said caucuses have significant downsides, like lower turnout than primaries. This is because certain groups of people don’t have the time necessary to caucus.
Street experienced this firsthand. During this year’s primary, he was working a part-time, evening factory job to earn extra money.
“I couldn’t have caucused if I wanted to,” Street said.
Some also don’t have the necessary stamina to caucus, Street noted.
“I ran into that more than a few times and [people] would say ‘I can’t go and stand in a line and can’t argue physically, I can’t do the caucus. I wish I could just go in and vote.’”
Along with being a system that disenfranchises a multitude of voters, the Iowa caucus also has the designation of being the first election in the primary process. However, Garofalo said the problem with Iowa and the second state in the process, New Hampshire, going first is that they aren’t representative of the country’s demographics.
In Iowa, nearly 92 percent of the population is white, while New Hampshire’s population is almost 94 percent white, making the two states that go first much less diverse than the U.S. as a whole, where 69 percent of people are white.
The states that go first are important because they often enjoy outsized attention from politicians as well as from the media, which covered the 2008 Iowa caucuses more than it covered global warming in 2007. How a candidate does in the first few primaries is believed to determine the viability of their campaign. But since the states that go first and second are lacking in diversity, few people of color get a say in who the frontrunners will be.
There are many proposals on the table to reform the order of primaries. One alternative, promoted by the National Association of Secretaries of State, is to hold a rotating regional primary, splitting states into three or four regions and rotating which region gets to go first each election cycle. Another, favored by Penrose and FairVote, is to split states into groups so that small states would go first, followed by medium and large states.
It’s clear that the problems with the primary system can’t be reduced to one issue. The system’s plethora of problems create a complicated structure that leads to the disenfranchisement of a multitude of voters, Solomon said.
“Throughout the process, it’s death by a thousand cuts.”
“The reigning champions of gerrymandering”
Gerrymandering has been the founding principle undermining U.S. democracy since 1788.
It’s a centuries-old practice that has been pushing partisan agendas since the conception of the U.S. It began when Governor Patrick Henry persuaded the state legislature to remake the 5th Congressional District of Virginia, which forced Henry’s political enemy James Madison to run against the formidable James Monroe. Unfortunately for Henry, his plan failed, and Madison became Congressman of the 5th district of Virginia.
Flash forward to 2016 and the same tactics from both parties to create sure-fire victories in specific congressional districts by drawing district maps in ways that ensure a certain party will win congressional seats.
Noel, from Georgetown University, said many believe “this system is more distorting and favors of only a small group.”
What this essentially means is that gerrymandering is a perverse way of electing Congressional representatives because it does not represent the public. And lately it’s represented Republican interests.
Documentary Film Director Jeff Reichert outlines these issues in his 2010 documentary “Gerrymandering.”
“Technically, most of what happens in the redistricting process is legal,” Reichert said. “It ends up creating an invisible hand that enshrines a political power structure that is not representative of the actual electorate.”
Reichart explained that many times, parties sit down to discuss how maps will look for their benefit without taking into account the needs of the people in each state.
“Take New York for example,” Reichert said. “Generally what happens in redistricting is that the Republican leader of the state Senate and the Democratic leader of the State Assembly agree to not mess with each other’s maps.”
In summary: the subtly of the lines themselves — along with the back door deals — are the reason it’s hard to pinpoint when redistricting is biased and unfair. When gerrymandering is agreed on, it’s no issue. But when it’s unconventional and undermining, it’s executed so cleanly by either the Republican or Democratic Party that it’s difficult to strike down.
Both parties practice gerrymandering. Hedrick Smith, Pulitzer Prize winner for international reporting and founder of Reclaim the American Dream, said that each party has certain states where they play around with maps for their own convenience.
But Smith also emphasized that while both parties practice redistricting, “the Republicans are the current reigning champions of gerrymandering.”
An example of this is the emergency redistricting of February 2016 in North Carolina. A federal order found the 2011 congressional map of North Carolina unconstitutional and asked to have the districts redrawn. It was supposed to be an opportunity for proportional maps, but it ended up further marginalizing racially skewed districts drawn by Republicans in 2012.
Sam Spencer, campaign manager for Alma Adams — Democratic Congresswoman of the 12th district of North Carolina — said Republicans took this as an opportunity to redraw the first and 12th districts in a way that compartmentalized Democrats into three districts out of 10. Therefore, Democrats only got three seats in Congress.
He said that for the 12th district specifically, the lines were drawn in a way where the black population was halved in some places and many were put into the 12th district. “I got calls from people who were happy to finally be represented by a Democrat,” Spencer said.
Although this is great for local level representation, it pins Democrats into a corner.
Other constituents were put into districts where they had little representation, creating a disproportionate, yet subtle, favoritism towards Republicans in the Congressional election. Spencer said they redrew the lines “regardless of the fact that the vote in North Carolina is roughly 50 percent Republican and 50 percent Democratic.”
In the 2016 election, roughly 46 percent of the votes cast in North Carolina were for the Democratic Party, yet Democrats only have three congressional seats out of 13.
Democrats are almost half the state, but have less than a quarter of the representation.
Smith said the redistricting that occurred in 2011 nationwide has allowed Republicans to “get more seats than their percentage of the popular vote allows them.”
A solution to this, Noel said, is introducing multimember districts and implementing proportional representation in congress.
“If you have a multimember constituency that allocates votes proportionally by party, you have more representation in congress. Essentially a party that gets 40 percent of the votes gets 40 percent of the seats,” Noel said.
If Democrats were proportionally represented, North Carolina Democrats would have five or six seats in the House instead of the current three.
“The whole point of having elections is to give voters a choice,” Smith said. “If you set up a gerrymandered system, which means that the party has drawn the lines of the district, it is certain that its party member will get elected.”
The impact of gerrymandering makes it seem as if the Republican Party is the voice of the people, when in fact it is a structural barrier that keeps Democrats out of Congressional seats and therefore out of decisions regarding legislation. The way the U.S. organizes politics disadvantages the Democratic Party, which in turn disadvantages its constituents; people who are traditionally Black, Hispanic, millennials, Asian and post-graduate women. These constituents have been historically marginalized by many systems of the U.S., and it is no surprise that the political party they most often vote for is suffering from the same systematic estrangement.
Every level of the electoral system disenfranchises voters.
The Electoral College gave Trump a victory he did not deserve; he knew how to play the system. And it means that certain states and groups of people, (who are usually white and rural) have more power than anyone else.
The primary system is complex and burdensome, often making it harder to cast a ballot than it should be in a free and fair democracy.
Gerrymandering keeps the many states red and white while pushing the blue into the margins; it’s a system that knows how to play voters.
The U.S. is no longer the epitome of democracy.
Its election system preys on those who are marginalized in society and counts votes unequally.
It is, as Donald Trump would say, rigged. Just not for the reasons he thinks.
