Racial Disparity of Voting Power in the Electoral College
TL;DR Black votes are worth ~90% of a white vote, Hispanic ~75% of a white vote, and Asian ~%60 of a white vote, as calculated using 538’s Voter Power Index and US Census Data.
After the election, many people accused the Electoral College of causing Trump to win. In some ways, they were right, as Trump won the Electoral College and lost the popular vote. Many accused the Electoral College of being racist, based on the calculation that a vote from Wyoming is worth far more than California, Texas, or New York. They did not take this analysis far enough. As stated in the TL;DR, the voting power varies extremely.
I used 538’s Voter Power Index to show that the voting power is very different amongst the races. The analysis is here. The rest of this post is a summary of the racist history of the electoral college, as well as a description of the analysis.
The electoral college has a bad history. The modern explanation is that it prevents populist swings caused by the populace being furious about a particular subject. However, many of the arguments for it at the time were based around the one of the most reviled pieces of the constitution: The 3/5’s Compromise.
There was one difficulty however of a serious nature attending an immediate choice by the people. The right of suffrage was much more diffusive in the Northern than the Southern States; and the latter could have no influence in the election on the score of Negroes. The substitution of electors obviated this difficulty and seemed on the whole to be liable to the fewest objections.
-James Madison
The existence of the 3/5’s Compromise makes the idea of a popular vote determining the president impossible back during the early days of the Constitution. This meant that some other form of election must be used to determine the presidency. Thus, the Electoral College was born.
With this foundation of racism, it would be best if the modern system exhibited no racial bias.
However, it exhibits major racial bias to this day, against Blacks, Hispanics, and Asians. It is often commented that the Electoral College is racist because the different races are distributed disproportionately across the country, specifically that Blacks and Hispanics are more likely to live in California, Texas, and New York, the three states with the lowest electoral votes to population. Additionally, states like Wyoming are mostly white, and have comparatively larger numbers of electoral college votes. This fails to take into account Voting Power disparities which exist between the states. It’s more than just population issues. It is whether the state is likely to go one way or another. In this way, Wyoming’s voters are among the weakest. It will certainly go Republican, and therefore it does not matter that it is mostly white.
Fortunately, 538 has a Voter Power Index for each state their election forecast, which describe as a ratio, how powerful the voters in each state are. Using this data, along with US Census data about the racial breakdown of each state, we can compute Relative Voting Power Scores for each race in the electoral college.
The results from this data analytics are quite shocking. If we normalize the data so that the White votes are given a score of 1, we get the following results:
- A Black vote is worth 0.92 of a white vote
- A Hispanic vote is is worth 0.752 of a white vote
- An Asian vote is worth 0.589 of a white vote
The general methodology behind finding this result was I computed first the “total racial power” by using populations modified by 538’s Power Index, and then dividing that by the “ideal racial power”, which is simply the total population of that race.
Notably, the Relative Voting Power Score for Asians is approximately 3/5. The 3/5 Compromise manifests itself in the electoral college to this day. This is unacceptable. Inequality should not be enshrined in the Constitution. This is by no means intentional but that does not mean that it is not real.
I got all data used from 538’s Presidential Election Forecast 2016 and the US Census Bureau.
