Go, Go, Electoral College

My college experience is leaving me a little jaded, as I complete classes that I don't feel are necessarily teaching me, or changing my mind. So far, I felt my Politics class was going the same direction.

Until today.

In our discussion of the Electoral College, something I've openly been an advocate of abolishing, one of my classmates dug up an article about a man who had devised a mathematical proof that shows that surprisingly, your vote has MORE power in the Electoral College system than it would in a direct election.

I can hear you all saying "Wha?" Don't worry, I didn't buy it at first either. Here's how he explained it ...

"The same logic that governs our electoral system, he saw, also applies to many sports--which Americans do, intuitively, understand. In baseball’s World Series, for example, the team that scores the most runs overall is like a candidate who gets the most votes. But to become champion, that team must win the most games. In 1960, during a World Series as nail-bitingly close as that year’s presidential battle between Kennedy and Nixon, the New York Yankees, with the awesome slugging combination of Mickey Mantle, Roger Maris, and Bill "Moose" Skowron, scored more than twice as many total runs as the Pittsburgh Pirates, 55 to 27. Yet the Yankees lost the series, four games to three.

"Runs must be grouped in a way that wins games, just as popular votes must be grouped in a way that wins states. The Yankees won three blowouts (16-3, 10-0, 12-0), but they couldn’t come up with the runs they needed in the other four games, which were close. In sports, we accept that a true champion should be more consistent than the 1960 Yankees. A champion should be able to win at least some of the tough, close contests by every means available--bunting, stealing, brilliant pitching, dazzling plays in the field--and not just smack home runs against second-best pitchers. A presidential candidate worthy of office, by the same logic, should have broad appeal across the whole nation, and not just play strongly on a single issue to isolated blocs of voters."

It goes on to explain the math, which is heavily statistics based, but comes down to this basic idea. Your individual vote is much less likely to turn a large national election than it is to turn the election in your state, and then your state turns the national election. The smaller pool your vote is in, the more your vote counts.

It's so disgustingly simple that I'm stunned I didn't realize it before. (The same thing happened to me on a regular basis as I learned in my statistics class that several things that you intuitively think are wrong are much more likely to happen than you realize.)

Read the article. I think you'll be surprised at just how well the Electoral College can do it's job.