Zahlen, bitte! 538 electors for the US presidency
The USA will elect its next president – using a system that was devised more than 200 years ago. It can produce grotesque results.
(Image: heise online)
This article in the "Numbers, please!" series was first published on the occasion of the 2020 US presidential election. We have updated it and republished it to reflect the current situation. We hope you enjoy reading it!
When the polling stations for the presidential election open in the United States in a few hours, an election procedure that is unique in the world will reach its climax. Conceived more than 200 years ago, some aspects of the US electoral system now seem out of date. This is especially true when the rules that were invented virtually out of thin air back then lead to such grotesque results as have occurred several times since then. At the same time, it is precisely these peculiarities that will ensure that just a little interim results next night could reveal whether Donald Trump will be allowed to move into the White House once again or whether Kamala Harris will succeed Joe Biden.
The states decide the election
When the US Constitutional Convention discussed how the President of the Republic should be elected in 1787, they did not consider a vote by Parliament to be desirable for reasons of separation of powers. Not only did they not want to risk a direct election, the representatives of the slave-holding states were against it. This was because the southern states were populous, but only with slaves, for whom the right to vote was out of the question. As a compromise, a system with electors was agreed upon. These were to be appointed in each state to elect the president. Exactly how many depended primarily on the size of the population, with slaves being counted as â…— of a person. The exact procedure for the election is determined by the states themselves.
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It was determined that each federal state was entitled to as many electors as it sent representatives to the House of Representatives and the Senate. The number of representatives per federal state is regularly adjusted – depending on the results of the census conducted every ten years and subject to the requirement that there are exactly 435 seats in total. In the Senate, on the other hand, there are always two senators per federal state. This deliberately favors smaller states so that they are not completely dominated. As a result, there are currently more than 700,000 inhabitants for every elector in California and fewer than 200,000 in Wyoming. This results in a total of 535 electoral votes. Thanks to the 23rd Amendment to the US Constitution, the federal district of Washington D.C. is also currently entitled to 3 electoral votes, bringing the total number to 538. Currently, the four largest states together account for 28 percent of the votes in the Electoral College, the 16 smallest for 11 percent.
This by no means straightforward history of the Electoral College ensures that this body always has an even number of seats under the current rules – odd number of seats in the House of Representatives, plus the de facto always 3 seats for Washington D.C., plus the even number of Senate seats. A tie is therefore possible. If this occurs, or if no candidate receives a majority of at least 270 votes, the House of Representatives must decide immediately. But not with a majority – which is currently very close to the Republicans – but carried out by the 50 representatives of the individual states as a block: currently, the Republicans would have a much more comfortable majority in such an election.
Farewell to the freedom of the electorate
The US Founding Fathers had envisaged that the states would appoint the electors – locally by delegates – to whom they would entrust the election of a president and vice president. Their selection was initially made by the local parliaments, then increasingly by the voters. The electors were actually supposed to cast two votes each to determine a winner – the president – and a runner-up – his vice–president. However, this led to unplanned consequences as early as 1796 and 1800 and so the current system was introduced, in which each elector votes separately for a president and his runner-up. In addition, the federal states gradually changed their electoral systems so that all their electors were no longer allowed to vote freely according to their conscience, but for the winner of the federal election. In this way, they wanted to maximize their influence – this was not in the spirit of the founding fathers. Deviating procedures exist today only in Maine and Nebraska.
These procedures ensured that slaveholders in the southern states had enough influence for decades to prevent interference in their affairs. This was although opposition to slavery was growing in the North. Seven of the first eleven US presidents came from Virginia, another from South Carolina and nine of the first 13 presidents were themselves slaves. When the southern states lost the upper hand, they went to war instead of giving up slavery. Only after their defeat was slavery abolished and former slaves officially granted equal rights. During the Reconstruction era, their right to vote was secured by the federal government – through the use of the military –. When the southern states regained their autonomy, however, they were once again responsible for conducting (presidential) elections and systematically excluded blacks.
From a few tens of thousands to tens of millions
It was not until the civil rights movement in the middle of the 20th century that the grossest discrimination in voting rights was prohibited. They were replaced locally by more subtle barriers, which meant that black people had to queue many times longer at polling stations in some places. Apart from the fact that the circle of eligible voters was gradually expanded – Women, for example, have generally been allowed to vote in US presidential elections since 1920 –, the basic procedure has not changed much. However, instead of the few tens of thousands of men with landed property who voted for George Washington unopposed in 1788 and 1789, more than 137 million Americans cast their votes in 2016. Four years later, the mark of 155 million votes was even broken.
The fact that the electoral college system does not always accurately reflect the majority of the electorate is not a new phenomenon. In 1824, John Quincy Adams was the first US president to be elected who did not receive the most votes of all candidates. However, none of his successors were to have such a large gap of more than 10 percent as Adams – a disparity between votes and electoral votes was repeated in 1876, 1888, 2000 and most recently in 2016 – in a dispute in 1960. In absolute figures, however, Donald Trump's gap to Hillary Clinton in 2016 was the largest of any US president at almost three million votes. The fact that he nevertheless received 77 more votes in the Electoral College than Hillary Clinton only underlines how problematic the system can be.
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Time and again, the electoral system has produced unusual situations. For example, the young Whig party put forward not one, but four presidential candidates for the 1836 election. Their hope: to oppose the Democrat, Vice President Martin van Buren, with a sufficiently popular opponent in all parts of the country to deny him an absolute majority in the Electoral College. The House of Representatives would then be called upon (as in 1801 and 1825). The strategy did not work – van Buren received 51 percent of the vote and a clear majority of the electorate: it was never tried again. In 1912, former President Theodore Roosevelt wanted to run, but his party denied him the nomination. So he founded his own and ended up well ahead of his former party colleague William Taft. Both together received more than 50 percent of the vote, but only 96 electoral votes. With 42 percent of the vote, Woodrow Wilson received 435 and became president. Overall, a two-party system emerged more than 150 years ago and has remained in place ever since.
The Electoral College seems downright grotesque when one candidate gets a sufficient lead to virtually sweep the states. Republican Ronald Reagan, for example, received a good 59 percent of the vote, but because he won every state except one, he received a full 525 electoral votes (over 97 percent), more than any other president – only George Washington had the entire Electoral College behind him twice without an opposing candidate. Franklin Delano Roosevelt even received 98.5 percent of the votes in the Electoral College in 1936, with around 61 percent of the electoral votes. Richard Nixon achieved similar results in 1972, just two years before he resigned to avoid impeachment. In 1968, by contrast, Nixon had received just over 56 percent of the Electoral College vote with just 43 percent. The racist Democrat George Wallace had won in several southern states and once again divided his opponents. Incidentally, it was closest in 1876: Rutherford B. Hayes received exactly one more electoral vote than Samuel Tilden, who had received an absolute majority of the electoral votes.
Focus on the swing states
For decades, the system for US presidential elections has meant that the campaigners of the two major parties concentrate on those states that they consider most promising to secure more than half of the electoral votes. States in which a majority for the Republicans is certain receive just as little attention as those in which the same applies to the Democrats. The only thing that has changed is which states are counted as swing states, on which the entire election campaign is focused instead. According to polls, it is likely to be particularly close this year in Michigan, Pennsylvania, Nevada and Wisconsin. For observers, however, this also means that the absolute final result does not necessarily have to be awaited: if Kamala Harris wins in Pennsylvania, for example, she is also certain to win a majority in the Electoral College and thus the presidency.
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Considering the problems with the US electoral system, reform efforts are constantly being made. The National Popular Vote Interstate Compact is probably the most advanced at present. The participating states pledge to commit their electors to the candidate who has achieved the most votes nationwide – but only if enough US states participate to guarantee his or her victory. Currently, the participating states have 209 electoral votes; of course, 270 are needed. A proposed change to the law in 1970 was even closer to the goal, but ultimately failed in the Senate due to opposition from representatives of smaller states.
Who will follow Joe Biden?
In 2024, the future US president will still need a majority in the Electoral College rather than most electoral votes. This still stands at 270 and after the last polling stations close, the world will once again be paying particularly close attention to the spectacle that follows. The experts know which states to look at – North Carolina, for example, traditionally counts quickly and could be decisive. If Kamala Harris does not win by a clear margin, an unprecedented tussle over the results in individual states could ensue, as it did four years ago. Back then, this culminated in the so-called storming of the Capitol, when attempts were made to prevent the official certification of the election. Even today, Donald Trump expects his party colleagues not to explicitly acknowledge that he lost the election to Joe Biden.
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(mho)
