The Yale Political Union is meeting on Thursday to address the issues of whether or not America should abolish the Electoral College. Of course, I know how you all feel about the E.C., but explaining it calmly and clearly to a bunch of very bright, well-informed students can be a challenge.
A challenge, of course, I am willing to take.
Now while I am no political scientist (heck, I'm not even a scientist scientist yet), I like to approach political questions like this from a scientific perspective. So to address the question of whether we should abolish the electoral college, I decided to determine just how "representative" the college really is.
Let's choose two states, say, Wyoming and California, and see how much of say a resident of either state really has over their state's electoral votes.
Wyoming has 3 Electoral Votes and, according to the 2000 census, 493,782 people within its borders.
On average, each person in Wyoming has
100*(3 Electoral Votes/493,782 people)= 0.00060756% of an electoral vote assigned to them.
California has 55 electoral votes and 33,871,648 people within its borders according to the 2000 census data.
On average, each person in California has 100*(55 Electoral Votes/33,871,648 people)= 0.00016238% of an elecotral vote assigned to them.
Thus, on average, a person from Wyoming constitutes 3.742 times as much of an electoral vote than a Californian.
Since no differentiation is made between an electoral vote from Wyoming and an electoral vote from California, people from Wyoming have more than 3.5 times a say in the election than Californians.*
In a country where all are supposedly created "equal" it seems antithetical to give more say to the residents of one state over another. I think this in itself makes the case for reforming the electoral college to be more proportional to the population of the states, that is, if we hope to stay consistant with our values of equality for all Americans.
I don't have the time to do this now, but I would like to plot the ratio of electoral votes to state population against state population. The curve would be somewhat hyperbolic and would clearly demonstrate that rural voters in America have more of a say in our politics than the rest of us.
*My data does not take into account numbers of voters, but total populations, so this conclusion is not entirely backed by my math. If anyone could find the data for numbers of registered voters in each state I would be very grateful.