Applied Satisologie: The Coverage Vote
Or: How I learned to stop worrying and love the Electoral College.
Features of America include
3 branches of government meant to check & balance each other
50 states each with their own mini America going on
Electoral College
Really, just three features? Well, yeah. We have not gone very far from the days of castles and farm lands.
[4]
Medieval Analogy
Let's go back in time to when the world was castles and farmers outside the walls. Your castle is about to get ransacked, oh no what do you do, let's go hide behind the castle walls. In that way, the castle was a way to protect oneself in case the lowlands flooded or the invading army was too close for comfort.
Well, fast forward to the 13 colonies and they are basically tiny states built around this concept of the citadel with farmlands out from the city/castle epicenter.
Hypothetical Disco
What happens if 300 people show up to a club you own and while you are normally the one to hire the bouncer, the DJ, and the rest of the staff, a bunch of guests have come just for the night and decide to have a "Popular Vote" to see who should be president of your club.
So there's an election and someone else wins and they start rewriting the laws. Your emergency contact is now so-and-so. Your emergency pet hospital is now a different one, and your dog has a new name. All the staff are fired and new staff are hired, the DJ is replaced with something more "with the times" and you are sitting on the sidelines wondering what good it is to have property in the first place.
For one, these people do not own the club, but when people come into a new state they get to influence the regional vote with their presence. If we really wanted to get a fair vote, we ought to balance the voting with coverage of ownership stake. For example, if you own part of the club, you are entitled to a vote in the stake of the club. Now, a bunch of people can't simply show up and outvote the owner, who has a long-term stake, in favor of the visitors who have a short-term stake, because now everybody needs some skin in the game to vote.
People who advocate for a National Popular Vote in America do not understand the implications of a Popular Vote and also do not understand how America got to where we are today.
Let's take a look at the history of electoral maps.
Let's imagine a simple adversarial example, one where the largest demographic always bosses around the smaller demographics. It’s called Tyranny of the Majority, and it’s one of the few things our governmental system is positioned to lock horns with.
Tyranny of the Majority
What happens when just the population chooses a president?
Votes in 3D by county from the 2016 election. Blue was the Popular Vote winner, but the Coverage Vote winner was Red. Which outcome more accurately depicts the sentiment of the nation, acre-by-acre?
Would you really want the election decided by the 5 most populous cities every time?
Popular votes have an issue: populated regions have all the sway and outskirts, rural areas, farmlands surrounding the castle epicenters, all are summarily disregarded because they lack the dramatic influence city populations have on popular votes. The truth is, America could have never started uniting colonies if it was always going to be the most populated regions calling all the shots. That’s exactly why the Electoral College was a compromise struck in the first place.
Above: Population. Below: Land.
( from EngagingData [1] )
The Coverage Vote is tied not only to the people who are citizens of America, but the land that constitutes America.
Of course, there are some caveats:
Acquired territories that exerted relatively no back-pressure onto the extant US, such as Puerto Rico, Guam, and American Samoa do not have any representation at this level, and history seems to suggest that it is not possible without full statehood. However, “under the 23rd Amendment of the Constitution, the District of Columbia is allocated three electors and treated like a State for purposes of the Electoral College” [see 5].
Candidates must actually go campaigning acre-by-acre to persuade as many people that they are the right person for the job.
Most states do not split electors but instead practice “winner takes all” — however, assigning discrete numbers of electors to regions and doing smaller winner-takes-all rounds would add back this lost “resolution” to some degree.
Definitely there will be times when the popular vote does not agree with the coverage vote, and that’s by design that the coverage vote is the priority. We did not start tracking the popular vote until the election of 1824 [see 3], although there are excellent estimates available [see 2].
You could move to a more sparsely populated area with an equal or greater number of electoral votes and exert extra influence on the presidential election. Of course, thresholds at the state and county level cause convolution in this regard [see 6, image immediately below].
“Wyoming has the power!” with a whopping 3 electoral votes (270 to win).
Conclusion
The Electoral Vote or Coverage Vote or Land Vote is better than the popular vote because it includes long-term-interest-holding landowners and residents who have more at risk given their property assertions and therefore deserve an equal voice because of their skin in the game.
Now teach the kids.
[1] Check out that distinction between population and coverage with a clickable selection bubble. https://engaging-data.com/county-electoral-map-land-vs-population/
[2] Check that population participation chart out and tell me voting ought not be mandatory. http://www.electproject.org/national-1789-present
[3] Clickable timeline of the electoral maps. https://www.270towin.com/historical-presidential-elections/timeline/
The election of 1824: https://www.270towin.com/1824_Election/
[4] Jasper Johns is a great artist. https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-jasper-johns-icon-20th-century-painting
[5] Washington D.C. does have 3 electors in the Electoral College. “Under the 23rd Amendment of the Constitution, the District of Columbia is allocated three electors and treated like a State for purposes of the Electoral College.” https://www.archives.gov/electoral-college/allocation
[6] Therefore, voting power or influence is Electoral Votes ÷ Population of State, making WY the strongest in terms of “voter power.” http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/map_of_the_week/2012/11/presidential_election_a_map_showing_the_vote_power_of_all_50_states.html