It seems like during every presidential election, there are talks of abolishing the Electoral College and the 2020 presidential election was no different. I did an analysis to see if we should get rid of the Electoral College.
Not Every Vote Is Equal
There are a total of 538 electoral votes in the US with each state getting a specific number of electors based on congressional delegation. I took the total number of electoral votes, 538, and divided that by the total registered voters in the US to determine the average worth of each vote. To find the weight of a vote in each state compared to the average, I divided each state's electoral votes by the number of registered voters in that state, then divided again by the average worth of each vote. The figure below is a choropleth map showing the worth of each state's vote in relation to the average. You can see that there is a huge disparity in vote worth. A vote from Wyoming is worth 4 times as much as a vote from South Carolina. The midwestern states seems to benefit from this.
In a democracy, every vote should be equal. Electoral College supporters would argue that the US is a constitutional republic not a democracy. The US is both, a representative democracy, where the people vote for representatives to exercise political power on our behalf and why should every vote not be equal? Votes are equal in every other political election.
Electoral College Doesn't Help Agriculture States
A pro Electoral College argument is that it helps the agriculture states by giving more weight to their votes, the candidates are forced to campaign there too. The map below shows where the presidential candidates campaign events were held starting on August 28, 2020 (day after the end of the RNC) and ending on November 3, 2020 (Election Day).
The result of the 'win it all' for each state results in battle states. In 2020, most of the campaign visits were in the battleground states known as the 'Blue Wall', there were no campaign visits in the midwestern agricultural states.
The figure below combines the previous two figures into a scatterplot. We can see that candidates don't care about the state voter weight when campaigning, since it's a winner take all situation, they're busy campaigning in battle ground states.
Electoral College Prevents City Campaigning
Another argument is that the Electoral College prevents candidates from just campaigning in large cities like NYC and LA. There are 260MM registered voters in the US and to win the popular vote you would need at least 130MM votes. I looked at the largest cities in the US and to get 130MM votes you'd need to win the largest 139 cities and this is assuming the candidate wins 100% of the votes in those cities. The map below shows the location of these 139 cities and they're dispersed across the US, not concentrated in one specific region.
Maybe back in the early days of the US, the Electoral College served it's purpose, but maybe it's an outdated process. It doesn't prevent whatever it was intended and it's absurd to not have every vote be equal. With the 'win it all' rule, you could be throwing away 49% of the votes of each state. I could go digress and go on about the faithless elector problem but I honestly just wanted to make maps in Python.
Python skills: import Excel sheets, merges, if/then, plotly choropleth and scatterplots
Cover photo credit: NYTimes
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