I'm sorry, but this is a horrible plan. You sort of brushed over the problems with implementing split presidential voting, but those problems are insurmountable. The fact that large states could never implement this plan without coordinating means that you would need some sort of interstate compact in order to make it work. So it's just a worse version of the NPVIC. Outside of an interstate compact, there is absolutely no prospect whatsoever for this plan being implemented nationwide. But it's even worse than that, because you would need every single state to sign on - otherwise, the states that do sign on are just diluting their power compared to those that don't. (There's a similar problem in the Republican primaries where the winner-take-all states have vastly disproportionate influence on the results compared to the proportional states). And given that the current effort to abolish the EC is led by one party, it gets even worse: If only the blue states decided to split their votes, then we would just get an electoral college that's insanely biased towards Republicans, so much so that it would be completely impossible for a Democrat to ever win (except many decades or even centuries from now when electoral coalitions change enough). So no blue states are incentivized to do this. And given that red states are dominated by people who want to keep the EC, how on Earth would anyone get them to agree to split their votes?
Now maybe your plan is to only have the states whose CDs currently vote unanimously split their votes, so that it has no effect on the EC in the short run, and thus there's no disincentive for them to do so. The problem is, there will never be a time when a state as large as California or Texas has all of its CDs vote unanimously. So that plan is a non-starter. And even if all of the states were small enough that it was feasible, it would take centuries at least for every state to go through a period where their CDs vote unanimously. I'd rather not have to wait that long! (There's also still a disincentive - even for a states whose CDs currently vote unanimously, splitting their electoral votes still means handing some of them to the other party when the time inevitably comes that they don't vote unanimously).
Split voting is also not any better than the statewide Electoral College anyway - in fact, it's probably worse. The problem of the election being determined by a small number of swing states, and the votes of everyone outside of them not mattering, still remains. It's just that now it's swing districts, rather than swing states. Once again, only a small percentage of districts are swing districts, and everyone else doesn't matter.
On top of that, split voting is actually more likely to differ from the popular vote winner than the EC. The PV differs from the EV because, due to the way votes are distributed geographically and how state borders happen to be drawn, the safe states of one party have more wasted votes than those of the other party, leading to the tipping point state being skewed in favor of the other party relative to the country. There was a strong Republican bias in 2016 and 2020 because Democrats won by massive margins in California and New York, while Republicans won by small margins in the comparably-large Texas and Florida, so the Democrats ended up with way more wasted votes. (That's also why there was almost no EC bias this year - Republicans ran up the margin in TX and FL, and Democrats won CA and NY by smaller margins. Almost all the safe states shifted right relative to the country, so there were fewer wasted Democratic votes and more wasted Republican votes). But this exact same problem will happen with Congressional districts. Except it will be even worse because, unlike states, whose borders are mostly fixed, the CDs are redrawn every ten years by people who can do so with the explicit goal of biasing the Electoral College in their favor.
And this isn't just theoretical: Using the split voting system would have led to Romney winning in 2012 despite losing the popular vote by a substantial margin (much larger than the margin Hillary won by in 2016). Split voting also wouldn't have changed the result in 2016, and I'm not sure about 2020 (I can't find the stat of how many CDs Biden won). So split voting would've only made the EC bias *worse* in recent elections. And due to the prevalence of gerrymandering, I expect that this would be a persistent result, not just a coincidence of how things lined up in any elections. Whichever party wins big in the year before reapportionment (which would be particularly big if it was a midterm year) would get to bias the EC massively in their favor. (It should be noted, by the way, that the EC was actually biased against Romney in 2012, so the gerrymandering bias was enough to not only cancel out the EC bias of the split vote, but to cause an even bigger bias in the opposite direction. So the gerrymandering bias could be even larger in a scenario where it lines up with the regular EC bias rather than counteracting it).
So in conclusion, split voting would be even more impossible to implement than the plans to effectively abolish the EC, and it doesn't give electoral reformers any of the things they want. In fact, it's probably a worse system than the Electoral College, so we shouldn't implement it even if we could.
Split voting has been successfully implemented in both a swing state, and a safely red state. Whatever the theoretical critiques, it has demonstrated feasibility.
Split voting doesn’t necessarily rely on districts. A state can assign their state’s vote on the popular vote if they wish.
I agree that split voting based on proportion of the PV would be good if every state implemented it. Feasibility is still an issue though. The fact that two small states have implemented it doesn't prove that it's feasible to implement it nationwide. How would we ever get California and Texas to implement it? There's just no way for it to happen without some agreement between all the states.
Meanwhile, I think the path forward for the NPVIC is feasible, if difficult. All we have to do is wait for the EC to start benefitting Democrats again. Then Republicans will suddenly be against it (since I don't believe for a second that they support it for principled reasons no matter how much they claim to), so some red states could sign on, pushing it over the majority.
And I don't think most of the worries about legitimacy are warranted. In the article, you portrayed it as though the NPVIC would come out of nowhere on Election Day and take everyone by surprise. But that's obviously not what would happen. It's public knowledge which states have signed onto it, so as soon as they get a 270 vote majority, it will be major national news. Coverage of the next election will take into account the fact that it's the PV now and no longer talk about swing states. The campaigns will take this into account as well. Everyone who's even slightly tuned in to politics will know. The only people who won't know until Election Day will be the people who pay so little attention to politics that they probably didn't even know what the EC was in the first place.
Now, defection could be an issue - ideally, we get enough states in on it to make it impossible - but that would have to happen *before* the election. States can't change their methodology of vote allocation after the election is already over. But this issue also affects proportional voting. Nebraska tried to defect from it this year and were stopped in part only because Maine threatened to defect as well.
>Personally, while I sympathize with ideas against direct democracy, the majority of pro-electoral-college support comes from the practical reasons of Republicans wanting to win.
And the majority of anti-electoral-college support comes from the practical reasons of Democrats wanting to win.
Congressional district voting opens the door to gerrymandering the Presidential election. State legislatures could design districts so that the state ends up giving more of its electoral college votes to the candidate that actually lost the popular vote in that state.
I'm sorry, but this is a horrible plan. You sort of brushed over the problems with implementing split presidential voting, but those problems are insurmountable. The fact that large states could never implement this plan without coordinating means that you would need some sort of interstate compact in order to make it work. So it's just a worse version of the NPVIC. Outside of an interstate compact, there is absolutely no prospect whatsoever for this plan being implemented nationwide. But it's even worse than that, because you would need every single state to sign on - otherwise, the states that do sign on are just diluting their power compared to those that don't. (There's a similar problem in the Republican primaries where the winner-take-all states have vastly disproportionate influence on the results compared to the proportional states). And given that the current effort to abolish the EC is led by one party, it gets even worse: If only the blue states decided to split their votes, then we would just get an electoral college that's insanely biased towards Republicans, so much so that it would be completely impossible for a Democrat to ever win (except many decades or even centuries from now when electoral coalitions change enough). So no blue states are incentivized to do this. And given that red states are dominated by people who want to keep the EC, how on Earth would anyone get them to agree to split their votes?
Now maybe your plan is to only have the states whose CDs currently vote unanimously split their votes, so that it has no effect on the EC in the short run, and thus there's no disincentive for them to do so. The problem is, there will never be a time when a state as large as California or Texas has all of its CDs vote unanimously. So that plan is a non-starter. And even if all of the states were small enough that it was feasible, it would take centuries at least for every state to go through a period where their CDs vote unanimously. I'd rather not have to wait that long! (There's also still a disincentive - even for a states whose CDs currently vote unanimously, splitting their electoral votes still means handing some of them to the other party when the time inevitably comes that they don't vote unanimously).
Split voting is also not any better than the statewide Electoral College anyway - in fact, it's probably worse. The problem of the election being determined by a small number of swing states, and the votes of everyone outside of them not mattering, still remains. It's just that now it's swing districts, rather than swing states. Once again, only a small percentage of districts are swing districts, and everyone else doesn't matter.
On top of that, split voting is actually more likely to differ from the popular vote winner than the EC. The PV differs from the EV because, due to the way votes are distributed geographically and how state borders happen to be drawn, the safe states of one party have more wasted votes than those of the other party, leading to the tipping point state being skewed in favor of the other party relative to the country. There was a strong Republican bias in 2016 and 2020 because Democrats won by massive margins in California and New York, while Republicans won by small margins in the comparably-large Texas and Florida, so the Democrats ended up with way more wasted votes. (That's also why there was almost no EC bias this year - Republicans ran up the margin in TX and FL, and Democrats won CA and NY by smaller margins. Almost all the safe states shifted right relative to the country, so there were fewer wasted Democratic votes and more wasted Republican votes). But this exact same problem will happen with Congressional districts. Except it will be even worse because, unlike states, whose borders are mostly fixed, the CDs are redrawn every ten years by people who can do so with the explicit goal of biasing the Electoral College in their favor.
And this isn't just theoretical: Using the split voting system would have led to Romney winning in 2012 despite losing the popular vote by a substantial margin (much larger than the margin Hillary won by in 2016). Split voting also wouldn't have changed the result in 2016, and I'm not sure about 2020 (I can't find the stat of how many CDs Biden won). So split voting would've only made the EC bias *worse* in recent elections. And due to the prevalence of gerrymandering, I expect that this would be a persistent result, not just a coincidence of how things lined up in any elections. Whichever party wins big in the year before reapportionment (which would be particularly big if it was a midterm year) would get to bias the EC massively in their favor. (It should be noted, by the way, that the EC was actually biased against Romney in 2012, so the gerrymandering bias was enough to not only cancel out the EC bias of the split vote, but to cause an even bigger bias in the opposite direction. So the gerrymandering bias could be even larger in a scenario where it lines up with the regular EC bias rather than counteracting it).
So in conclusion, split voting would be even more impossible to implement than the plans to effectively abolish the EC, and it doesn't give electoral reformers any of the things they want. In fact, it's probably a worse system than the Electoral College, so we shouldn't implement it even if we could.
I’m happy to hear your alternative suggestion.
Split voting has been successfully implemented in both a swing state, and a safely red state. Whatever the theoretical critiques, it has demonstrated feasibility.
Split voting doesn’t necessarily rely on districts. A state can assign their state’s vote on the popular vote if they wish.
I agree that split voting based on proportion of the PV would be good if every state implemented it. Feasibility is still an issue though. The fact that two small states have implemented it doesn't prove that it's feasible to implement it nationwide. How would we ever get California and Texas to implement it? There's just no way for it to happen without some agreement between all the states.
Meanwhile, I think the path forward for the NPVIC is feasible, if difficult. All we have to do is wait for the EC to start benefitting Democrats again. Then Republicans will suddenly be against it (since I don't believe for a second that they support it for principled reasons no matter how much they claim to), so some red states could sign on, pushing it over the majority.
And I don't think most of the worries about legitimacy are warranted. In the article, you portrayed it as though the NPVIC would come out of nowhere on Election Day and take everyone by surprise. But that's obviously not what would happen. It's public knowledge which states have signed onto it, so as soon as they get a 270 vote majority, it will be major national news. Coverage of the next election will take into account the fact that it's the PV now and no longer talk about swing states. The campaigns will take this into account as well. Everyone who's even slightly tuned in to politics will know. The only people who won't know until Election Day will be the people who pay so little attention to politics that they probably didn't even know what the EC was in the first place.
Now, defection could be an issue - ideally, we get enough states in on it to make it impossible - but that would have to happen *before* the election. States can't change their methodology of vote allocation after the election is already over. But this issue also affects proportional voting. Nebraska tried to defect from it this year and were stopped in part only because Maine threatened to defect as well.
>Personally, while I sympathize with ideas against direct democracy, the majority of pro-electoral-college support comes from the practical reasons of Republicans wanting to win.
And the majority of anti-electoral-college support comes from the practical reasons of Democrats wanting to win.
Very true.
Congressional district voting opens the door to gerrymandering the Presidential election. State legislatures could design districts so that the state ends up giving more of its electoral college votes to the candidate that actually lost the popular vote in that state.