Since the election, there have been a number of calls to end the electoral college system.  The New York Times asked “But why should the votes of Americans in California or New York count for less than those in Idaho or Texas?”.  A journalist for the New Republic stated that “white rural states, which are already massively overrepresented in the Senate, hardly need further overrepresentation when choosing the president.”

This got me wondering, does the electoral college really benefit white, rural states?  I grabbed data from the US Census¹ and calculated the representation of voters in the electoral college by state to to find out².

It’s pretty clear that places like Wyoming and the Dakotas are over-represented in the Electoral College, but what hasn’t been mentioned much in the news is how places like Texas (not particularly white, but certainly conservative) get the short end of the stick. If we look at electoral college representation versus how white and rural the state is, the picture is not as simple as I might have expected.

“Rural” here is defined as living in a town with less than 60,000 residents, and it turns out that a lot of states have a lot of white people, and a lot of people living outside of big cities. (You can play with this graphic and zoom in on big clusters to get a finer view.) The states are also color-coded by voting record (with states that swung at least once in the last 4 elections in purple.) The size of the circle represents the amount of representation each voter is afforded in the electoral college.

There are definitely a bunch of over-represented states that are very white and very rural, but what struck me was the representation of places like Hawaii and Washington DC (both very democratic-leaning and not very white at all.)

If we look at just electoral college over/under-representation by state voting record, we can see that the “average” amount of representation for Democratic-leaning and Republican-leaning states is not so different (an average of 142% versus %146, respectively.)

Small effects can be important in determining the outcome of elections, but the most interesting thing I noticed here was the under-representation of the swing states. In fact, in the 2016 election (where many of the swing states went Republican) the average representation of states voting for Trump was 132% versus 138% for Clinton. So it was actually voters in the blue states that were more represented.

So is the electoral college a good system? Well, it’s still true that voters in some states have more than 3 times the representation of voters in other states, and a president could win with less than 25% of the popular vote. But the winner-take-all aspect of it seems to cause much more of the problem than the over-representation of states with small populations. (Perhaps more on that in another post.)

But the point I want to make is that over-representation of small states in the electoral college is not favoring one party over the other, so this should not be a partisan issue. We should agree to replace it with something that gives the same influence to citizens in Texas and California as it does to citizens in Washington, DC and Vermont. As long as it’s framed (incorrectly!) in a partisan way, we as a country are going to have a much more difficult time reforming it.

^{1. The census data I used was from the last census in 2010 and I looked at all people over 17 rather than only eligible voters.  But barring some large systematic error, the numbers should reflect eligible voters in 2016 to a pretty good first approximation. ↩}

^{2. There are 237 million people of eligible voting age (ie. over 17) in the US, and 538 electoral college votes. If everyone’s vote counted equally, that would mean each electoral college vote would represent 440,000 people. In other words, each voter should count as 1/400,000 of an electoral college vote. To get the percent average per state, I divided the number of electoral college votes by the number of eligible voters in that state, and found what percentage of the national average voters in that state represented. (For example, Vermont has 3 electoral college votes and 500,000 people, so each voter counts for 1/165,000 of an electoral college vote, or 267% of the national average.)↩}.

NOTE: All the code to produce these plots is here.