Presidential Gerrymandering: The Problem and the Meta-Problem

Joseph Fishkin

Following up on Gerard’s post, I agree that there is nothing wrong with states changing the way they allocate their electoral votes in presidential elections. But the problem of partisans switching the rules around for short-term political reasons is only the beginning of what is problematic about the plan now being floated in Pennsylvania to allocate electoral votes by Congressional district.

Thomas Jefferson wrote in a letter in 1800 that allocating electoral college votes by states would be fine, and doing it by congressional districts would be as good or better—“it is merely a question whether we will divide the United States into sixteen or one hundred and thirty-seven districts” (today, that’s 50 or 435)—but that a mix of the two would be a problem. It would “give a result very different from what would be the sentiment of the whole people of the United States, were they assembled together.” These comments reflect a complete innocence of the technologies of modern partisan gerrymandering. Today, presidential races conducted only in “swing” states are narrow and exclusive enough. Presidential races conducted only in the even narrower confines of “swing” Congressional districts would be even worse, particularly in races like 2012 that immediately follow a redistricting cycle, when Congressional districts are as gerrymandered as they will be for a decade. (Population shifts generally leave more districts competitive by the end of a decade than at the start.)

Even so, Jefferson was right that a hybrid electoral college mixing statewide-winner-take-all with congressional-district-based rules—i.e. what we would have as more states go the way of Maine and Nebraska—almost certainly increases the chances of an undemocratic result, defined in his terms (“a result very different from what would be the sentiment of the whole people of the United States”). Specifically it almost certainly increases the chances that even in a two-candidate race, most Americans could vote for one candidate, and the winner would be the other.

And this leads me to the more concerning meta-problem that this Pennsylvania initiative reflects. Before the 2000 election, there was a great deal of disagreement about whether the electoral college favored one party or the other, in comparison to the obvious democratic baseline, a national popular vote. In those more innocent days, some pundits theorized that Bush was likely to win the popular vote and lose the electoral college—the reverse of how things turned out. (Some suggested that Gore might not be a legitimate leader if he were to win under such circumstances; there were many questions.) Uncertainty about the direction, if any, of the partisan tilt of the electoral college allowed members of both parties, for a time, to agree with Jefferson that the point of a Presidential election, in the end, is to produce a result that reflects the sentiment of “the whole people of the United States.” Now we are living through a different and more partisan time. Regardless of the merits of the Pennsylvania plan, the very fact that the majority leader of the Pennsylvania state senate would propose it reflects a different configuration of political sentiments and democratic norms: no longer do we all agree that the national popular vote confers legitimacy. Instead, some openly propose moves to shore up their party’s chances of winning the electoral vote regardless of the popular vote. If this change is real, it suggests that the idea that the President is there to represent all the people of the United States may be in trouble. And that could make serious discussions about electoral college reform very difficult.
Posted 3:46 PM by Joseph Fishkin [link]