How To Make Your State Irrelevant

As this map from electoral-vote.com shows, Colorado has 9 electoral votes and is a swing state, currently swinging in Kerry's direction. Why aren't both candidates spending more time in Colorado? There are several reasons, but one of them is that Colorado is holding a referendum this fall on whether to go to a proportional vote in the Electoral College. If it passes, the state of Colorado's 9 electoral votes will split 5-4, meaning that Colorado immediately becomes among the least valuable pickups for either candidate. (Of course, every little bit helps, and if this rule had been in place in 2000, Al Gore would have won the presidency, not even talking Florida into account. Then again, if almost anything had been different, Al Gore would have won the presidency. Then again, he actually did win the Presidency, but don't get me started....).

If Ohio, Pennsylvania, Florida, and other swing states were to adopt proportional electoral college voting, they too would become irrelevant just like Colorado, because both candidates could assume that they would pick up at most one or two electoral votes from winning. That would mean no candidate visits, and no saturation of the airwaves for months with political advertisements. (Hmmm, this is starting to sound like a pretty good deal.) The downside is less Presidential attention and less pork for the state during the years immediately preceding an election.

What would happen if all of the states went to proportional voting in the electoral college? As mentioned above, one result would be that the current swing states would be much less important, because candidates could expect to pick up only a net of one or two votes. Small states would still have an advantage in theory, but candidates' attentions would be more widely dispersed than they are now, and their attentions would shift to those states where the net gains would likely be more than one or two votes. Those would include the biggest (most populous) states, and states where a candidate might plausibly win by a landslide (greater than say, 55 or 60 percent) in the hopes of picking up an extra vote or two.

Is this a better system than we have now? Perhaps. But the change that would make the most sense is getting rid of the electoral college entirely. I suspect that if John Kerry were to win the electoral college but lose the popular vote, finally, there might be support for change. Generally speaking, the electoral college remains because the combination of winning the electoral college and losing the popular vote happens so infrequently, and because at any point in our nation's history one major political party believes that it has an advantage under the current system. That effectively blocks a constitutional amendment. However, if the candidate who won the popular vote was denied the Presidency twice in two successive election cycles, and if each political party lost a chance at the Presidency because of the current system, there might finally be strong bipartisan support for a change.