American democracy is characterized by a unique institution: the electoral college. The electoral college aggregates the individual or popular vote during American elections for president and vice-president into the electoral vote: “the votes of 538 ordinary citizens” who are themselves selected by the national electorate and distributed among the various American states in proportion to the number of seats each state has in the American Congress. For example, California has 54 electoral votes while New York has 33.
To win the popular vote in a state is also to win the electoral vote apportioned to the state. To win the position of president or vice-president, the candidate must win a majority of the electoral vote. Otherwise, if the electoral votes won are not a majority but are simply greater than that for any of the other individual candidates but who nonetheless, collectively, hold a majority of the electoral votes, then the House of Representatives (HR) in the American Congress gets to pick the winner.
For example, in 1824, John Quincy Adams was picked by the HR over Andrew Jackson because, although Jackson had more electoral votes (99) than Adams (84), Jackson’s electoral votes were not a majority: Adams and the other candidates had, among them, 162 electoral votes. (The number of electoral votes then was smaller than the present 538.)
The electoral college was contrived by the founding fathers of American democracy to prevent the tyranny of the majority. The founding fathers did not wish American elections to be determined by mob mentality. A mathematically rigorous demonstration of the soundness of the intuition of the founding fathers, however, was only afforded in the mid-1990s by the physicist, Alan Natapoff, in an article published in the peer reviewed journal, Public Choice.
Nataoff’s proof begins by first criticizing the mathematical arguments of those determined to abolish the electoral college. Natapoof noted those arguments essentially assumed that voters decided who to vote for through the toss of a fair coin because this considerably simplified the mathematics involved. Natapoff objected that this was hardly realistic. He argued that, in the real world, it was more likely that voter decisions were at least slightly biased by the social environment to favor a particular candidate. If so, then you do not want to scrap the electoral college: The electoral college system (or some other districting system for aggregating votes) would then act to increase voting power (i.e. the capacity of a single vote to break a deadlock in votes). In turn, increased voting power is precisely what you want to avoid a tyranny of the majority: Candidates would then be unable to ignore the concerns of minorities without potentially committing political suicide.
If districting of votes is availed of, however, Natapoff warns that we should be prepared for cases in which losers of the popular vote would still win the election. Rather than seeing this as the thwarting of the popular will, Natapoff argues that they should rather be seen as a safeguard against candidates catering only to the majority. Surely that is a small price to be paid to save a democracy from the possibility of insensible excess and abuse inflicted on minorities and sanctified by the will of the majority.
Source: Hively, Will. 1996. “Math Against Tyranny.” Discover, November, vol. 17, pp. 74-85.
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