Is the Electoral College Inherently Racist? A Rebuttal to ‘The Votes of Black Americans Should Count Twice’
The electoral college is everyone's scapegoat, but is it inherently biased against black Americans? No and it may just weight black voter's more heavily than a popular vote.
Brandon Hasbrouck, Assistant Professor at Washington & Lee University, recently penned an article entitled, “The Votes of Black Americans Should Count Twice” in which he argues in favor of reweighting voters as a method to achieve reparations both for a long history and the modern disenfranchisement of Black Americans. The crux of the contemporary argument center’s around the electoral college. While Hasbrouck makes a larger argument for the need of voting reparations, what I write here will contest the first central claim: Does the electoral college inherently lead to the disenfranchisement of black Americans? To clarify this is not a refutation on the historical racially biased results the electoral college may have produced in the past or the racially motivated purposes of its origin. Rather, I hope to show that currently the electoral college prioritizes and represents black voters at or above the expectation of national demographics; i.e. the electoral college isn’t inherently biased against black Americans. I hope not to suggest that this representation necessarily leads to the government enacting adequate policy for black Americans, (it doesn’t) but that this inadequate policy isn’t directly caused by the electoral college. Furthermore, I will argue the inverse position as well. Namely that the abolishment of the electoral college in favor of an evenly weighted national popular vote system would not necessarily lead to better representation, and in fact, may lead to the further disenfranchisement of black Americans.
Voting Power Does Not Mean Representation
A state is awarded electors according to its total representation in congress; every state is awarded 2 for its senators and additional votes for each congressional district. Critics are right to point out that this leads to unequal voting power for each state. Hasbrouck argues, “Wyoming, which has just 580,000 residents and is 93 percent white, gets three electors… Georgia’s Fifth Congressional District—which includes Atlanta, has 710,000 residents, and is 58 percent Black—has no dedicated electors” he goes on to say “This devaluation of Black votes allows our political system to ignore Black lives, and the consequences are devastating.”
Remember how important Wyoming was to the 2020 election? Nope, me either. In fact none of the five highest states or territories by voting power — Vermont, Washington D.C (notably 47% Black), North Dakota, and Alaska— received so much as a visit during the general election campaign. The states with the highest voting power naturally have the smallest populations who tend to live relatively homogeneous lives. As such the results of these states are largely predetermined and electorally insignificant. At most the electoral math they cause indirectly determines which states actually receive attention - the swing states.
2020 saw 11 states receive the bulk of spending and campaign stops —Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Texas, and Wisconsin. (excluding states that are statistical outliers, margin of victory < 5%, does not significantly alter results) These states have low electoral college voting power. New Hampshire and Nevada are the only two to break into the top 20. Michigan, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Florida, and Texas are all in the bottom 10.
This group of states display a wide cross section of representation for African Americans. (A) 3 are relatively close to matching black identification nationwide (13.4%): Pennsylvania (12.0%), Texas (12.9%), and Michigan (14.1%).Another three are well above nationwide demographics: Florida (16.9%), North Carolina (22.2%) and Georgia (32.6%). Black Americans are a statistically significant demographic across many of the most important states. Black Americans also represent 30% of all independent voters nationwide, a statistic candidates hoping to win over voters ought to account for. Even if independent registration does not equate to swing voters, base turnout remains a primary decider in first past the post elections. Black Americans were a statistically important section of swing state voters, and key individuals in deciding the race. A fact Hasbrouck alludes to multiple times in his article, despite saying the electoral college is sorted against them.
Swing states represent over 117.5 million Americans of which over 17.6 million identify as black. (A) African Americans represent 14.98% of individuals within swing states, statistically outweighing nationwide demographics (13.4%). Furthermore, there are just over 44 million people who identify as black in the United States meaning that nearly 40% of black Americans are represented in the 2020 swing states. To give a contrasting case, non-Hispanic white identifying Americans represented 67% of swing state voters, less than the 73% shown in nationwide demographics. 35.5% of all white Americans are represented within swing states. (B)
Black representation in swing states actually outpaces nationwide statistics. Black Americans hold significant voting bases in over half of all swing states. Ostensibly this ought to incentivize candidates to appeal to black voters. Whether or not candidates choose to do so, or if such representation actually leads to pro-black legislation is a different question. However, 2020 shows that the incentive structure of the electoral college is not inherently biased against black American representation.
Would a Popular Election better Represent Black Americans?
Even if the electoral college may not necessarily lead to improper representation of black Americans, this still begs the question: Would a popular vote system still increase black representation? Hasbrouck says of the electoral college, “Abolishing this system would mean that ballots cast by Black voters—or any voters, for that matter—would count the same.” However, equally counted votes do not necessarily mean that every voter has equal value to presidential candidates. Recent presidential elections have been relatively close. The past four contests have all been within 10 million votes, and on average just over 6 million.
Candidates only have so much time and money to spend. Popular voting systems anticipate that presidential campaigns put a premium in areas of the country in which they can reach the most voters and have the greatest opportunity to sway the population there. Stated differently, popular vote incentivizes campaigns to find the most cost effective strategy to overcome the 6 million voter hump needed to win the popular election. With this said there are definite limitations in predicting how people would vote in a new voting system. Everything known about US elections is known through the electoral college voting system. Voter turnout, number of swing voters, and winning margins are a function of candidate running campaigns focused on winning the electoral college not a popular vote. That being said, there are clear indications that a pure popular vote system could actually work to further disenfranchise black voters.
There is a partial inescapability of states themselves. Ad buys and campaign events are not isolated to exact destinations, but rather the greater metropolitan areas surrounding the region. States more or less determine where people are, and how many people live there. Considering this, the natural intuition of a presidential campaign is to spend the most time in high population states. The five most populous states represent over 37% of the entire country which would guarantee interest. However, Black Americans are proportionally underrepresented within this group of states only reaching 12.1%. (C) However, the 10 most populous states reach over 54% of the entire country, and Black Americans would be overrepresented making up 14.3 % of the population. (C) Finding a happy medium within these states would likely lead closely to the proper representation of Black Americans nationwide, however, as shown earlier, such representation may actually linger behind electoral college representation.
Furthermore, population size alone does not show the full picture. Simply campaigning to a large crowd doesn’t necessarily mean the candidate will win over those voters. There are diminishing returns for each side to spend campaign resources on decided voters. Campaigns would instead put a premium on reaching undecided and swing voters. A useful statistic to evaluate this is voter elasticity. Developed by 538, elasticity measures the corresponding polling swing of individual states relative to general election trends. States with elasticity over 1 make larger swings relative to the general election trend, and vice versa for states with elasticity under 1. Of the 10 most populated states, only Florida breaks into the top 50 in elasticity. The remaining 9 are in the bottom 50 with 6 holding elasticity below 1. Populated states tend to be relatively inelastic. This may divert some attention highly populated states would receive if based on population alone. Now, consider there are 16 states with proportionally greater African American representation than the U.S. average. (D) These states represent nearly 65% of all black individuals in the country. 10 of these states rank in the very bottom 12 for elasticity. (D) Again all but Florida rank in the bottom 50. A campaign hoping to win the popular vote will likely find it advantageous to prioritize more elastic territory leading to the disenfranchisement of states with high African Americans representation. ( continues after tweet)
Moving away from states specifically. Many hope that a popular vote system would allow for more effective local action in key areas that would better decide the election. The electoral college swing states would give way to swing counties; hotspots with large populations of undecided voters ripe for the taking. Here I must admit that the ideal information is lacking. County specific elasticity metrics would give more precise information. Despite this we can make safe assumptions. America’s largest cities would be likely first guesses, but considering New York City, Los Angeles, and Chicago are far from the most competitive cities there is likely little to gain there for any prospective presidential candidate. Instead, I looked specifically at the most populated American counties with relatively close margins of victory (less than 10%) as prediction for would-be swing counties. The 25 most populated counties fitting these parameters represent nearly 30 million Americans across 10 states. (E) However, 11 counties, accounting for nearly 60% of the group’s total population, come from just 3 states - Florida, Texas and California. When it comes to representation black Americans account for barely over 10 % of these county’s population. Among the top 5, which represents over 50% of the total population, African Americans represent 7.5%.
Takeaways
In full disclosure, I find myself more often than not in favor of the abolition of the electoral college. However, I do so generally as an argument in support of democratic ideals, and against the arbitrary nature that the electoral college decides which voters are important. However, as someone who is also concerned with minority representation, I believe there should be a real concern in moving to a purely popular vote system. There are many ways to piece together the highest cumulative result of any candidate in a field, and those methods certainly do not have to include historically disenfranchised groups.
A departure from the electoral college could forever change American politics for the good as well. However, in determining to go down this path weeding out weak arguments is just as important as building up a strong one. Hasbrouck’s claim that the electoral college leads to inherently racist outcomes, either because of state voting power or racialized origins, couldn’t be further from the truth. Disenfranchised American’s shouldn’t believe that a popular vote system will necessarily make things fair. These are weak arguments. The voting population ought to know what they are getting themselves into well before jumping into a popular vote system. Doing so because it sounds good isn’t enough.
Very detailed analysis of a broken system. Wondering if you're cross-posting these pieces on Medium (check out Coffeelicious, for instance). Your pieces deserve more eyes!