Crossposted on Mediafuturenow.com
Randall Lane wrote a provocative piece in Monday’s New York Times suggesting a “ballot buddy system” among the states to permit apportioning of electoral votes among counties or congressional districts. The idea seems like one of those suggestions likely to go nowhere, except when you realize that (a) 2 states (Maine and Nebraska) have already moved in that direction, (b) the 2000 election may have permanently disencumbered any remaining pillars of the infallibility of the electoral college system and (c) the Obama campaign’s social media breakthroughs may have demonstrated the irrelevance of the system in the first place.
(Full disclosure: Lane’s current company, Doubledown Media, is a corporate law client of my law firm.)
In “A Ballot Buddy System”, Lane argues that the big win for deconstructing the electoral college was vividly illustrated in Nebraska, where Hillary Clinton and Sarah Palin both campaigned in Omaha in the last weeks of the 2008 campaign – something not otherwise thought likely for an otherwise reliably red state. When counties are in play, versus whole states, “winner takes all”, a different campaign dynamic kicks in.
Of course, the Obama campaign campaigned just as vigorously in reliably red counties in Ohio and Virginia, states that were viewed as vulnerable but where lower loss margins in Republican counties could sway the state-wide picture. It may therefore not be entirely predictable what would happen if apportioned voting becomes the national norm.
The constitutional argument for apportionment is that abolishing the electoral college would require a constitutional amendment, while individual state action of apportioned delegations would not.
As background on the problem, Lane’s essay is well-written in the Forbes tradition of understandable explanations for complex problems. (In a former life, Lane was Washington bureau chief for Forbes.) But Lane’s most nifty idea is that of his title, suggesting a system where equal-size electoral states (e.g. New York and Texas) that are, respectively, reliably Democratic and Republican can be persuaded to go the apportionment route to soften the political blow of the loss of a state-wide red or blue margin. That may be, but that too gets complicated by the disproportionately skewed demographics of a state like New York, heavily Democratic in just a few, albeit populous counties, while Texas is more broadly Republican.
Which simply raises obstacles that have to be gotten around, but that need not kill the deal.
What’s more, there’s political precedent for this sort of thing. The admission to the Union of Alaska and Hawaii in 1959 was smoothed by recognition of the states’ balanced party representation – Alaska was likely to be heavily Republican, and Hawaii equally so Democratic. For some background on this, see this AP story from June 30, 1959.
