New York Times slams the Electoral College

David Sommerstein forwarded me the New York Times’ review of the Electoral College, which doesn’t formally meet to select our next president for the next month.

The link is below and it’s worth reading. I regularly deride the Electoral College when I talk about politics — and I regularly hear a lot of loyalty to the institution.

But I’m convinced that this is an organ of our government that atrophied a long time ago.
Here’s a sample of the Times piece:

Voters in small states are favored because Electoral College votes are based on the number of senators and representatives a state has. Wyoming’s roughly 500,000 people get three electoral votes. California, which has about 70 times Wyoming’s population, gets only 55 electoral votes.

The Electoral College also makes America seem more divided along blue-red lines than it actually is. If you look at an Electoral College map, California appears solidly blue and Alabama solidly red. But if you look at a map of the popular votes, you see a more nuanced picture. More than 4.5 million Californians voted for Mr. McCain (roughly as many votes as he got in Texas), while about 40 percent of voters in Alabama cast a ballot for Mr. Obama.

One of the biggest problems with the Electoral College, of course, is that three times since the Civil War — most recently, with George W. Bush in 2000 — it has awarded the presidency to the loser of the popular vote. The president should be the candidate who wins the votes of the most Americans.

Amen, brother. Here’s the link:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/20/opinion/20thu1.html?_r=1&ref=opinion