The United States of America prides itself on being the original and oldest democracy, and certainly the people have significant power in the makeup of the government. However, it is not a direct democracy by any means. Rather than being direct, America governs through representative democracy, where government officials are meant to make decisions on behalf of their constituents. In many cases, the decisions of the government are made by representatives who are not equally apportioned power based on population. Because of this, citizens living in certain areas of the country have disproportionate voting power to control the direction of the government. These elements of American government veer from the democratic ideal; two examples this paper will focus on are the Senate and the Electoral College.

The Electoral College purposely gives citizens of certain states more voting power than others, bringing undue attention to a handful of states while the rest of the country is neglected. It was established by the founding fathers as a compromise between the president being chosen by both Congress and the people. Instead of people voting directly for the president, article II section 1 of the Constitution requires that electors nominated by state party officials are the ones that vote for the president. Each state gets a number of electors equal to the number of congressional districts plus an extra two electors for the two senators. The addition of the two senators to the electoral count was done at the behest of the smaller states.

Once all the votes are in, the electors get to cast their votes. Generally, all the electors vote for the candidate that won in their state, except for in two states: Maine and Nebraska. These states’ electors vote for the candidate that won their district, and then the two electors with the senator’s votes are given to the one that won the popular vote in the state. However, the Constitution does not require electors to cast their votes to the winner of the state, or even the winner of the district. The electors are allowed to vote for anyone they would like to. When an elector deviates from the vote in the state, they are called a faithless elector. In American electoral history, there have only been 156 total faithless electors, including 10 in the 2016 presidential election. Although there have never been enough faithless electors to change the outcome of an election, it makes the possibility of a close race dangerous. The presidency could be in the hands of just a few people.

The number of votes each state gets is far from equitable. As similar as the population of every congressional district may be, it is the two senators’ votes which throw off the proportions. Without taking into consideration whether a state is considered a “swing state” or how much more media attention certain states receive than others, the electoral college overwhelmingly makes citizens of smaller states’ votes more valuable than citizens of bigger states’. Take for example Florida, the third largest state, and Alaska, the third smallest state. Florida has a population of around 22.24 million while Alaska has one of about 730,000 as of 2022. In a presidential election, Florida gets 31 votes while Alaska gets 3. This means that one vote in Florida represents around 717,000 people, and one vote in Alaska represents 243,000 people. Thus giving an Alaskan 3.0 times the voting power of a Floridian. The disparities get more extreme on both sides of the bell curve. A Vermonter’s vote is worth 3.5 times a Texan’s vote, and a Wyomingite’s is worth 3.7 times that of a Californian’s. 

Removing the two senators’ votes from the state would make the electoral college more proportional, but still not perfect. To simulate this, I used what I call The Goldberg Theorem. I ran an analysis using this simpler approach - the number of electoral votes for each state equals its number of representatives. I evaluated for each state whether this would make their electoral power, which I define as the number of a state’s electoral votes divided by the total number of electoral votes, closer to their portion of the population. 

PC = U.S. population, PS = state population, EP = proposed electoral count for the state, 

EA = actual electoral count for the state, TA = actual electoral total, TP = proposed electoral total 

EP = round((PS/PC)/TP) (This is how Representatives are apportioned, and how I propose allocating electoral votes)

EA = EP + 2 (This is how the electoral college is currently apportioned)

I = |EP/TP  - PS/PC| < |EA/TA - PS/PC| (Indicates whether new approach makes electoral power closer to proportion of population) 

(Note: TA is currently 538, and TP would be 436, because D.C. would get one vote. For previous elections, totals are different.)

My analysis showed that for 47 of the 50 states, this new approach would lead to improvement, i.e. the electoral count would better reflect the proportion of population. Smaller states, which currently have disproportionate electoral power, would have less, and large states, which currently have less power than their population would indicate, would have more. There are three states whose electoral power would be further from their proportion of the population. These are all average sized states, and the difference between the two approaches is minuscule.

I then analyzed how this different approach would have impacted previous elections. I analyzed all close elections which I defined as 36 electoral votes or fewer. For each candidate in an election, the following is the formula for their electoral count in the proposed system:

EP = EA - 2s

s = number of states that the candidate won

There are 3 elections whose results would be changed by this proposal. In 2 of those elections, 2000 and 1876, the results would have been changed to reflect the popular vote. In one of those elections, 1916, the results would have been changed to no longer reflect the popular vote. The 1916 election was unusual because not only did Woodrow Wilson win a larger number of states, but in many of those states he won in a landslide. For example, he won 96% of South Carolina. Nevertheless, overall, this new system would have made national election results more closely reflect the popular vote. Furthermore, my analysis also shows how the addition of the two senators made the electoral college less democratic in that the electoral counts are not as reflective of the state’s populations. Additionally, I have demonstrated that this had a real impact on subsequent national elections, most recently in the infamous 2000 election between George W. Bush and Al Gore. In that election with my proposal, the hanging chads would have been irrelevant because Gore would have been so far ahead in the electoral count that Florida would not have mattered.

The electoral college draws campaign attention away from the country, and focuses it on only a handful of states. The states visited by a presidential candidate are generally swing states, or states where the candidates are polling over/under 6 percentage points. In the 2020 presidential election, only 17 states were visited by either or both candidates, totaling to 212 campaign visits. 204 of those visits were to only 12 states, and 124 were to just Pennsylvania, Florida, Ohio, and North Carolina. Small states, which the electoral college is supposed to “protect”, get no attention – neither do a lot of the big states like California, Illinois, and New York, which are already safe Democratic strongholds. Since their statehoods, every president has won either Pennsylvania or Florida. In a five-minute segment from PragerU, a conservative website that makes short animations to give right-wing approaches to political issues, speaker Tara Ross made the claim that “if winning were only about getting the most votes, a candidate might focus his efforts in the biggest cities or the biggest states. Why would that candidate care about what people in West Virginia, or Iowa, or Montana think?” And the answer is that most candidates do not. Candidates do not focus on the most electorally powerful states unless they are a swing state. 

There is a plan, however, to make the electoral college obsolete. The only way to formally get rid of the electoral college is an amendment change to the constitution, which requires a supermajority in both the House and Senate, as well as 38 state legislatures. An increasingly polarizing political landscape makes this approach highly unlikely. However, there is another way to weaken the electoral college. The constitution says that the states must be the ones that vote, however there are few rules on who they vote for. Thus, a coalition currently comprising 16 states have signed what is called the National Popular Vote Compact. Its intent is to ensure no candidate wins the presidency with a minority of the country supporting them. Here is how it works: Once the coalition gets enough states needed to guarantee an electoral victory (270 votes), those states will agree to give their votes to the winner of the national popular vote, rather than the winner of a certain state. This way, it is as if the electoral college was not even there. So far, all the states have joined in are predominantly blue states as the only presidents to be elected without a national majority have been republican. But there are still other somewhat blue states such as Michigan and Pennsylvania which have not signed on. The reasoning goes back to campaign attention. The electoral college allows these states to get more attention during campaign season. Candidates visit, people care about them, and their voices are heard. It is unlikely that those states would want to partake in a coalition that takes that attention away from them.

Similarly to the electoral college, the Senate is a representative governing body which is hugely disproportionate. Article I section III of the Constitution reads that “The Senate of the United States shall be composed of two Senators from each State, chosen by the Legislature thereof, for six years; and each Senator shall have one Vote.” No matter how big or small the state is, every state needs to have two senators. This creates a power dynamic which once again gives certain states more power than others. Given that every senator has one vote, they have 1% of the voting power in the Senate. However, Senator Alex Padilla, a Democrat from California, represents around 19,515,000 people. (population of California divided by two). That is around 5.983% of the total population. His Republican colleague, Cynthia Lummis from Wyoming, also gets one vote. However, she represents around 290,000 people, which is not even a tenth of a percent of the total population. 

With these rules in place, it is possible for a party to gain a majority in the senate with just 25,460,000 people, or 7.7% of the total population. If a party’s candidates receive approximately 50% of the total votes of the 25 smallest states, they will have a majority in the Senate. Though a discrepancy of that size is unlikely, the majority in the senate has been disproportionate in recent years. The 117th congress saw a 50-50 split in the Senate for the first time in 20 years. Despite both parties having an equal number of senators, the Democrats represented 56.5% of voters, whereas the Republicans represented a mere 43.5% of voters. Similarly in 2018, the Democrats won 18 million more votes, yet the Republicans still had a 2 seat advantage. The last time the Republicans represented a majority of voters was in 1996, and since then, they have had a majority in the Senate in 7 out of the 12 congresses.

Why does the United States need the electoral college, and why does it need a second legislative body if both are undemocratic? It does not. Since getting rid of the electoral college means changing the constitution, the best bet for a more democratic electoral system is either my approach, or the National Popular Vote Compact. As for the Senate, there is no particular need for a second legislative body. The House of Representatives is far more proportional to the population because each congressional district has around 700,000 people. It could serve as the sole legislative body. When the details of the country’s representative system are analyzed, it raises the question of how democratic the United States actually is. If we want to continue to be a beacon of democracy to the world, then perhaps these two bodies need to be reformed.