So here’s to four years of non-specific ‘change’. After a solid 18 months of tedious, blanket media coverage, Barack Obama finally beat John McCain in the U.S. Presidential Election, and will now be the youngest and blackest president in American history. Obama has (at the time of writing) some 349 electoral votes to McCain’s 163 (and he only needed 270 to win). This looks like a good two-thirds majority, but is it really? Bear with me as we take a closer look at the statistics. (Sorry, but my eldest was reading up on citizenship for his Scouts badge, so I was doing some research….)
Obama clearly won the electoral vote. But what exactly is the ‘electoral vote’? Well, each state has a number of ‘electors’ which is calculated as the number of the senators the state has plus the number of representatives it has. Each state (but not DC or the territories) gets two senators, regardless of the population of the state (most populous: California with 36 million; least populous: Wyoming, with half a million). Hardly proportional representation! For the representatives, things are a little more balanced, with a fixed number of representatives being divided between all 50 states, depending on their individual populations. This fixed number of representatives is set at 435, and was originally based on an apparently-arbritrary policy of “one representative per 30,000 people”. This indeed equated to 435, for a population of 13 million, in 1789, but for today’s population of 300 million, there should in theory be 10,000 representatives. Either that or we accept that each representative represents 650,000 people, which seems a little thin on the ground for representation. Whatever. At least it’s (more or less) proportional, so (for example) California gets 53 representatives and Wyoming gets 3. In addition, DC (the District of Columbia), which isn’t a State at all, gets given a number of representatives “equal to the number held by the least populous state”, so also gets 3 regardless of population. On top of this, the territories of American Samoa, Guam, the U.S. Virgin Islands, and Puerto Rico each get one vote, again, regardless of population. Which means that DC, these four territories, and sparsely-populated states such as Wyoming, Vermont, Alaska and North Dakota have far more representation than they should statistically have. For example, Wyoming, with a population of 522,000, gets the same number of votes (3) as Montana, which has – at 957,000 – twice the population of Wyoming. And Mississippi gets only twice the number of votes (6) of Wyoming, despite having (at almost 3 million) six times the population!
So the allocation of electors to the states is flawed to begin with, being half bastardized proportionality (for the representatives) combined with fixed assignments (for the senate). But then this all gets knocked into a cocked hat by the fact that in 48 of the 50 states, the electoral vote is a ‘winner takes all’ competition, with whatever party gets the most voters statewide winning all of the electoral votes for that state. So in California, 61% of people voted for Obama, but he gets all 53 of the Californian electoral votes, rather than 32 (61% of 53). (For completeness, in the remaining two states of Maine and Nebraska things are more complicated, with one vote being decided per congressional district and two by state.) Which completely negates any semblance of accurate representation that the original model had!
All of which means that the electoral vote is hardly a fair representation of popularity (in its most literal sense). For that, we need to look to the popular vote. The popular vote looks at the number of individual people who voted. Sadly, it doesn’t count for anything in the Presidential election (only the electoral vote does) but it is worth considering, nonetheless. Now, Obama may have won 68% of the electoral vote, but he only won 52% of the popular vote. Think about that. On an individual basis, only 52% of the people who voted actually voted for Obama. Not quite the two-thirds majority, is it? But it gets worse. This is 52% of the people who voted. This election admittedly had record turnouts, but current estimates are that still only 60% of registered voters actually voted (maybe it would have been higher had people been able to text in their vote, as with American Idol!). Which means that only 31% (60% x 52%) of registered voters actually voted for Obama. Or put another way, 69% of people who were able to vote did not vote for Obama. Interesting.
Delving deeper, it’s worth noting that this is only taking into account registered voters. The U.S. Constitution lets every U.S. citizen over 18 (except for those that have been convicted of a felony) vote. According to the latest published government statistics, there are somewhere in the region of 220 million eligible voters in America (out of a population of more than 300 million). Around 75% of these are actually registered to vote. So let’s revise our figure again. 31% of registered voters voted for Obama. Which means that only 23% (75% x 31%) of eligible voters voted for Obama. So instead of having a two-thirds majority in favor of Obama if you accept the electoral votes numbers, we actually have a three-quarters majority against Obama based on the number of people who could have voted for him but presumably ‘chose’ not to (either by not registering to vote or by not turning up on voting day)!
Now, I’m not arguing that McCain should have won. He had even less of the popular vote, and therefore an even smaller percentage of eligible voters voted for him, but the point is that Obama’s victory is not the whitewash being claimed. Statistically, more people voted for no-one (121 million – 25% unregistered voters plus 40% of the registered voters who didn’t vote – out of 220 million eligible voters) rather than for either of the candidates, so technically, no-one should be President! Still, I guess it’s better than Britain, which has a Prime Minister that no-one voted into that position at all…
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