Forever One Less Vote
The Failures of the American Democratic System
Machiavelli wrote in The Prince, “And it ought to be remembered that there is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things, because the innovator has for enemies all those who have done well under the old conditions, and lukewarm defenders in those who may do well under the new.”
This axiom is the crux of politics: the certitude that those who have the ability to enforce progress have a pecuniary dictum not to and, therefore, rarely will.
This refrain is also acutely applicable to the growing sentiment that the Electoral College should — and must — be replaced with the national popular vote, but I’ll dive into that more later.
I believe this is the basis for our nation’s ongoing debate over voting rights. From a purely moral perspective, the advancement of suffrage is an obvious cause to be at the forefront of. Our history was built on the duty to continue that struggle; to abandon the cause of enfranchisement would be sacrilege to the very idea of American democracy.
So, resolving that virtuous imperative is not a factor in the opposition to voting rights in the United States, the question remains: Why are voter ID laws, which are statistically making it harder for people to vote, being adopted by state governments across the United States and enabled by the federal judicial system?
The answer lies in the core tenets of every conceivable organization and structure imaginable: the principle of dividing the political landscape into, as Mesquita and Smith put it in The Dictator’s Handbook, interchangeables, influentials, and essentials. Selectorate theory, as the idea of splitting power between those three groups is known, is less identifying moral and ideological belief as the determiner of politics, and more universally defining the structural dissemination of power as the paramount influence on the actions of government.
The first of those groups, the interchangeables (also known as the nominal selectorate), is the collection of all people who, at least in name, have a theoretical say in who leads them. In the United States, this category includes everyone who has the ability to vote; any citizen over 18 is a part of the nominal selectorate. Although the people who comprise the interchangeables have some say in their governance, as Mesquita and Smith say, “Members of the nominal selectorate in a universal-franchise democracy have a toe in the political door, but not much more.”
For much of American history, the drive was to expand the number of people in the nation who could claim to be interchangeables — first to expand the ability to vote to every white man regardless of economic status, then to every man regardless of race, and finally to every American citizen regardless of gender or any other irrelevant factor. And, over the centuries, as a country, we have been generally successful at this; through political and military conflicts the United States has advanced the right to vote to practically all citizens over the age of 18.
The second tier of the political hierarchy are the influentials or the real selectorate. This class is all those who exercise their nominal power, and therein actually raise their voices in their own leadership. The real selectorate is those who vote; these are the people who determine who should run their city, their state, and their country.
The real selectorate, even before we get to the third and most important group of political power wielders, is where we begin to approach the problem: in the United States the real selectorate is startlingly small, at least in comparison to other democracies around the globe. Over the past ten general elections the average voter turnout, or the percent of the nominal selectorate that exercises their right to vote and therefore becomes a part of the real selectorate, was only 56.6%. Even worse, the average voter turnout for the past ten midterm elections was a dismal 42.5%.
Having a low ratio of people in the real selectorate to the nominal selectorate translates to increased political power for the few citizens who actually turn out to vote — the real selectorate. Furthermore, this means that prospective politicians have to curry favor only with the real selectorate and therefore don’t have to care one bit about the plights and quandaries of the other, in the case of the U.S. general election, 43.4% — all the registered voters who decided to not vote.
A smaller real selectorate also makes it easier for politicians to politic without regard for the majority of their constituents by decreasing the number of people constituting the third and most important group: the winning coalition, or the essentials. The essentials are basically all those people who the aspiring leader is obligated to secure the support of in order to gain their intended position. In the case of American democracy, the winning coalition is the half plus one of the real selectorate required to gain a majority in a standard-issue election.
The winning coalition is where the core of the issue with our democratic system is. Because of the way the electoral college works, that group of essentials is really only the portion of the real selectorate needed to get 50% plus one of the electoral votes.
The way the Electoral College was designed, it is theoretically possible to win the presidency with only 22.96% of the popular vote (or real selectorate) by getting 50% plus one of the popular vote in the forty smallest states and the District of Columbia.
Another apocalyptic scenario for a U.S. presidential election is one in which no candidate reaches the threshold of 270 electoral votes required for immediate victory due to a third party candidate splitting the electoral vote. In this case, the Constitution mandates a vote in Congress in which each state casts a single vote each for its preferred presidential candidate. A candidate is chosen to be president if they receive a majority of the states’ support. In this case, if the twenty-six smallest states all chose the same candidate in the first round of Electoral College voting — again, because that candidate received 50% plus one of the real selectorate’s support — the small state candidate could win the presidency with only around 8.25% of the popular — or real selectorate — vote.
Incredible as this seems, this is not the end of disproportionality and unrepresentative governance; these statistics must be adjusted for the sad state of the American real selectorate. In other words, what those two numbers — 22.96% and 8.25% — don’t show is how they stack up when we take into account the proportion of people who actually voted in those elections. When you adjust that first number — 22.96% — for voter turnout, it becomes only about 13%, and that second number — 8.25% — becomes a mere 4.67%.
Modify that again to consider the size of the nominal selectorate, which is about 73% of the total U.S. population, and you find that 13% shrinks to 9.52%. This means that, excepting the constitutionally ambiguous situation where I got that 8.25% presidential victory, a candidate can be elected president with only 9.52% of the U.S. population’s support.
Although both of these scenarios are extremely unlikely, the fact that they are possible should alarm anyone living under the American democratic system. What this proves is that the U.S. government was designed in such a way that was intended to maximize the nominal selectorate while minimizing the actual winning coalition.
But I’ve left something critical out of the equation until this point: in actuality the real selectorate is the electors in the Electoral College. These are the members of Congress who cast the electoral vote. However, they are not constitutionally mandated to vote with the will of the states they represent and can vote in whatever way they want. It must be recognized, however, that many states do have laws that would punish any “faithless electors,” but the electors still have the final discretion in how to cast their ballots.
The Constitution enacted this loophole in democracy in order, as previously alluded, to minimize the winning coalition for prospective candidates. The founders aimed to restrict the number of essentials because they, like any other politician, are really only beholden to the essentials. Remaining in favor with the winning coalition is all politicians need to stay in power; politicians should not — and do not — waste resources and rewards (in the case of our democracy this is economic prosperity, civil rights, and expanded freedoms) on the real or nominal selectorates because that inevitably means taking resources and rewards away from those who the politician actually needs to stay in power — the essentials. When a policy is enacted that does make the people in the real and nominal selectorates’ lives better, this is because it also helps the winning coalition, meaning that the politician had nothing to lose and could, in fact, gain from implementing that policy.
The significance of a small real selectorate and a small winning coalition in the United States is that by making those groups more exclusive, the elected leader can act more dictatorial as they only need to provide resources and rewards to a small group of people and can ignore the excluded masses who really need those resources and rewards. That’s why there is a fundamental problem with the Electoral College: it allows the aspiring president to cater to a tiny portion of the U.S. population, the essentials, instead of serving all the people. And by favoring and providing for a smaller group of essentials over all their other constituents, politicians and leaders don’t make the lives of the real and nominal selectorates better; they can, in fact, make it far worse.
The Electoral College is an autocratic approach to democracy. In order to resolve this authoritarian configuration and improve the American system, we need to implement the national popular vote. This would greatly expand the ratio of winning coalition to the real selectorate, therein forcing our presidents to be answerable to more people and, as a result, be mandated by the increased political will of the people to fight for their civil and human rights, bring economic prosperity to them, and grant them more liberties and freedoms.
By expanding the winning coalition in the elections for U.S. president, we, as a country, can ensure that their tenures will be directed at expanding the prosperity of more Americans, therein building a better nation for tomorrow.
