Gerrymandering the presidency

Posted on November 1st, 2007 Jack 1 comment  Print This Post

CA Congressman Darrell Issa (R-49) will help bankroll the effort to split California’s Electoral College votes by congressional district (CD allocation). And he’s defending it as a move to “proportional representation.”

“This is about making people’s votes count,” he said. “It’s about proportional representation.” [...]

Issa insists that he has not endorsed a candidate for president and said the effort is not motivated by politics, but by a desire to increase voter turnout in the state.

“If Florida had proportional representation [in 2000], Al Gore would be president today,” he said.

In another post I highlight some problems with CD allocation. The biggest (in my opinion) is that doing so would drastically raise the stakes of redistricting wherever the system were implemented. Bluntly, gerrymandering would affect presidential elections.

From The Hill:

Rep. David Dreier (R-Calif.), who has survived tough election fights in recent years, predicted that the initiative could rally Republican voters and give all California voters a bigger role in the presidential selection process.

“California is relevant in every other way – this could make us relevant politically as well,” he said.

Only the swing districts. No candidate will waste time or money in, say, Nancy Pelosi’s district, which leans about 86 points Democratic in presidential elections. Nor will anyone bother with Issa’s district, which leans about 62 points Republican.

Allocation of electors by congressional district is not proportional representation. It is not even proportional representation of states by population, which is what the Founders meant by the the term as used in The Federalist. Proportional allocation of electors is the only way to get close to proportional representation in the Electoral College because such proposals usually include in the allocation the two electors corresponding to Senators. Most CD allocation proposals automatically would grant those to the statewide winner.

Not that the thing will pass a June 2008 referendum. California is a solidly Democratic state, and it doesn’t take genius to know which party’s interests CD allocation would serve there. Independent redistricting went down in flames in 2005 for similar reasons.

Both “reforms” face the same collective action problem because they would affect national-level electoral outcomes. Neither is likely to happen unless all states implement it at the same time. The genius of the National Popular Vote plan is its interstate compact approach. States can ratify reform one-by-one without fearing the national political impact because the compact doesn’t go into operation until its impact on the unit rule system is null.

NPV has the added benefit of avoiding the “swing district problem,” i.e. that only swing districts would become relevant to candidates (with all the attendant consulting pitfalls).