No easy fix for Electoral College or first-past-post systems
With the Nov. 3 showdown looming between Donald Trump and Joe Biden - don’t those sound like names on a 1950s boxing card? - there will be the predictable agonizing about the effect of that uniquely American political mechanism, the Electoral College.
Smarty-pants politics wonks know the Electoral College is not actually an educational institution but the quirky method by which the most powerful leader in the free world is chosen.
Critics of the system point to the results of the 2016 presidential election where Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton got 2,868,686 more votes than Trump but lost the election because he won the Electoral College vote 304 to 227. He was the fifth president to win despite having fewer votes.
The problem with the Electoral College system, in short, is that a candidate wins all the votes of a state’s electors with a bare 50 per cent + 1 majority. For example, Trump won all of Pennsylvania’s 20 electoral votes, even though he won the traditionally Democratic state by 68,000 out of nearly six million votes cast.
Defenders of the Electoral College say it ensures smaller states don’t get bulldozed by the bigger ones in the choosing of a president. A powerful Senate, where each state, no matter the population, gets two senators, would seem to guarantee the clout of lightly populated states.
A recent New Yorker article notes “the (Electoral College) system is so buggy that, between 1800 and 2016 … members of Congress introduced more than 800 constitutional amendments to fix its technical problems or to abolish it altogether.”
On this side of the border, we have nothing comparable to an Electoral College in the selection of the national government, and our Senate, though unelected, is proportionately representative of the provinces and territories.
There is, though, a persistent dissatisfaction with the first-pastthe-post (FPTP) system, which, when applied to parties running candidates in separate ridings, can produce distorted - critics say undemocratic - results. We need look no further than the most recent Quebec and federal elections for examples.
Justin Trudeau’s Liberals won the most seats in the election last October, but the Conservatives under Andrew Scheer got 220,499 more votes - thanks in large part to lopsided victories in Alberta, although Liberals racked up big majorities as well in Montreal-area ridings. With one-third of the popular vote, Trudeau and the Liberals retained government, albeit a minority.
In Quebec, though Francois Legault’s Coalition Avenir Quebec (CAQ) won a convincingly strong majority in the election two years ago, it did so with a somewhat warped election result. The CAQ got 59 per cent of the 125 seats in the National Assembly with 37 per cent of the popular vote.
Both Trudeau’s Liberals and Legault’s CAQ vowed to reform the electoral system once they came to power. The Liberals dutifully launched a panel to explore reform options which reported at the end of 2016. It recommended, in brief, the FPTP system be replaced by a proportional representation ( PR) method that allocates seats to parties based on their share of the popular vote.
The committee also recommended a national referendum be held to let the people choose how they elect their representatives. The Liberals, armed with evidence that no provincial government has been able to effect change in the electoral system through referendums over the years, determined there was just not enough public interest in change to go through such an ordeal.
The Legault government has been somewhat more forthright. Bill 39, introduced last year, proposes a mixed member proportional (MMP) system whereby electors vote for 80 “divisional” seats and a further 45 allocated to the regions.
Voters would have both candidates for their divisional seat as well as a list of regional candidates on the ballot, decided by popular vote for the given region.
The impact of this “reform” is that, according to government projections, Montreal would lose three seats, which would be redistributed to regions, where, you may have noticed, the CAQ reigns supreme.
After initially proposing a new system be in place for the 2022 election, the Legault government is now committed to holding a referendum on electoral changes simultaneous with that vote.
Who knows, given the vagaries of FPTP and the fickleness of voters, come the next election, the CAQ’S electoral reform ambitions may end up just as futile as Trudeau’s.