The gist of this article is that Obama was able to use a combination of data mining and creative marketing to pinpoint impressionable voters in crucial areas with a view toward manipulating the electoral college system to his advantage. This is yet another reason to toss the electoral system in the garbage and set it on fire. In no event should a relatively small subset of the population in a handful of states be responsible for choosing the President of the United States.
Had we used a popular voting system rather than electoral college system, this system would have been expanded to every state in the nation, and Obama would likely have won by a far wider margin than he did.
Again, this system was about identifying impressionable voters and marketing to them properly. The location of swing states is simple and public information, not proprietary.
"Had we used a popular voting system rather than electoral college system....Obama would likely have won by a far wider margin than he did."
That is quite debatable. There is no way of knowing how many people simply don't show up to the polls because they live in a state that leans heavily toward the opposition and therefore know their vote will have exactly zero effect on the election.
The problem with a straight popular vote is that it is much more susceptible to attack.
Take a jurisdiction like Chicago which is known for voter fraud and high turnout among the dead. Under our current system, no matter how compromised that system is, its impact is limited to that state.. it can only swing some Electoral Votes (and everything state and local).
With a straight popular vote, that compromised system would put the overall system at much bigger risk.
The Electoral College serves as a corruption firewall between systems.. not perfect, but significantly better than the alternative.
In your Chicago example, the electoral college could easily magnify it.
Imagine, for a moment, that if the kind of voter fraud that Chicago earned a reputation for in the 1960s were to happen in a city like Miami nowadays. So let's say 5,000 fraudulent votes went to candidate A. In a popular vote system, that's unlikely to swing the verdict because that's such a tiny margin compared to the country's entire electorate. 5,000 is less than 0.004% of the number of people who voted in 2008.
But Florida historically polls close - easily close enough for 5,000 votes to swing which way the state goes. And this winner wouldn't just pick up that tiny sliver, they would get all 29 of Florida's electoral votes. That's a much bigger chunk of the pie - 5.4%. Worse yet, in the electoral college getting the votes is a zero-sum game. (Not so in the earlier case because the votes shouldn't have existed in the first place - so picking up a fraudulent vote for candidate A doesn't mean that candidate B lost a vote.) Candidate A getting 29 votes means candidate B loses 29 votes, so the real swing is more than 10%.
Meaning that in this hypothetical, the electoral college managed to magnify the influence of what was a relatively small instance of electoral fraud by a factor of more than 2,500%, into something that could easily swing an election.
Electoral fraud in Illinois would swing a maximum of Illinois's 20 electoral votes, or 29 in Florida
With a popular vote, it would be popular to have millions upon millions of fraudulent votes in a single place, say, Delaware, that would allow the opposing candidate to win even if there was supposed to be a landslide victory for the other candidate.
How, exactly, would one manage to organize millions upon millions of fraudulent voter registrations in a single place?
It would be better if your hypothetical example were at least remotely plausible. The entire population of Delaware is less than one million.
Keep in mind that my example of only 5,000 fraudulent registrations in a single place is already over an order of magnitude larger than notable examples from recent history.
"Take a jurisdiction like Chicago which is known for voter fraud and high turnout among the dead. "
An unproven case of a small number (<100) of possibly fraudulent votes in an election more than 60 years ago, and still going on about it as if it happens every election, and orders of magnitude worse.
We can have a better more granular "firewall". Instead of direct popular vote, simply quantize it into congressional districts instead of just the state level.
Who wins the district wins that EV. Who wins the state wins an additional 2 EVs (ie, aligned with senate numbers). Total would equal (currently) 538 EVs.
Some states already do something similar (see Nebraska, Maine).
Of course, this brings up the perennial problem of gerrymandering... which could be resolved by mandating perimeter to area ratios that keep things from looking too crazy.
I think there are lots of factors to consider, but the electoral college limits, to a certain extent, the "ground game" advantage Obama had. This is making an assumption that Obama's ground game was scalable, because if we went on popular vote, Obama would be able to ramp up that ground game all over the country, just as he did in the swing states.
What the electoral college incentivizes is isolated ad spending and campaign stumping in the battleground states. It's clear that this aspect of campaigning would change substantially if the electoral college were eliminated, so strategic advantages would be sought elsewhere and I think the ground game would become a focal point.
Even more important is that the system is in place -- already in production, tested, and battle-hardened -- and it is in the hands of Democrats.
The smart Republicans will take this to heart and turn their attention towards the 'quants and coders,' and the smart quants and coders will be looking to be employed by them.
1. He would have won on the popular vote anyway. People who were excited early in the evening by Romney's apparent lead forgot to figure the west coast #s into their calculations.
2. You should throw your support behind one of the initiatives to link electoral college representation to the popular vote at the state level, because you're not going to get rid of the college itself for the foreseeable future.
3. Mitt Romney had exactly the same opportunities Obama did and knows exactly how the electoral college works. He just didn't use them. For example, the Obama campaign gambled and bought a lot of TV time early on when it was cheaper, so they got more bang for their buck. It's no good whining about one candidate manipulating the electoral college system, as if it had somehow been kept a secret from the other candidate. Romney was able to figure out the GOP primary system, which is at least as complex. Every student of American politics understands how the electoral college functions.
Elections aren't about learning the wills (plural! very plural!) of the people, it's about making sure power changes hands often enough (peacefully) that systematic suppression of minorities is made very difficult. As for elections, it's the vetting of the candidates that's the important bit.
> In no event should a relatively small subset of the population in a handful of states be responsible for choosing the President of the United States.
I don't know why people love to say this; its simply not true. Just because we can predict which way certain regions will lean before the vote comes in does not imply that those regions don't matter. Does Nate Silver predicting 100% of the outcome of the election mean none of our votes mattered? Of course not.
The purpose of voting is not to "change the outcome election". The purpose is to participate in the process, thereby giving the process legitimacy.
Why would you need a different voter targeting system/strategy for a popular vote? The goal is the same - convince people that would support you anyway but are not probable to go vote to actually get to the polls.
In fact, seems like this system worked just fine anyway - they won the popular vote as well.
Whether or not you would need a different strategy is debatable, but you would almost definitely see one. Voters in less populous states are over-represented in the EC, and urban voters are a key Democratic constituency, so you would definitely see messaging shifting away from things that would appeal to farmers in Iowa, since it would cease to matter (think things like mentions of ethanol as an energy source in stump speeches), and towards things that would drive up Latino turnout in Los Angeles: heavier discussion of immigration reform, for example, which very rarely came up in this cycle -- the foreign policy debate didn't mention drug violence in Mexico at all, this time, I don't think, and instead focused entirely on the middle east.
I think lots of "urban" issues would suddenly be much more relevant to the campaign, particularly on the left; gun control would be back on the table, marijuana legalization would start to be taken seriously as a social justice issue, etc. I'm partly talking out of my ass, but things would almost definitely change.
the electoral college system only constrains the location of targets. without it, you might make the problem harder, but you would not make it impossible.
