Hate the Electoral College? Then add Hundreds of seats to the House.

[Captain Stern]

11. Surprisingly, that wouldn't help as much as one would think.

A while back, I checked into how making those sorts of changes would have affected the last election. I was surprised by the results.

Here's a copy/paste from the post where I talked about it last time:




As we all know, donald trump 'won' the last election in the electoral college 306 to 232 (I gave the 7 faithless votes to the winner of the states in which they were cast in.) That's 56.9% of the electoral vote.

We also know that Clinton won the popular vote by two percentage points.

As things stand, there are a total of 538 electoral votes cast. This number comes from the fact that every state is allocated the amount of electoral votes equivalent to the sum of its Representatives and Senators. The District of Columbia receives the same amount of electoral votes as the smallest state (3).

Every state is represented equally in the Senate, with two Senators each. The number of Representatives each state receives is supposed to be proportional to their relative populations, but it's really not, because the total number of House members is capped at 435, and since the state with the lowest population has to receive at least one rep, the number of reps that the larger states get tends to be depressed.

For example:

In the last census (2010) Wyoming had a population of 563,767, and they received one Representative. California had a population of 37,252,895, and received 53 Representatives.

However if we were to say that every 563,767 citizens should be represented by one member in the House, then California should receive 66 ( 37,252,895/563,767) Representatives...not 53.

So, I got curious how the House would look if we didn't cap it at 435, and we assigned Representatives to every group of 563,767 people. I also wanted to see how the last election would have looked if it had been conducted with this system.

With this system, the new House would have 548 members instead of 435. The new electoral college would have 650 electors (548 + 102). And trump would have won the election 369 to 281. His percentage of electoral votes would have essentially remained unchanged. This surprised me.

I then decided to see what would happen in the last election if we hadn't assigned electoral votes based on the total of Representatives and Senators, but assigned them based only on the number of Representatives. This would reduce the amount of electoral votes to 436 (538 - 102). trump still would have won 246-190..again almost the same percentage. Again, I found this surprising.

Then I tried redoing the election with the increased number of Representatives and getting rid of electoral votes for Senators. This put the electoral college at 548. trump would have still won 309-239, and still not gotten a significantly smaller percentage of the total. I actually found this sort of stunning.

I thought for sure that Clinton would have won the last election using the final method, and I would have bet that she would have won it with at least one of the other two.

In any case, I don't think this really proves anything or disproves anything. I just found it interesting.