Debunking Electoral Reform's "Urban" Myth

Proposed Reform Will Not Result In America's Biggest Cities Controlling The Presidential Election

October 13, 2017

The organization Equal Citizens is working to mount a court challenge to change how states allocate their Electoral Votes. Their proposed court case would not do away with the Electoral College (which would require a Constitutional Amendment), nor does it force states to award its Electors to the winner of the national popular vote (which would require action in many state legislatures and their governors). It would require states to distribute their electors in proportion to their own states' popular vote.

Detractors of this reform complain this would result in voters from a handful of cities and states deciding who becomes President. Let me show you why this is not so.

As of July 2015, there were 143 counties or county-equivalents (parishes, boroughs, independent cities, etc.) having populations of more than 480,000. At least 35 of the 50 states have at least one such county (36 if you count DC, and the Electoral College does, so I will). Collectively, a slight majority of Americans (160,720,317... 50.03%; ~11,000 more than half) lived in those counties. Let's call them "the top-half counties." The rest of America lives in not quite 3,000 other counties. Let's call those "the bottom-half counties."

• Takeaway #1: Turning the fact above upside down, a majority of Americans live in counties having 500,000 people or less. Following election reform, anyone who would aspire to be President intuitively would need support in these communities, regardless of that candidate's level of support in high-population centers.

• Takeaway #2: Politicians who decided to focus on this half of the population necessarily would be putting forth a material campaign effort in 70% of the states. That's far more than the roughly 20% (8-12) states that matter most for a winner-take-all Electoral College.

Breaking it down further, more than 1/8 of America (more than 40,000,000 people) lives in counties having a population of 50,000 or less.

• Takeaway #3: With the proposed electoral reform, a politician who writes off 40-million rural Americans is worse off than a politician who takes a pass on 39,5-million Californians.

The argument that reform would enable large population centers to hold the key to the Presidency only could be true if electoral reform paved a path to the Presidency that allowed a candidate to win the office with a strong majority of the highly-urban vote and just a smattering of less-urban/rural vote. In other words, for the urban-bias theory to hold, the vote of the top-half counties would need to matter more to the final result than the vote of the bottom-half counties, even though the two sets of counties have equal population. Electoral math says that cannot happen.

First, in the 2016 election, the top-half counties accounted for 65.74 million of the 137.06 million popular votes cast for President... just short of 48 percent (despite having 50%+ of the country's people). Demographics explain this; the top-half counties generally have proportionally more children and non-citizen adults than the bottom-half counties.

Secondly, you still have the Electoral College... not the by-and-large winner-take-all Electoral College of today... but you still have states sending Electors to determine the Presidency. Thus, the top-half-bottom-half split of votes cast by state would matter to any analysis trying to determine if the result of reform would be urban bias. The following shows the number of ballots cast for President in 2016, by state and top/bottom-half county.

# of Presidential Popular Votes by State and County-Population Split

State	Top ½	Bottom ½	EV
AK	0	318,608	3
AL	304,191	1,819,181	9
AR	0	1,130,635	6
AZ	1,989,478	615,183	11
CA	11,953,032	2,228,563	55
CO	1,476,412	1,303,808	9
CT	1,207,079	437,841	7
DC	311,268	0	3
DE	262,979	180,835	3
FL	6,021,848	3,480,899	29
GA	1,421,608	2,719,839	16
HI	285,790	143,147	4
IA	0	1,566,031	6
ID	0	690,433	4
IL	3,418,451	2,176,374	20
IN	569,680	2,188,285	11
KS	486,006	708,749	6
KY	353,100	1,571,050	8
LA	0	2,029,032	8
MA	2,776,351	548,695	11
MD	1,769,423	1,012,023	10
ME	0	743,941	4
MI	2,181,850	2,642,692	16
MN	953,120	1,992,113	10
MO	824,373	2,003,893	10
MS	0	1,211,088	6
MT	0	501,822	3
NC	1,257,886	3,483,678	15
ND	0	344,360	3
NE	240,433	603,794	5
NH	0	744,296	4
NJ	2,781,053	1,125,670	14
NM	274,662	523,657	5
NV	767,156	358,229	6
NY	5,080,906	2,640,889	29
OH	2,125,734	3,410,813	18
OK	520,996	931,996	7
OR	668,335	1,333,001	7
PA	2,967,667	3,199,062	20
RI	248,474	214,942	4
SC	215,165	1,887,862	9
SD	0	370,047	3
TN	586,451	1,921,576	11
TX	5,535,636	3,457,530	38
UT	627,385	516,216	6
VA	551,183	3,431,569	13
VT	0	315,067	3
WA	1,979,251	1,337,745	12
WI	750,407	2,225,743	10
WV	0	721,233	5
WY	0	255,849	3
	65,744,819	71,319,584	538

Now suppose the Equal Citizens reform is enacted. Further suppose there is a 2-candidate race (Candidate A and B) where the same number of voters showed up to the polls in each county as 2016. Further suppose Candidate A were to win 75% of the votes in the top-half counties (extremely hard! see below) but just 25% of the votes in the bottom-half counties, with Candidate B winning the rest.

If top-half counties would be capable of exerting over-sized influence on the result of the Presidential election, this split of the vote would need to result in a White House win for Candidate A. However, the opposite actually is true. With more votes to be had in the smaller counties than the bigger ones, Candidate B wins by 2.6-million popular votes and 10 EV:

Candidate A: 75% Top ½ & 25% Bottom ½

Votes A	Votes B	EV A	EV B
67,138,515	69,925,888	264	274

In order for Candidate A to win the popular vote, their support in bottom-half counties would need to be about 27%. That still doesn't get them over the hump in Electoral Votes.

Candidate A: 75% Top ½ & 27% Bottom ½

Votes A	Votes B	EV A	EV B
68,564,904	68,499,499	266	272

What if A's bottom-half support was 29.9%? Not good enough (despite 4.2-million more popular votes)!

Candidate A: 75% Top ½ & 29.9% Bottom ½

Votes A	Votes B	EV A	EV B
70,633,167	66,431,236	268	270

  

Candidate A would need a full 30% of bottom-half county support to secure the required Electoral Votes.

Candidate A: 75% Top ½ & 30% Bottom ½

Votes A	Votes B	EV A	EV B
70,704,493	66,359,910	270	268

Now, do you think it's realistic for anyone to win 3/4 of the top-half county vote in a 2-person race? Hillary Clinton didn't do so in 2016... not nearly. In the top-half counties, Clinton garnered almost exactly five votes for every three cast for Trump. That's the equivalent of a 62.5%/37.5% split in a pure 2-person race. So, let's look at some scenarios where Candidate A's top-half county support is 62.5%.  

Again, with both halves being unequal for popular and Electoral-College purposes, someone with 5/8 of the top-half county vote to earn almost 4 in 10 votes from the bottom-half counties to win the White House. 40% is pretty significant support. Yes, 2016 wasn't a 2-person race, but Clinton failed to get 40% of the vote in 18 states, and Trump failed to get 40% of the vote in 10 states and DC.

Candidate A: 62.5% Top ½ & 37.5% Bottom ½

Votes A	Votes B	EV A	EV B
67,835,356	69,229,047	262	276

Candidate A: 62.5% Top ½ & 38.5% Bottom ½

Votes A	Votes B	EV A	EV B
68,548,555	68,515,848	266	272

Candidate A: 62.5% Top ½ & 39.6% Bottom ½

Votes A	Votes B	EV A	EV B
69,333,066	67,731,337	270	268

• Takeaway #4: Should Equal Citizens succeed in their aims, there is no scenario that would follow reform that would allow any candidate who succeeds wildly in high-population centers to become President without significant support from less-populated areas.

Sources:
County Population Data:
https://data.world/garyhoov/2016-pres-election-by-county

Voting Data By County:
same as sources used by https://uselectionatlas.org/

The author is not affiliated with Equal Citizens or the sources cited above.