USA Election: Proposing a Free Market Solution to Electoral College Dilemma

Free market solution to Electoral College dilemma.

Corporations and their shareholders should make major investments in the counties (Maine and Nebraska) whose Electoral College representatives are allowed to vote outside their state "winner take all" system. Like a "magnet school", these counties economic benefits would create incentives for other states to slowly loosen the "winner take all" system which is responsible - twice in 2 decades - for promoting a candidate with fewer popular votes to Chief Executive. Detroit should be the first. Had Michigan allowed the City of Detroit to cast its own proportionate electoral votes, investors would be saving the city and politicians wouldn't appeal solely to the Michigan rural majority. Whichever Michigan governor pulled it off would be credited with healing the city, which has become the very thing that "white" Michigan cities (Howell etc) fear in its current state.

I'm constantly asked to explain the USA's Electoral College whenever the topic of a USA election comes up. It's a civics lesson about a rational decision by smaller state actors. Here's how I explain it to Europeans.

Imagine if Europe were to try to elect a President of EU. Its "United States of Europe" constitution would require the buy-in, or joining, of individual member states with their own cultures and languages. Those states would, in a completely free market, face the same market forces as urbanization. Money is more efficiently concentrated in one place. Smaller nation-states would fear being lost in the shuffle.

Why build a bridge or an airport or a stadium in a small state, like Vermont or Belgium or Denmark, if the marketplace and political (voter) economics reward spending that infrastructure money in a big city like London, Paris, Milan, etc? If you were a President, you could always win more votes by spending every federal dollar in the cities and states with the most votes. If you were an EU state like Belgium, you'd be about the population of Michigan in the USA (in proportion to USA/EU population). That fear created the "winner take all" electoral college, and Luxembourg would as likely want "all its votes" cast on one candidate, to ensure candidates don't just passively take 45% of their votes and move on.

For a smaller state, like Denmark, or even larger Belgium, there would be a legitimate risk that their population's vote would be diluted by voter demands in larger states like France and Germany. So in order to force the future President of Europe to pay attention, Denmark might hold an election or a primary - with ballots in Danish - and get all Danes to agree that 100% of the "Danish vote" will go to one candidate. That would force Presidential candidates who might otherwise "shrug off" Denmark's popular vote.
"Winner Takes All" exists in sports and gambling for the same reason. If every time you played cards, the 9 of hearts got a proportionate share of the winnings to a 10 of hearts card, the returns from "winning" the hand would be much less of an incentive to even play.

You may have learned about this in the great USA Constitutional Compromise that created a Congress with bicameral legislature. The smaller states (Vermont) have the same two Senators per state, and the larger states have the House of Representatives, with more reps for larger states like California. A little different from the Electoral College, but addressing the same problem of getting a small state - like Belgium - to buy into the benefits of a shared market while reducing the risk of "tyranny of the majority".

So why do some states - like Nebraska and Maine - buck the "winner take all" trend and allow a single county to issue its own Electoral College vote?

Regardless of the historical answer to that question, the opportunity creates the Free Market Solution this blog seeks to address. Like blogger pal Joel Valenzuela's Free State Project (Desert Lynx), the idea is to attract investment to a state small enough to attract voters who seek to leverage their votes. But in the individual counties that are given their own proportionate electoral vote, we have an investment opportunity. We need to offer more counties the same incentives.

So large economic players, like Google, Facebook, Koch Brothers, Amazon, Chik-Fil-A, whatever, should consider massively investing in counties which are allowed individual electoral votes. This investment would best target very large states like California, Texas, Florida, etc. whose "winner take all" electoral colleges create the greatest risk of minority candidates winning an electoral college majority over 50 states. This already happens, btw, with military contractors, who tend to source "parts manufacture" in states like Vermont, to leverage our two state Senators (same proportional voting power as California or Texas). Matt Dunne, the Google employee in Vermont who ran for Governor (lost in primaries) was suspected by some Vermonters of being a Google plant. (I don't subscribe to that opinion of Matt, I'm just repeating what I heard some people say).

Basically, California, Texas and Florida have big enough single counties - think of Austin Texas or Fresno California - which have more liberal or conservative ideas than their majority state compatriots. Since the Presidential Election comes down to just a few electoral college votes being "up for grabs", it would be logical for more states to create that leverage. Winner-take-most, but 5% of our electoral college votes are up for grabs in Detroit or Flint or [yourdepressedcityhere]. Depressed economic areas can become investment magnets if their state constitutions (or more easily, political party primaries) allow them to make electoral representative promises, negotiated separately from "Michigan".

It's possible that the rural Michigan counties would resist allowing Detroit to negotiate its own electoral college proportion. In that case, invest in the Nebraska and Maine counties that do.

If billions of free market money is invested into the small counties where the electoral college votes are "democratized", it creates an incentive for a governor in Michigan etc. attract the same investment to its depressed cities.

This blog is way off topic for recycling, fair trade, etc. But a day after the USA election, it's an opportunity to take a break and answer my foreign-born wife's family's questions about why a woman who was more qualified, and got more popular votes, was passed over for a job given instead to a man who's far less qualified. I've been explaining for years the rationality of smaller states opting for "winner takes all", and don't think EU could ever unite behind a strong EU Executive without similar guarantees to smaller states like Denmark, Belgium, etc. that their votes wouldn't be "diluted".

The other analogy, btw, for defending Trump voters is that if you are a lifelong fan - or linebacker, perhaps - of Football Team A, and the quarterback they put on the field is a doper or groper, that you can detest the coach's decision to hire that quarterback or put them on the field, without necessarily quitting your team. Everyone who plays or roots for Football Team A may not be fan of the quarterback's big mouth, or a sympathetic listener. What they'd probably do is try to influence the quarterback to reform and act like a teammate they can be proud of.