alternatehistory.com

When we talk about the electoral college in American politics it's generally with the air of "it sucks, what if it wasn't put in place?" Yet given the political climate at the time with many states wary over yielding sovereignty to the federal government, that's fairly unlikely. A question that's occurred to me, however, is what if the electors were assigned more proportionately than the current winner-take-all system. This could be either implemented from the start (at least, in those states which always used the popular vote; I believe some originally appointed their electors via the state assemblies) or instituted later on by amendment.

Under the OTL system, say the fictional state of South Cheyenne has a turnout of 3,000,000, and of those voters, 1,400,000 voted for the Republocrat presidential candidate, 1,399,999 voted for the Demican, and 200,001 voted for the Nohoper Third Party candidate. Under the first-past-the-post, winner-take-all system, all 12 of the state's electoral votes go to the Republocrat, even though he barely won a plurality of the vote, never mind a majority. The problem here is that the popular vote can become detached from the final result, and we end up with the silly OTL situation where polarised politics leads to the idea of "red states and blue states", ignoring the fact that all states represent a mixture of voters.

So what if a more proportional system was instituted? I can see two basic ways this could be done:

1) Split the states into electoral districts similar to those used for electing congressmen, and determine the electors on a regional basis. So for example South Cheyenne would have 12 electoral districts. The result would probably be 6 Republocrat and 6 Demican electors from the aforementioned election, as the Nohopers probably haven't led any of the polls.

2) Set up a European-style proportional representative system with a single popular vote ballot across the state, but the resulting 12 electors being assigned by one PR formula or another across the vote percentages. This would allow third parties to gain some electoral votes. This isn't that unlikely even from the start, given that some of the American founding fathers actually were the first to propose PR systems that are now used today elsewhere.

Thoughts? How would this change the American political landscape compared to OTL?
Top