As both Democrats, some Republicans and backers of third-party candidates look for ways to tweak the Electoral College for a different outcome to the 2016 presidential election, at least one picture is muddy. In particular, there is controversy over who, if anyone, would win the election if each states electors were divided proportionally according to the popular vote in that states.<\/p>\n
Occasional Planet has previously written<\/a> about a proportional vote of electors. If democracy is the popular vote of the people, which it is in the United States for every election except that for President and Vice-President, then proportional electoral voting is just another way of stifling direct democracy. But there are some political scientists, philosophers and practitioners who think that it is good policy because it reduces the total disparity between electoral votes and popular votes. For instance, in 2016, Hillary Clinton won 47.9% of the popular vote to Donald Trump\u2019s 46.7%. That 1.2% difference in Clinton\u2019s favor amounts to nearly 1.6 million actual votes. That is not inconsequential.<\/p>\n As for the electoral vote, it finally appears that Michigan will go for Donald Trump. That being the case, he will win 306 electoral votes or 57% and Clinton would garner 232 electoral votes of 43%. So the electoral college has a separation of fourteen percentage points, and in favor of Trump, but the popular vote difference is only 1.2%, and this time in favor of Clinton. So the electoral college is a distortion in terms of both quality (who won?) and quantity (by how much?).<\/p>\n When we examined proportional electoral voting in the 2012 presidential election, we found that Barack Obama would have won in such a system, just as he won the popular vote and the standard electoral vote. Using the same methodology as in 2012, our calculations show Donald Trump winning in a proportionally apportioned electoral college by a slender 272-266 margin. If the idea of a proportional representation in the electoral college is to make it more democratic or more like the popular vote, it would have failed. Below are the state-by-state results.<\/p>\n PROPORTIONAL ELECTORAL VOTES BY STATE, 2016<\/strong><\/p>\n\n