October 23, 2006
Private: Levinson: on "Our Undemocratic Constitution"
Building off ideas expressed in his book Our Undemocratic Constitution, Texas law professor Sanford Levinson laments how federal elections favor some voters over others:
[T]he Senate and the Electoral College are among our most grievously flawed institutions. The Senate is not only an affront to our basic value of one-person/one vote; it also acts as the political mechanism by which tax revenues from large states along the Atlantic and Pacific end up disproportionately in the hands of residents of small states, especially in the upper Midwest and Rocky Mountain area, where approximately 5 percent of the national population controls almost a quarter of the vote in the Senate. Much publicity was given last year to the `'bridge to nowhere" voted by Congress for Alaska. Less publicity was given to the fact that such indefensible boondoggles are directly traceable to the Constitution's allocation of voting power in the Senate.
As boondoggles go, `'bridges to nowhere" may seem almost charmingly old-fashioned. But there is nothing charming about funding formulas that award Wyoming three times ($27.80) the per capita Homeland Security spending received by Massachusetts ($9.77)--though perhaps we should take neighborly pleasure that each Vermonter receives $23.83 worth of protection. Nor is there anything charming about an Electoral College system that works to make non-battleground states (a primary example being Massachusetts), nearly irrelevant, as attention is paid (and commitments made) almost exclusively to the lucky residents of the few battlegrounds.
ACSBlog previously highlighted one proposal which would effectively eliminate the electoral college, an interstate compact of states pledging their electors to the winner of the national popular vote.