The 2000 U.S. presidential election rekindled interest in possible
electoral reform. While most of the popular and academic accounts
focused on balloting irregularities in Florida, such as the now
infamous "butterfly" ballot and mishandled absentee ballots, some also
noted that this election marked only the fourth time in history that
the candidate with a plurality of the popular vote did not also win
the Electoral College. This "anti-democratic" outcome has fueled
desire for reform or even outright elimination of the electoral
college. We show that after appropriate statistical analysis of the
available historical electoral data, there is little basis to argue
for reforming the Electoral College. We first show that while the
Electoral College may once have been biased against the Democrats, the
current distribution of voters advantages neither party. Further, the
electoral vote will differ from the popular vote only when the average
vote shares of the two major candidates are extremely close to 50
percent. As for individual voting power, we show that while there has
been much temporal variation in relative voting power over the last
several decades, the voting power of individual citizens would not
likely increase under a popular vote system of electing the president.
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