The Irrationality of the Electoral College

 

In “Voting, Rational Abstention, and Rational Ignorance” by Johnson, he claims that voting results do not necessarily reflect the will of the majority, but the preferences of those who went to the polls. However, because of the electoral college system of determining the presidential election, even those who go to the polls may not have their preferences reflected in the outcome. In the past twenty years, two of the five elections in the United States have ended with voters revealing their preferences for one candidate, yet the other taking victory due to the electoral college. That is, 40% of the presidential elections in the past two decades have resulted this way. Now, this is not an argument about the pros and cons of the electoral college, but rather the impact it may have on the incentive to vote in a presidential election and the utility derived from voting.

According to Johnson’s explanation, as long as expected marginal benefit (the probability that your vote is decisive) + some other beneficial reason for voting (social pressure, moral obligation, opportunity for expression, utility from the act of voting, minimax regret, etc.) exceed the cost of voting, then it may be rational to vote. We already know that in a presidential election, the marginal benefit from voting is infinitely minimal, and then, if the electoral college results of an election are different from the popular vote, many of the other reasons people vote can be discarded making it irrational to vote entirely. If there is a reasonable chance that the candidate who wins the popular vote, a direct reflection of the preferences of voters, loses the election, what incentives are left for people to vote in presidential elections? If the candidate who wins the popular vote does not win the electoral college, the utility from voting may be obsolete. There could be a high level of regret for even voting in the first place if your vote, which was represented in the popular vote, ended up being essentially worthless in the outcome of the election. As Jesse Wegman writes in the New York Times, “When every vote matters, more people vote”. I argue that by changing to a popular vote, rather than relying on the electoral college to determine a victor, there would be a greater incentive to vote and greater expected utility from voting knowing that citizens’ preferences will be properly represented every single time.