In actuality, it’s fairly simple if you take a moment to look at how it works. Yet, it never fails to prompt students to throw out comments like, “That’s not fair!” “Our votes don’t count!” and “They just cheat anyway!”

Analyzing Proposed Election Reforms

While teaching the Constitution – and election politics – I like to throw in a little investigation of the Electoral College. Another day, I’ll write up the entire lesson, but it basically asks the students to look at the 2000 Presidential Election and to determine if there was a more fair way to distribute the electoral votes.

The problem at the core of the issue is that electoral votes are distributed winner-take-all, so there’s really no guarantee that the person who won the electoral vote also won the electoral college. In fact, if you browse through past electoral maps, you’ll see a lot of cases in which the proportion of the electoral vote is nowhere near the proportion of the popular vote.

A couple years ago, some California Republicans concocted a plan to split its massive amount of electoral votes along Congressional districts. As long as California was the only state to adopt such a measure, it would effectively hamstring any future Democratic candidates.

The Republican candidate could count on getting easy votes from all the Red states, and he could also steal a few of California’s 55 votes from the Democratic candidate. Based on the current layout of California’s Congressional districts, those “few” votes would probably amount to about 19 votes.

This gave me the idea for the lesson – to have the students do a kind of experiment. Split the electoral votes in some states, but not all. What happens if all the Democratic states split their votes? What happens if all the Republican states split their vote?

The result, in either case, is a lopsided victory for the opposition.

Wrapping It Up: Creative Solutions

Now, I’ve got a nifty little article to have the students read at the end. There was an Op Ed in today’s NY Times about the Electoral College.

Originally, I thought the author was going to support that same California plan – which alone is a pretty shoddy  idea. It turns out that Randall Lane has a pretty creative idea though: states from opposite sides of the political aisle pair up and enact this legislation together.

For example, New York and Texas have roughly the same number of electoral votes. If both of them passed a law that split their electoral votes according to Congressional districts, it wouldn’t give (much of) an advantage to either Republicans or Democratics. It would, however, greatly increase the value of campaigning in those two states.

The point of my original lesson was to open students ideas to the fact that some ideas may sound good and fair – like the California plan – but they are designed to break the system. The Lane article provides a nice wrap up. It validates the students’ findings in the activity, while also providing a creative alternative.

Of course, this doesn’t solve the problem of gerrymandering… so maybe we’re just trading one abusive system for another.

I never quite thought about it before, but I guess I’d have to agree with Steven in general – not much. How much power does the President really have in the face of 535 federal legislators? Or, more importantly, how much power does he have in the face of lobbyists, special interest groups, the military-industrial complex, or the murky depths of the Capitalist market system?

The current economic crisis is a great example. How much could the President – even one better than Bush – really impact the economy? In the short term, I’d say it’s kind of hopeless – I don’t think we need any more bailouts to figure that one out.

In the long term, he could potentially patch things together through legislation and policy shifts. Yet legislation isn’t the purvue of the President, and even with a friendly Congress it can be difficult to get stuff passed. If legislation solves the problem, the claim to fame would necessarily be shared with others.

Then there’s the notion that economies move slowly, so how do we know who’s really behind the change? It took the country a decade under FDR to claw its way out of the Great Depression. Not quite the instant gratification that most people desire.

This Matters for Education?

This question seems extremely relevant to me for two reasons.

First, people (my students included) expect the world to change when Obama becomes President. His appointment of a security team is just one example that you can’t expect too much change – especially in the type of crisis the country is in.

Shortly before the election, the Iraq War briefly came up as a topic in class. One my students said that if Obama was elected, the war would be over and all the troops would come home. I delicately tried to explain that that just wasn’t the case. For starters, he never said anything like that (timetable != immediate withdrawal in January). It would also be a logistical nightmare to pick up and leave in the blink of an eye.

This question – Does the President really matter? – is a great talking point to get students thinking about the real possibilities for change. How much power will Obama really have? How much is he hemmed in by the war, by the financial crisis, by the need to appease party rivals?  We can keep hoping for change, but he’s no genie in a bottle.

Second, it’s a good general view into the world of federal politics. We all know what the government does, but what power do the parts really have? That executive branch always seemed a bit fuzzy to me. He signs a bill, eh? That sounds important. Not so different from Queen Elizabeth II.

Obama is one example, but I do think we tend to over-estimate the impact of the President. Even he is a driving force in the action of the government, he is arguably less important than the courts and the legislature. He just provides a single name, a single face for us to fixate on. In some ways, it is a ceremonial, figurehead position like the British monarch.

The question could also be turned on other parts.  The Supreme Court, for example, is seeminglingly all-powerful.  But it couldn’t force Jackson to respect the Cherokee Nation.  It’s landmark decision, Brown v. Board of Education, was only a start to the desegregation of schools.

I think the question is terribly thought-provoking, and I’d love to use it as the basis of a lesson/project/unit. Just got to figure out how to address it…