A Stitch in Haste

One of my first and favorite blogging topics was my staunch advocacy of the District Method of allocating electoral votes. The District Method is highly desirable compromise between the nonsensical current winner-take-all system used by all but two states and the totally unworkable proposition of moving to a straight popular vote.

States are not currently required to tally their election results by Congressional Districts, so independent think tanks and research firms have to crunch the local polling data manually, which as we see can take several months.

But the results are now in:

Polidata's Clark Bensen said that Bush carried 255 congressional districts on his way to winning reelection last November, while Kerry won 180. The president captured 214 districts held by congressional Republicans and 41 districts that were won by Democratic House candidates. Just 18 of the districts that Kerry won are in GOP hands.
...
How would Bush and Kerry have fared if the electoral college determined its allocation of electoral votes on the basis of who won each congressional district, as some advocate, rather than on who wins the popular vote in each state? Bensen crunched those numbers and concluded that Bush would have won by an even larger margin, with 317 electoral votes rather than the 286 he actually captured.

There are obviously significant implications in these numbers for the 2010 Congressional Redistricting and therefore post-2010 national elections -- OpinionJournal is all over that, as is WILLisms.

But I’m more interested in how the District Method result would have achieved what the Electoral College is supposed to achieve -- a clear, decisive victory -- even better than the winner-take-all system did, while better reflecting the popular vote in the process.

As I’ve blogged before, a true popular election is simply not possible in this country unless we are willing to spend far more money and impose far stricter rules for voting (e.g., actually registering to vote and actually having ID when you vote). But the District Method would be a huge step in that direction and achieve most of what anti-Electoral advocates seek. Almost every state would return to “battleground” status. Candidates would actually have to campaign nationwide. The prospects of a tie, or a Florida 2000 crisis or Ohio 2004 not-quite-crisis, would be miniscule compared to the current winner-take-all system.

The District Method is an idea whose time has come. It may not be the exactingly perfect solution to the flaws of the Electoral College, but it is a simple, straightforward, workable improvement that gets us mostly where we want and ought to be.

Hat tip to Right Side of the Rainbow, who first noticed the WaPo story.

Related Posts:
Electing an Electoral Alternative
Are You Sure You Want a Popular Vote?
Electoral College: Did I Say "Glacier Speed"?
Electoral College: Bush Seeks to Split Maine Vote
County Results Suggest District Method Landslide