If I ever found myself suddenly in need of a PhD dissertation in political science to research, write, and defend (I will not), I would study the relationship between citizen satisfaction and confidence in government institutions, the number of legislators that stand for each person in a state, and the populace’s belief that their interests are represented in government. If we take as an axiom that the just exercise of government power relies upon the consent of the governed, then the legitimacy of government is conditional on an engaged citizenry that feels represented.

Yes, feelings do matter, here. When the people do not feel that public institutions represent them, any action those institutions take is of questionable legitimacy. Given how often we interact with the machinery of the state—from law enforcement to the schools to the courts to the bureaucracy—that’s a problem! And with enough people around the world questioning the legitimacy of entrenched political power—a global populist spasm that has thus far resulted in (among other things) the election of Donald Trump and Britain’s vote to (eventually, presumably) leave the European Union—we may be in the midst of a full-blown crisis of representation.

Representation is not merely a question of the precise numerical ratio of population to legislator, of course, but I think it’s fair to say that proportionality is a major factor in how representative a given government can feel to the population. It would be facile (and demonstrably wrong) to suggest that the legitimacy of government rests entirely on a particular, low ratio of population to representatives, but there seems to be a relationship there, at least, in the majority of cases.

There is no perfect or objective or scientific way to measure the health of a democracy, but that doesn’t stop the think-tanks from trying. The Democracy Index is one such attempt, scoring governments on their commitment to democratic principles including “electoral process and pluralism, civil liberties, the functioning of government, political participation, and political culture.” Checking the 2018 Democracy Index scores against countries’ population per legislative seat, one finds that only one of the 20 “full democracies” in the DI ranking have legislative bodies whose members represent more than 100,000 people each.

The United States, meanwhile, has a legislature of just 535 individuals for a population of 320,000,000—a rate of one representative for every 600,000 people. This is decidedly off-brand, considering our long-held Lincolnian insistence on “government of the people, by the people, for the people!” For a country that fetishizes its democratic bona fides at home while spreading it with fire and fury abroad, it’s strange to find the United States trailing only India (and their 1.4 billion people) in terms of proportional representation.

Again, I’m not saying that representation rates are everything. North Korea has an “elected” unicameral legislature with each representative standing for just 36,000 people—a rate in line with some of the freest societies in the world—not to mention the founding document of the United States—which North Korea decidedly is not. And while James Madison was also wary of a legislature so large as to be unwieldy and mob-like in character, it’s safe to say that he did not imagine, when he was defending the proportional representation plan for the House, that each House Rep would one day stand for 700,000 of his fellow citizens.

From Federalist 55:

In general it may be remarked on this subject [of proportional representation], that no political problem is less susceptible of a precise solution, than that which relates to the number most convenient for a representative legislature…

(…) Nothing can be more fallacious than to found our political calculations on arithmetical principles. Sixty or seventy men, may be more properly trusted with a given degree of power than six or seven. But it does not follow, that six or seven hundred would be proportionally a better depositary. And if we carry on the supposition to six or seven thousand, the whole reasoning ought to be reversed. The truth is, that in all cases a certain number at least seems to be necessary to secure the benefits of free consultation and discussion, and to guard against too easy a combination for improper purposes: As on the other hand, the number ought at most to be kept within a certain limit, in order to avoid the confusion and intemperance of a multitude. In all very numerous assemblies, of whatever characters composed, passion never fails to wrest the sceptre from reason. Had every Athenian citizen been a Socrates; every Athenian assembly would still have been a mob.

All of which is to say that though I sure as shit don’t know how big the House of Representatives should be, I definitely think it should be considerably larger than it is now. Increasing the size of the legislature would have the benefit of increasing the representative voice of each constituent in the federal legislature while also flattening out some of the disparity of representation that exists between small states and larger ones. Currently, each member of the House from Wyoming represents about 190,000 Wyomingites, while each member of the House from California represents about 755,000 Californians. Leave the disproportionate representation to the other chamber—they’ve more than got it covered.

And that brings us, finally, to the Electoral College, and its various problems of representation. You may have heard—the good ol’ EC is not too popular these days. People of all different stripes are calling for it to be ended or neutered—in the pages of this very newspaper, no less!—and it’s being defended by none other than the Very Worst American himself.

Which is not to say that he has been perfectly consistent on the issue through the years.

I am unconvinced that the Electoral College needs to go. I understand the simple appeal of a national popular vote. It incentivizes turnout in states that aren’t traditionally in play. It gives an equal voice to each voter. And it just feels fair—whichever candidate gets the most votes wins. That’s just how it’s supposed to work in democracies, right?

I’m not here to “actually” you to death, and I don’t think that a direct popular vote for the president would be in conflict with the rest of our government continuing to function (or not) as a representative republic. Still, I am wary about a national popular vote, not least because of Madison’s concerns about the “confusion and intemperance of a multitude” quoted above. I don’t think that now is the time to be pushing the campaign for president even further in the direction of a purely national media campaign, in no small part because it would encourage anybody with some money and a decent marketing firm behind them to jump into the race. How many Michael Bloombergs and Howard Schultz-es and various Shitty Billionaire’s Scions and Elon Musks would it take in the final field to get the “winner” of the popular vote down to a twenty-five or thirty-percent plurality? As for the potential prospect of a national recount, imagine Florida in 2000 times 2,356.

We should be working toward the democratic principle of equality of representation, not demanding an absolute religious fealty to a standard of one person, one vote. We can achieve a more equitable, representative system without succumbing to the temptation of the easy (but drastic) fix, the unintended consequences of which could be as dire as they are difficult to foresee. It will come as little surprise, at this point, that I have a solution in mind.

One of the primary (and quite valid) complaints about the EC is that it fails to even nod in the direction of the one person, one vote ideal. So let’s fix that, first. Each state will receive electors at a rate of one for every 50,000 people in their state. There will not be a false floor, nor a cap, on the number of electors a state can have. Wyoming’s population of 600,000 would earn them 12 electoral votes, and California, with a population of 39,550,000, would receive 791 electoral votes.

This would dramatically increase the total number of electors in the Electoral College. Currently, there are 538 electoral votes up for grabs—under my fix, with a total US population of approximately 327,050,000, that number jumps to 6,541. The obvious upside, here, is that all of the dis-proportionality baked into the current EC is flattened out of existence. As of 2016, each electoral vote in California stood for more than 700,000 Californians, while each electoral vote in Wyoming stood for 200,000 Wyomingites, giving Wyomingites more relative power. Under my system, each electoral vote, no matter the state, stands for precisely 50,000 people.

In one way, this expansion is a huge coup for the biggest states in the Union, with the power of the smallest states diminished to mere equality of representation. No doubt all the Dakotans and Delawareans and Montanans in the room—and they’re all over there, in the corner, trying to put together a coalition to field a single baseball team—are quite upset. But before we go dancing on the gravestone of Alaska’s outsized influence, it’s worth noting that even with this fix, Donald Trump would have still won the 2016 election.

Hillary Clinton’s popular vote victory was real, but she won a 48.2% plurality by a margin of 2.86 million votes out of a total of 137 million votes cast, with a turnout rate of about 55%. Well in excess of 100 million decided not to vote at all. This was not some bold statement about the direction most Americans believed the country should move in, it was a bare acknowledgement that we, uhh, kinda prefer this widely hated asshole over this other widely hated asshole. Trump won not because he piled up a bunch of wins in over-represented small states (though he did that, too), he won because millions of people who voted for Obama in 2012 stayed home, and because he didn't lose a single important swing state.

But we'll get back to the arguments in a minute—we're not done saving America, yet.

In addition to a great expansion of the size of the EC, we must institute a national standard for how citizens vote for president, and how the winning votes are apportioned. For all the talk of the importance of representation above, it's worth pointing out that a direct popular vote can leave the great majority of Americans—all but the 62,984,828 who voted for Clinton, for example—feeling rather unrepresented. A pure popular vote invites a binary, even apocalyptic, mentality, often enough leaving most people to feel like they lost. Ranked-choice voting, with an instant run-off to get to a majority, on the other hand, invites the highest number of people to participate and ultimately feel like they had a role in determining the outcome. Maybe a voter’s first or second choice didn’t win, but their third choice did—they’re disappointed, sure, but they still played a role, their preference noted and respected and represented. Combined with a state-by-state winner take all system of awarding electoral votes, we'd have a system in which a higher percentage of Americans than ever would have a hand in selecting the president. Talk about good for representation and legitimacy!

~ ~ ~

Somewhat parenthetically, but not parenthetically enough to dismiss it to the footnotes (had I footnotes), I originally imagined this system as one that rewarded turnout above all else. Instead of one elector for every 50,000 people in a state, ideally I’d like to award one elector for every 50,000 people who voted in that state. Unfortunately, such a system has a real-world tragic flaw. While it encourages turnout in swing states, raising the importance of winning that majority with every additional vote cast, it also offers a perverse incentive to suppress the vote in any state that does not seem to be in play. Florida, for example, would be hotly contested, with both parties (and any third-party candidates, whose prospects brighten dramatically in a ranked-choice system) doing everything in their power to turn out their votes. We could see a record turnout, and Florida would have more electoral votes than ever—a reward for having engaged and participated. But Republicans would likely tell their voters in California, as a counterexample, not to bother showing up at all. Knowing that they won’t win the state-wide popular vote anyway, every 50,000 Republicans that showed up to vote ultimately just handed an additional elector to the Democrats.

I really, really like the idea of tying states’ electors to how many people actually come out to vote. It seems intuitively fair in an important way, and it encourages turnout not just to get to the all-important majority, but to increase the power of the collective voice of the state. Tied in with ranked-choice voting and winner-take-all apportionment, it also increases voter engagement and participation and ultimately, I suspect, confidence in a government of, for, and by the people.

Awarding electors based on turnout is likely one rose-colored step too far, but this is already an exercise in imagining good faith where none exists, an idealistic re-imagining of the American body politic as engaged and civically minded. And it requires a non-partisan commitment to encouraging voting rights, expanding the franchise, and a general faith in the idea that government can be a non-malevolent force, if it can ever achieve the moral authority to exercise just power with the consent and confidence of the governed. We can do this should not be a hopelessly partisan position. We can do this was a primary motivation of the various, often shameful compromises that birthed this nation—if one doesn’t believe, at the very least, we can do this, I cannot imagine what other meaning one has projected upon this nation, its founding documents, or its flag. When Reagan admonished “government is not the solution to our problem—government is the problem," he wasn’t talking about everything, he was talking about economic policy and bureaucratic overreach. But it seems a couple of generations of conservatives have absorbed the mantra as foundational near-religious doctrine and ignored the context. Reagan, for all his faults, certainly believed that we can do this.

In short, awarding electors based on turnout would require that all parties accept that the battle must be over ideas and policy proposals and fought in good faith, not over who can most effectively limit the other team from having their say—and that seems terrifically naive, at the moment. On the other hand, maybe there is an easy solution, some way to link the number of electors assigned to each state to voter turnout without encouraging the likely losers to stay home, and I just can't think of it. Maybe you can! And, though I am, apparently, the sort of person who writes blogs and builds PERSONAL BRAND IDENTITIES, I do not actually believe I am capable of delivering all the answers. Valid institutions are built in compromise and collaboration, not because one person thinks they've accounted for every possible objection. No more do I think the answer is "just go with a popular vote, you idiot, it's actually very easy," than do I think I've put my finger on the exact right solution.

~ ~ ~

So, ranked-choice voting for president in every state, with each elector standing for 50,000 people—every vote equal. As I mentioned above, the results of the 2016 election would not change under my system—neither the system I settled for, with the number of electors (truly) based on a state’s population, nor my idealized version based on turnout. (Here’s the worksheet I created that tallies these different scenarios, if you’re a real weirdo.) Not to re-litigate that shitshow, but because of his sweep of big swing states like Wisconsin, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Florida, not to mention easy victories in places Clinton thought she might eke out wins like North Carolina and Arizona, Trump simply won too many states to expect to be defeated in any system that resembles the EC. "But he didn't get the most votes," you're saying, "so he shouldn't have won the election!"

Any defense of the EC must necessarily include a justification for why it is occasionally good to subvert the will of the people. (This is considerably easier, I think, when the loser only won a plurality of the vote, but I recognize it as a legitimate hurdle nonetheless.) "The person who gets the most votes should win" is, again, a very powerful and compelling intuition, and I don't think there's actually a convincing single argument to be made against it. Overcoming it requires a recognition that there are a number of conflicting ideals at work, and that the simplest solution does not always work best to satisfy all of them.

For me, along with the objections noted above, one of those competing ideals is the notion of federalism itself. The principle of federalism, reinforced by the Electoral College, helps solidify the disparate voices of the many into the voice of one while maintaining the all important feeling of representation. The knowledge that you and the people in your 50,000 person neighborhood or town or county or region can raise your voices and speak collaboratively as one strikes me as more powerful and legitimizing than being one vote among some possible 200 million. (Speaking of the Brand!)

The vast increase in the number of electors I’m calling for is designed to increase the feeling of representation the average voter experiences when casting a vote for president, the same goal that an expansion of the House of Representatives would pursue for the legislature. The legitimate exercise of government power is dependent upon the consent of the governed—consent that is best achieved through collaboration and representation. I hate to be the one to break it to you, Resistance America, but Trump’s America isn’t actually going anywhere, even when the power inevitably rotates away from them, just as Trump’s victory did not somehow vanquish those who opposed him to Canada or some other dimension. The direct popular election of the president, even if it would have resulted in outcomes that you’d have preferred in recent history, wouldn’t actually solve any of the underlying problems. Abolishing the Electoral College won’t solve anything, either. Let’s blow it up, instead.

I assume my PhD, along with the gratitude of a healed nation, is in the mail.