[EL] State-by-state popular vote statistics for presidential elections from 1796 (or as early as possible) through 2016

Thu Jul 18 09:00:20 PDT 2019

I asked a while back whether anyone had responded to Michael Rosin's
analyses. He points out that a national popular vote system would have
given a great deal of power to states -- almost all in the South as it
turned out -- where the voting margins would be high. If Georgia gives 93%
of its popular vote to Jefferson, but Pennsylvania splits 52-48 for Adams
(numbers based on a recollection of something I saw a while back that may
or may not be accurate), Jefferson's margin in Georgia would have given it
much more influence than Pennsylvania on the outcome of the election. That
is true even if the total number of voters in Georgia is substantially less
than in Pennsylvania. That problem would have existed until Reconstruction
began and then would have reemerged under a popular vote system when
African Americans then were effectively disenfranchised after
Reconstruction.

So it isn't clear that a national popular vote system would have
disadvantaged the slave states at the time of the Founding.

Madison and others from the South must have been smart enough to know that.
Unless they thought that voters in northern states would vote for their
preferred candidates by fairly high margins, they would have understood
that the electoral college system was not necessarily in their interest.
All of this would have depended on the relative number of votes in the
states and the expected margins. In my example, you could calculate how
much larger the popular vote in Pennsylvania would have to be for Adams's
4% advantage in Pennsylvania to balance out Jefferson's 86% advantage in
Georgia. I haven't done that calculation yet.

One reason I want to get the state-by-state popular vote totals for
presidential elections is to check Rosin's analysis and do those
calculations.

This certainly raises a question whether adoption of the electoral college
would have been seen as an advantage for the South (and whether it actually
turned out to be an advantage). It may undercut the current narrative that
the Convention chose the electoral college system to benefit the slave
states (the ones in the South, I mean -- slavery was legal everywhere at
that time, I think).

Congress is a different matter; the 3/5 clause gave the South a substantial
bonus in the House -- though not in the contingent selection procedure if
the House ended up choosing the president, with each state's delegation
having a single vote.

My thanks to Charles for his reference to the CQ volume. Based on the
snippet I've been able to see, it does not seem to include the raw popular
vote totals for the states that used popular vote (at-large or by district)
to appoint electors. I will try to get the full volume and see what is
included.

So I'm still hoping someone has a link to an authoritative source for the
raw popular vote totals.

Again, I'm also hoping someone will know how reliable the information is
that Dave Leip has on his webpage. He has raw popular vote totals by state,
but I don't know whether I can trust his numbers.

Mark

Prof. Mark S. Scarberry
Pepperdine Univ. School of Law

On Thu, Jul 18, 2019 at 3:23 AM Rob Richie <rr at fairvote.org> wrote:

> I'll note that quite a few states did not allocate electoral votes
> according to a statewide popular vote until Andrew Jackson’s presidency
> (and not every state held a presidential election until 1872, with another
> blip in 1876 before all states holding elections starting in 1880, albeit
> without suffrage rights for a majority of adult adjust until 1920).
> FairVote a few years ago did a piece on how use of the winner take all rule
> and use of statewide popular votes here:
>
> https://www.fairvote.org/how-the-electoral-college-became-winner-take-all
>
> James Madison proposed banning the winner take all rule just as it was
> becoming the norm, notably. See.
>
>
> https://www.fairvote.org/why-james-madison-wanted-to-change-the-way-we-vote-for-president
>
>
> When people quote Alexander Hamiton on the "most excellent" Electoral
> College or tell modern reformers "so you think you're smarter than the
> framers," they may not realize that the framers and the opening generation
> of American political leaders did not make use of the Electoral College
> anything like we do today. But they also weren't timid about change.
> Perhaps it was their revolutionary spirit, perhaps it was that most had
> been part of a living debate about the roots of government structures and
> systems, but they were quick to change presidential selection rules and
> practices that weren't working - both by statute at the state level and
> with constitutional change like the 12th amendment, that was a major
> departure from the first Electoral College system.
>
> Ironically, we then got saddled with the winner take all rule by popular
> vote in states - not because it was a fair or effective national system of
> picking the president, but because it was in the self-interest of any
> particular state trying to maximize the advantages of its majority. And
> today we have a defenders of tradition less ready to take action for
> necessary changes. Or at least that's how I see it!
>
> Rob
>
>
> On Thu, Jul 18, 2019 at 5:53 AM Charles H Stewart <cstewart at mit.edu>
> wrote:
>
>> Try _Presidential elections, 1789–2008,_ Washington, CQ Press, 2010,
>> starting at p. 190.
>>
>>
>> Charles Stewart III
>> MIT
>> Sent from my iPad
>>
>> On Jul 18, 2019, at 4:25 AM, Mark Scarberry <
>> mark.scarberry at pepperdine.edu> wrote:
>>
>> I am trying to find information about the popular vote in presidential
>> elections by state from 1796 (or as early as possible) through 2016. I
>> realize that, early on, some states' legislatures picked the electors, so
>> that in some cases there would be no state popular vote data.
>>
>> Dave Leip's Atlas of U.S. Presidential Elections,
>> https://uselectionatlas.org/, has such data going back to the 1824
>> election. Does anyone know whether his data is reliable?
>>
>> Mark
>>
>> Prof. Mark S. Scarberry
>> Pepperdine Univ. School of Law
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> Law-election mailing list
>> Law-election at department-lists.uci.edu
>> https://department-lists.uci.edu/mailman/listinfo/law-election
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> Law-election mailing list
>> Law-election at department-lists.uci.edu
>> https://department-lists.uci.edu/mailman/listinfo/law-election
>
>
>
> --
> ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
> Rob Richie
> President and CEO, FairVote
> 6930 Carroll Avenue, Suite 240
> Takoma Park, MD 20912
> rr at fairvote.org  (301) 270-4616  http://www.fairvote.org
> *FairVote Facebook <https://www.facebook.com/FairVoteReform>*   *FairVote
> Twitter <https://twitter.com/fairvote>*   My Twitter
> <https://twitter.com/rob_richie>
>
> Thank you for considering a *donation
> <http://www.fairvote.org/donate>. Enjoy our video on ranked choice voting
> <https://youtu.be/CIz_nzP-W_c>!*
> (Note: Our Combined Federal Campaign number is 10132.)
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://webshare.law.ucla.edu/Listservs/law-election/attachments/20190718/4ceb93a7/attachment.html>