Readers Write: The Electoral College debate continued, literacy

Opinion editor’s note: Strib Voices publishes letters from readers online and in print each day. To contribute, click here.

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Missing from both D.J. Tice’s commentary and all the subsequent letters on the Electoral College issue was any reasonable compromise solution, so here is one (“Walz is wrong about the Electoral College,” Strib Voices, Oct. 14, and subsequent letters).

First, one of the causes of the Electoral College becoming increasingly skewed to the per-state side of the calculation vs. the per-person side is that the Electoral College calculation for electoral votes based on population is (mostly) held to the 435 congressional member limit imposed by the 1929 Permanent Apportionment Act. (The exception is that D.C. gets real Electoral College votes on top of the 435 but only one nonvoting congressional representative.) If we instead used the population of the smallest state as a denominator and around 330 million as the total U.S. population, the 436 (435 plus one for D.C.) becomes approximately 578 (plus or minus the rounding effect). The smallest state, Wyoming, would retain its one population-based elector, while the largest, California, would increase from 52 population-based votes to around 69. (To the writer who thinks this overly favors blue California, the second- and third-largest states are Texas and Florida, which would increase from a combined population-based 66 electors to around 89). Then, when you add in the 102 state- and D.C.-based electors, the total size of the Electoral College would go from 538 to 680. This would restore the state vs. population weighting to something closer to what the framers (minus the three-fifths abomination) were aiming for.

Second, to get even closer to original intent, we could also require apportionment of each state’s electors based on the state voting split, which is what all the states did originally, instead of a winner-take-all system. (One would need to do this by state totals, not by congressional district, as the two are no longer synced, but this has the added benefit of taking gerrymandering out of the calculation.) But we could also compromise on this and have the population-based electors be apportioned while the state- and D.C.-based electors be winner-take-all for each state.

Miles Anderson, Minneapolis

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The time to squabble about the Electoral College has arrived with quadrennial regularity, and Tice has revisited his defense of the indefensible college — interrupting his argument to throw shade at Gov. Tim Walz, “pedantic” former schoolteachers and “well-coiffed” California Democratic donors. Others have adroitly rebutted his reasoning but haven’t invited us to peer into the truly anti-democratic black hole at the heart of the Electoral College arrangement. If no one wins a majority of the electors (270), the House elects the president with each state casting a single vote — one vote for Wyoming with its 580,000 or so residents, one vote for California’s nearly 40 million (some “well-coiffed”) folks and so on. Given the states’ current political leanings, this virtually assures a Republican victory — regardless of the popular vote. Far-fetched? It didn’t seem so in 1968 when the avowedly racist George Wallace mounted a strong third-party challenge, apparently hoping to throw the election into the House, where he would have sufficient influence over like-minded Congressmen to gain concessions. Teetering on the edge of the black hole was sufficiently disturbing to both Democrats and Republicans that in 1969 the House voted 338-70 to send an amendment to the Senate to dismantle the Electoral College. A contemporary poll found that 80% of the public favored direct election of the president. But a group of Southern senators killed the amendment with a filibuster.

The founders famously fretted about forestalling majority tyranny. They might have worried more about warding off minority rule.

David Miller, Minneapolis

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One last thought on that Electoral College debate. There’s a common argument that one of the benefits of the Electoral College is that it makes smaller states like Wyoming, North Dakota or Delaware more relevant. I hear often that the founding fathers implemented the Electoral College for that reason. That is not true. I think people are thinking of the Connecticut Compromise (which established the two houses in the legislative branch).

The original purpose of the Electoral College was in order to let citizens elect representatives that could pick a president for them, while also remaining separate from the day-to-day politics of the legislative branch. In other words, the founding fathers did not want citizens to vote for the president directly, and they did not want the presidential election mired in partisan politics. Seeing as we already gave up on those two benefits, it’s pretty easy to call the Electoral College vestigial.

But let’s take a harder look at that one benefit conservatives love to bring up: The Electoral College protects voters in small states from voters in larger states. In all three of those small states mentioned earlier, your vote basically does not matter. The site 538 is giving Trump a greater than 99% chance of winning Wyoming and North Dakota, and Harris a 99% chance of winning Delaware. The smallest state where the underdog has a better than 20% chance of winning is Nevada, the 32nd most populous state. Let me reiterate: If you live in a state smaller than Nevada, it’s likely that the election result in your state is already known.

Let’s say, hypothetically, a presidential candidate decided to focus their campaign on just the largest states. They manage to convince 51% of the 12 largest states to vote for them, while losing 100% of every other state. Assuming the turnout is the same in every state, they would win the Electoral College with a little under a third of the popular vote. I think the worst part of this hypothetical is that even if turnout in the states this hypothetical urban darling loses was double the turnout in the states they won, the Electoral College result would remain the same. No amount of small-state voters could outweigh the large-state voters.

I find myself taking this debate a bit personally this election cycle. I recently moved from Georgia to Minnesota, so over the course of my lifetime, my vote has gone from inconsequential to extremely consequential back to inconsequential. I also find myself struggling to relate to either campaign, since I am not part of that Midwestern working-class voting bloc both candidates seem to need. Yes, the Electoral College has successfully elevated a certain group of people often forgotten, but in the meantime it’s forgotten about the citizens of the 43-nonswing states (who I am once again a part of).

Rhett Smith, Minneapolis

I would like to chime in on the issues surrounding evidence-based reading instruction (“Boost literacy levels for Minn. students,” Strib Voices, Oct. 11, and “Look in the mirror, administrators,” Readers Write, Oct. 16). Several years ago I wrote a letter to the editor that was published that addressed pre-reading skills that children must have in order to take advantage of phonics instruction. These include holding books right-side up, scanning from left to right and top to bottom on a page, recognizing word boundaries in print (the space that indicates that one word ends and another has begun), being able to separate words into their sounds (not letters). If children can generate rhyming words, it is an indication that they know that they can take one sound off the beginning of a word and substitute another. Children who do not have this understanding are not ready to be taught phonics. Children who come from homes where they are read to, exposed to books extensively and have preschool experience generally pick up these skills in their environments. Children who come from “low print” homes often need to be specifically taught. If we are to improve reading proficiency in our young students, we must know that they are developmentally ready to benefit from phonics instruction.

Carol Henderson, Minneapolis