Having been asked to write a short article on U.S. elections for the magazine of our club in Yokohama (where U.S. citizens are very much a minority), I wrote the following. 

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Why U.S. Elections are So Complicated.

An election is a simple thing. Whoever gets the most votes wins, right? Not in the United States of America.

When the Founders wrote the Constitution they were aware, as Hamilton puts it in Federalist No. 1 that

Happy will it be if our choice should be directed by a judicious estimate of our true interests, unperplexed and unbiased by considerations not connected with the publicgood. But this is a thing more ardently to be wished than seriously to be expected. The plan offered to our deliberations affects too many particular interests, innovates upon toomany local institutions, not to involve in its discussion a variety of objects foreign to its merits, and of views, passions, and prejudices little favorable to the discovery of truth.

One set of those particular interests that Hamilton mentions pitted the larger of the thirteen original colonies, New York, Pennsylvania and Virginia, against the smaller ones,Rhode Island and South Carolina, for example. The former asserted the importance of majority rule, which would, if simply accepted, have given them control of the new country. The latter countered with right of minorities to be protected and have a voice in the new Republic. The result was a compromise in which the legislative branch would be divided into two houses, the House of Representatives, in which representation is proportional to the populations of the states as determined by the decennial census, and the Senate, in which every state, regardless of population, gets two Senators. In addition, the President would be elected, not by the national popular vote, but instead by an Electoral College in which the number of electors apportioned to each state equal its total Congressional delegation, Representatives plus Senators.

Thus, for example, Wyoming, a state with a population of 515,004, one Representative and two Senators, has three electoral college votes. Each of its Electoral College votes represents 171,668 people. In contrast California has a population of 36,457,549, fifty- three Representatives and two Senators. Each of its Electoral College Votes represents 662, 865 people. Thus, a voter who casts his or her vote in Wyoming has, roughly speaking, nearly four times the impact on the election of a California voter.

A further set of complications is introduced by the fact that how elections should be conducted is not specified in the Constitution. That is left up to the states. The Constitution, moreover, makes no provision for political parties. Thus, not only does how votes are cast and counted vary from state-to-state, so does the choice of processes by which the parties nominate their candidates.

Current options on the table include primaries, caucuses or, in at least one recently notorious case, “the Texas two-step,” both. Primaries are run like other elections, with people going to the polls to vote. Primaries may be either open, allowing independents and members of the other party to vote in a party’s primary, or closed, allowing only voters registered as members of the party in question to vote.

Caucuses are party meetings, typically open to anyone who shows up and signs a declaration that he or she is a member of the party. Historically, caucuses have given the edge to politicians whose supporters control the local party machinery, are able to get supporters to attend, and have mastered the often byzantine rules under which caucuses are run. They have also been favored by smaller and poorer state parties, for whom
running a primary may be seen as too costly, given the need to conserve resources for the general election. As recent events have revealed, however, an insurgent national campaign can turn the tables on the party hacks by getting its people to attend caucuses in large numbers and training them in caucus procedures in advance.

Feeling confused? Don’t blame yourself. Imagine yourself an American trying to understand cricket. The one thing you really need to know as the U.S. elections climax this November is, “Keep an eye on the electoral votes!” That’s the score that counts.

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Having heard that tomorrow’s national tracking polls will show a substantial bump for McCain-Palin, I take particular comfort from that final sentence and the electoral vote projection at FiveThirtyEight.com. I note, too, that polls reported on Monday tend to be biased by oversampling of old white folks who stay at home on the weekend.