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Gary Parish
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| The Electoral College: Source of Inequality and Social Injustice in America by Gary Parish |
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| POSTSCRIPT: VOTING POWER AND GAME THEORY |
• One Person One Vote Myth • Fundamentally Unfair! • See For Yourself! • Social Injustice • Football Analogy • Moral Arguments • EC Cancels Votes • Founding Fathers • Invalid Arguments For EC • States' Rights? • Reform Options • Conclusion • Inequality Maps • EC Cartoons • Postscript:Voting Power • References • Acknowledgements • Action Center • Get Involved • E-mail White House • E-mail Congress • E-mail Newspapers • E-mail Political Parties • E-mail Networks • E-mail Media • Calling Cards • Teaching Notes |
Some analysts have argued that large states have a disproportionate influence on the election of a president by virtue of the sheer magnitude of their electoral vote counts regardless of the composition of that vote. They cite research in the area of Game Theory, particularly the use of power indexes in solving cooperative N-person games to more precisely characterize the political power arising from the structure of the election process. The work of Shapley and Banzhaf has resulted in several useful metrics for the measurement of power in voting systems. Applied to the Electoral College, these power indices do indeed show a "size effect" bias in favor of the large states somewhat smaller than the opposite bias against large states described in the analysis above. (Unfortunately, software to demonstrate this effect on problems as large as the Electoral College is not generally available to the layman, so independent confirmation of the game theory effect bias in favor of large states is not possible for this analysis.) However, the policy prescriptions emerging from the power index analysis are to eliminate the bias by either: 1) combining, subdividing, or redefining the states so they all have equal population; or 2) applying mathematical transformations of the states' electoral votes to reduce the bias in favor of larger states. Neither of these approaches is politically feasible in the foreseeable future.
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