In the September 1996 issue of PS, I.M. Destler analyzes the supposed “electoral lock” that Republicans have on the Presidency due to the dynamics of the Electoral College. Under Destler's analysis, there turns out to be no great advantage in the system for either party. Destler speculates that the reason is that there are offsetting effects. On the one hand, Republicans do well in smaller states which because of the weighting bias of the electoral college system are disproportionately represented (each state, of course, has one vote for each U.S. Representative and one vote for each Senator, the latter element giving a disproportionate voice to the smaller states). Democrats, on the other hand, have been doing better in the bigger states where the winner-take-all principle helps boost their electoral college totals.

The electoral college is of course a perennial target of reformers who see it as unfair and confusing. While defenders of the electoral college argue its merits on many grounds, there are many significant problems, and few are as serious as the small state bias. Figure 1 shows this bias by comparing the actual votes that each state gets during elections in the 1990s (and 2000) with the votes each would get if the 538 electoral votes were allocated on a strictly proportional basis (the states are sorted by their non-biased electoral votes). Certainly, giving extra weight to one state over another—violating the one person-one vote principle—is more problematic than the second issue raised by Destler: the winner-take-all aspect.