Vox Claims The Electoral College ‘Magnifies The Power Of White Voters’

It’s been over two weeks since the election, and liberals continue to analyze the “fairness” of the Electoral College. Their newest angle? The Electoral College “magnifies the power of white voters.”

The Electoral College magnifies the power of white voters https://t.co/GoMzZO4X5p

— Vox (@voxdotcom) November 22, 2016

Check out this stellar analysis from Vox.

We can use a similar approach to show how the Electoral College increases not just the weight of voters in swing states but the weight of voters of certain ethnicities — based on their distribution across the states. We find that, based on the current distribution of voters of different ethnicities across states, and particularly within swing states, the Electoral College amplifies the power of white voters by a substantial amount.

They first calculated the probability of a single voter making a difference in each state.

You multiply together two factors: 1) the probability that your state is needed for an Electoral College win and 2) the probability that the vote in your state is tied, given that its electoral votes are necessary. Take California, for example. There we estimated a probability of over 50 percent that the state’s 55 electoral votes would be required for a win. But there was a probability of less than 1 in 10 billion that the vote in the state would be tied, under this scenario.

According to their analysis, new Hampshire voters had the highest change of determining the election, but there was one problem. The first analysis didn’t take race into consideration! And as you all know, race is everything.

They initially concluded that voters in five states– New Hampshire, Colorado, Nevada, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania– have the highest voting power. According to exit polls, 80 percent of those voters are white. That’s problematic, according to Vox.

The same approach also lets us introduce ethnicity into the picture, because we know the approximate ethnic composition of voters in each state — the proportion who are white, black, Hispanic, or “other.” We can average this across states and thus compute the average probability of decisiveness for everyone of each of these ethnic groups, across the country.

 

After running the numbers, we estimate that, per voter, whites have 16 percent more power than blacks once the Electoral College is taken into consideration, 28 percent more power than Latinos, and 57 percent more power than those who fall into the other category.

They even provided this chart, which made their conclusion super official.

Vox concludes:

The Electoral College isn’t just a goofy way of cumulating votes that sometimes grants the presidency to the person who gets fewer votes. It also motivates candidates to aim for the segments of voters who are overrepresented in swing states. In 2016, this implied a greater focus on whites, which affected the campaign and may have far-reaching implications on politics and policy.

 

This is not to cast doubt upon the legitimacy of Donald Trump’s Electoral College win (or, for that matter, to highlight Hillary Clinton’s plurality in the popular vote). But the disproportionate power of white voters is a statistical fact that has implications for the focus and content of campaigns, and it deserves attention and scrutiny.

They’re so hopelessly confused. Where to even begin?

For starters, non-Hispanic whites make up 63 percent of the population in the United States. OF COURSE they’re going to carry more weight as a whole in the big picture. It’s not our fault that the United States’ ethnic population isn’t evenly distributed across the country.

The truth is, the Electoral College doesn’t take race, gender, or political ideology into consideration. If we didn’t have the Electoral College, states like New York and California wold forever determine the outcome of the elections. That’s not fair to the other 48 states. The Electoral College is a safeguard against mob rule, period. It has nothing to do with race. It isn’t an issue. Again, the Electoral College has nothing to do with race. This is just another way for Vox to imply that non-white voters are oppressed. That’s the point of the entire article.

That’s aside from the fact that they assume white voters and non-white voters think completely differently. Their analysis is fundamentally flawed, because it’s based on the premise that most– if not all– non-white voters are at odds with white voters and therefore don’t have a voice. That’s absurd, completely divisive and based on false stereotypes.

It’s funny how Vox is suddenly maddened by the Electoral College “screwing over” non-white voters, isn’t it? They didn’t seem to have a problem with the system in 2008 or 2012.

h/t Twitchy