Dumb case for the Electoral College: What if the election were a World Series, and each voter represented a run?

My attention has been drawn (blame JJ) to the argument that the Electoral College elegantly turns each presidential election into a World Series.

In other words, it doesn’t matter how many runs in total the two teams score. It matters only which team wins four games first.

According to MIT physicist Alan Natapoff’s logic, the votes are the runs; the games are the states. A candidate can’t simply score the most runs to win; he has to score key runs in key games, when the runs count most.

At that is just the problem with the Electoral College. An election is not a World Series. A World Series is designed to generate dramatic tension from the clash of two teams trying to make sure that most of the players don’t score at all. A real election isn’t supposed to produce drama for drama’s sake. It’s supposed to produce a democratic decision.

All batters are not created equal. Some are much more likely than others to score or to bat runs in. And each team has pitchers and fielders of unequal skills trying to deny those runs.

Even if Natapoff is hypothesizing that unequal ball teams represent the unequal merits of each candidate’s platform, the arbitrary manipulation of when and how runs (votes) count is proof the Electoral College is anti-democratic garbage.

Here’s a better sports analogy for what the Electoral College does:

Each presidential election is one baseball game, except that the runs scored in three innings are doubled automatically, and the runs scored in three other innings don’t count at all.

Try playing a few ball games like that. Then, as soon as a team with more real runs loses to a team with more counted runs, ask the fans if that game was fair.

Frank Warner