A Republican candidate for governor of Colorado wants to be elected via a statewide electoral college

Behind the candidate’s odd, unconstitutional proposal to make states into republics of their counties

Photo by Kait Herzog on Unsplash

Greg Lopez, a Republican former mayor running for governor of Colorado, said this week that if he is elected in November he would immediately move to replace the state’s popular-vote system with a system that assigns electoral votes to counties based on the voter turnout of their residents. Each county would get between 3 and 11 votes in a statewide electoral college, with the precise number determined by the share of residents in that county that voted in the last election. 

To state the obvious: this is an incredibly bad idea.

Lopez’s state electoral-college system would have the dual effect of punishing voters who live in cities, via malapportionment of too many votes to rural counties, and hurting voters where turnout is lower — a dubious principle to base an electoral system on

According to a recording of the campaign stop where he unearthed his proposal, Lopez said: “One of the things that I’m going to do, and I’ve already put this plan together, is, as governor, I’m going to introduce a conversation about doing away with the popular vote for statewide elected officials and doing an electoral college vote for statewide elected officials.”. Any changes of this magnitude would require an amendment to the state constitution.

Supporters of plans like these say they would incentivize candidates to pull support from all parts of a state, similar to how the presidential Electoral College rewards voters in rural states.

But the reality is that they are spectacularly bad ideas. They are philosophical betrayals of both democratic and republican principles. And they are unconstitutional.

To see how this goes wrong, start with a hypothetical election. According to an analysis of election returns by 9NEWS in Colorado, a re-run of the 2018 election using Lopez’s state electoral college would have resulted in Republicans winning the office despite losing the popular vote in the state by double digits: 

Under Lopez’s plan, that governor's race would have been a runaway win for Republicans, who lost the actual race by double-digits when each vote was weighted equally.

Democrat Jared Polis defeated Republican Walker Stapleton by more than 10 percentage points. Lopez’s electoral college plan would have swung that race for Republicans by nearly 30 percentage points, resulting in the equivalent of an 18 percentage point victory for Stapleton over Polis.

This is in part because Colorado’s rural counties have higher voter turnout than rural ones. But the big difference is the population disparity by arbitrarily capping each county’s number of votes at 11:

Colorado’s rural, conservative counties had seven of the 10 highest voter turnout percentages in the 2018 race for governor. … Lopez’s weighting system would have given the 2,013 combined voters in Hinsdale, Kiowa and Mineral counties a total of 33 electoral votes, more than double the 14 electoral votes of Denver, Arapahoe and Adams counties’ combined 761,873 voters.

So, here’s the math. Voters in those three small, rural, conservative high-turnout counties get about 0.016 electors per voter. In the largest counties of the state, voters earn 0.0000184 electors per person. That is a difference of 87,000%. A voter in Hinsdale, in other words, counts 870x as much as a voter in Denver when determining who wins statewide elections.

That is an obvious and egregious violation of the democratic principle of one person = one vote. But that’s exactly what Lopez is after: “It’s not about one-person, one-vote,” he said on his campaign stop. “It’s about true representation.”

But the “true representation” of what? A generous interpretation of Lopez’s words is that he means the accurate representation of counties. But that might be giving him too much credit; he has given no reason why he thinks counties aren’t served by their state government. The plan would, however, give an untenable advantage to Republicans. It takes no stretch of the imagination to wonder if he means “true representation” for them, instead of Democrats in the cities.

The idea of a state electoral college is not only anti-democratic and counter-majoritarian. It is also an assault on republicanism. The system gives too many extra votes to rural areas to ensure that the will of the majority of voters is reflected in government most of the time. The officials elected under such a system would not actually represent the people, but the counties.

Luckily, the plan is unlikely to muster enough support from Coloradans to actually amended the state’s constitution. And, if it did, the Supreme Court would likely strike it down.

State electoral-college systems have twice been struck down by the Court. The 1964 case Reynolds v Sims is the most famous. Voters from Jefferson County, Alabama had challenged a state law which gave at least one state representative to each county. At the time, the district containing Jefferson County had 41 times as many eligible voters as the smallest district in the state. Sims and the other plaintiffs argued that the malapportionment — the lack of proportionality in translating votes to seats — prevented them from effectively participating in a republican form of government, which the state constitution set to establish.

In an 8-1 decision, the Warren Court held that the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment demanded “no less than substantially equal state legislative representation for all citizens.” It had ruled similarly in a 1962 case over the system that the state of Georgia used to count votes in primary elections. That system assigned counties a set number of votes per the first 5, 10, 15, then 30 thousand votes that lived there, over-weighting the say of rural compared to urban counties. The winner of the plurality vote in the county then won all of the county unit’s “electoral college” votes. That made the disparity even worse.

The Warren Court ruled 8-1 in that case, Gray v Sanders, that the Georgia county system for weighting votes also violed the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment. Justice William Douglas delivered the opinion of the Court, in part saying:

The concept of"we the people" under the Constitution visualizes no preferred class of voters, but equality among those who meet the basic qualifications. The idea that every voter is equal to every other voter in his State when he casts his ballot in favor of one of several competing candidates underlies many of our decisions. … The only weighting of votes sanctioned by the Constitution concerns matters of representation, such as the allocation of Senators irrespective of population and the use of the electoral college in the choice of a President.

The conception of political equality from the Declaration of Independence, to Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, to the Fifteenth, Seventeenth, and Nineteenth Amendments can mean only one thing-one person, one vote.

This precedent would render Greg Lopez’s proposals for an electoral-college-like system to determine the winner of Colorado state office unconstitutional. As it should! Given the lack of any philosophical or historical basis for such a system, it is hard to understand the proposal as anything less than a partisan attempt to enshrine rural Republican rule in perpetuity.

The Electoral College’s defenders often note (wrongly) that “America is a Republic, not a Democracy.” But enacting a state-level electoral college is akin to saying that “Colorado is not a state. It is a Republic of counties.” That is silly and anti-democratic on its face.