• The Electoral College The Electoral College By St. Louis Post-Dispatch – November 3, 2004 The American way of electing a president should have gone out with tri-corner hats. Four years ago, George W. Bush was installed in the White
• The Electoral College
The Electoral College
By St. Louis Post-Dispatch – November 3, 2004
The American way of electing a president should have gone out with tri-corner hats.
Four years ago, George W. Bush was installed in the White House despite the fact that about 500,000 more Americans had voted for Vice President Al Gore. An election where the winner loses is cock-eyed democracy.
That happened, of course, because Mr. Bush managed to win a very big state – Florida – by a very small margin. Our current system gave him the state’s entire electoral vote and the presidency.
This time around, Mr. Bush and Democratic contender Sen. John F. Kerry deployed armies of lawyers – literally thousands of them – ready to pounce if votes are disputed. A repeat of the 2000 meshugas this year could make Americans wonder if it’s worth it to vote if their votes aren’t counted properly.
The Electoral College has been around since the Constitution was written in 1787. Back then, news traveled with the speed of a horse. Our founders felt that John Q. Voter (no Janes allowed) couldn’t possibly know enough about presidential candidates from other states. So each state would select smart local electors instead, and the electors would pick the president.
Now, of course, you can’t turn on the TV without seeing the mug of a would-be president. Radio and newspapers are full of politics. John and Jane Voter have no excuse for not being well-informed.
Founders from the small states also worried that big states would gang up and control the nation. So they gave each state two electors for its senators as well as one for each congressman based on population. The gang-up theory is tenuous. Will New York and Texas actually gang up on Wyoming and Delaware.
Two centuries later, we’re stuck with a flintlock-era electoral system that sometimes distorts the popular will and always distorts campaigning. Since all of a states’ electors go to the top popular vote-getter, candidates concentrate on the dozen or so swing states where the vote could go either way. States that are solidly in one camp get short shrift in campaigning. This year, candidates paid particular attention to Ohio, Pennsylvania, Florida and Wisconsin. St. Louis and St. Charles early on got lots of candidate attention because Missouri is a swing state. Belleville, in solidly Kerry Illinois, might as well have been Siberia.
Some think we should go to direct popular election of the president, but that has its own hazards. In a very close race, such as in 2000, a loser might demand a recount for the entire nation, not just one state. We’d have the Florida’s hanging chad debacle times 50 with lawsuits and accusations flying everywhere. In addition, Democrats could become a bicoastal party, paying little attention to the heartland outside the cities, while Republicans emphasized their southern and western strength. The result could be greater polarization of the electorate.
Another solution might be to keep the Electoral College but award one elector to the winner in each congressional district, and the extra two to the winner of the statewide vote. Nebraska and Maine use such a system today. That would lessen the chance that a tiny victory in a big state would subvert the will of the people. The flaw in that method is the way districts are gerrymandered. They’re generally drawn to favor incumbents of one party or another. That could distort the popular will in ways as unfair as the current system.
The best solution may be a direct, popular nationwide election. We could combine that with a better-funded vote-counting system to avoid another post-election, hanging-chad, e-mail, butterfly, touch-screen meltdown.
Once the dust from the 2004 election has settled, Democrats and Republicans should start a discussion of a principled, bipartisan way to bring out presidential voting into the 21st century.
