Abolish The Electoral College?

Bryan Zepp Jamieson

01/15/01

A week before the 2000 general election, those of us watching the polls and knowledgeable enough to know which were the legitimate polls and which were right wing entities designed to create an astroturf movement for Bush realized that with the election as close as it was, there was a very good chance we could end up with a "split decision", with the popular vote going to one candidate, but the other prevailing in the Electoral college.

I noted as such to a friend in email, and suggested that it was likely, should Gore win Florida, that Bush would win the popular vote, perhaps even by less than a million, and Gore would win the Electoral vote with 284 or so. My friend was tickled pink at the thought since he, like me, doesn’t like right wingers and their authoritarian and anti-democratic ways, and thoroughly enjoys seeing them hoist by their own petard.

He asked me if I would like it, and I replied that while I would spend considerable time publically laughing at right wingers over it, I wouldn’t be happy with the result. For one thing, I’ve been arguing that we should get rid of the Electoral college since 1972. For another, it would result in an extremely damaged and weak presidency.

(We reckoned that Gore as America’s fourth president not to win a plurality of the vote wasn’t as likely as Democratic takeover of the House, but more likely than Democrats wiping out the Republican lead in the Senate, which just goes to show that neither of us should quit our day jobs and become political prognosticators. There’s clowns on TV with seven figure incomes who were further off than us, even on election night, so perhaps I should become a professional prognosticator. If the networks want to pay me seven figures to tell other windbags in the talk shows What Happens Next, I’ll grin, take their money, and give you the most entertaining and provocative predictions I can come up with. This generous offer comes with an ironclad, absolutely no money back whatsoever guarantee.)

Nobody successfully predicted how this election would go. The voters, the state of Florida, and, perhaps, some criminals as well, fooled everyone.

While the questions lingering over electoral shenanigans in Florida will continue, perhaps indefinitely, and hopefully lead to some serious reform nationwide in how the nation amasses and tabulates its votes, it did take the focus of public attention away from the fact that, once again, that pothole in our democracy, the Electoral College has once again saddled the country with a President that was not the choice of the voters.

Finding out if Bush really won Florida legitimately or not is important, of course. We need to know if we have a legitimate government or an illicit junta. And the upcoming FOIA counts – the Freedom of Information Act examinations of the ballots – in Florida will go a long way toward answering that question.

But in the meantime, that old debbil Electoral College has whipped around and bitten us on the ass. It’s the fourth time it’s happened, and each time it’s proven to be divisive and hurt the country. It’s no mistake that the previous three EC "winners" all ended up as ineffectual one-term presidents, regarded by historians as failures.

I didn’t have much hope that Gore could lead successfully under such circumstances, and I can’t even begin to imagine that Bush could. A successful Bush Presidency isn’t in the cards. People will blame Florida, but the fact is that the minute it became clear that Gore had won the popular vote, Bush’s hopes for a successful presidency were doomed, even without the legitimacy question.

So we have a damaged and weak president-select. It could be argued that Bush would have been an ineffectual and incompetent President in any event, but this assures that he will go down, like all the other Electoral College flukes, as a one-term failure.

On Usenet, of course, the various right wingers are enjoying telling everyone that Americans don’t have the right to vote anyway, and that this is a Republic, not a Democracy. (Time out for a brief refresher in freshman political science: Any modern nation is a Republic – the USSR, the Peoples’ Republic of China, Germany’s Third Reich, Canada, France, and Indonesia are all Republics. Some are Democracies–Canada is considered such, even though they don’t directly elect their Prime Minister. As the first few examples indicate, being a Republic isn’t necessarily a sign you are in a nice place). Frankly, I like to encourage these ur-fascist Usenet types, since they show what sort of following the GOP has these days.

But pursuant to the philosophy that the right is always right, no matter how wrong it is, they like to argue that the Electoral College "protects" the "small states". They point to the county-by-county breakdown, red vs. blue, to show that Bush was a big, big winner in terms of acreage, and that this was what the Electoral College was supposed to do.

There’s a germ of truth to this, but of course, being right wingers, they’ve got it all bollixed up.

In the first days of the independence, America was a confederation, with each state being what amounted to an autonomous part of an alliance. The states didn’t trust one another, the alliance was shaky, and in danger of disintegrating into dozens of squabbling little statelings, popcorn for whatever European power thought it might be nice to absorb the former English holdings.

The Constitution, with its much stronger federal presence, supplanted the Articles of Confederation. But the mistrust among the states was high, and the weaker states wanted some guarantees against the stronger states dominating them economically, politically, or militarily.

Thus the constitution contained all sorts of provisions to prevent such from occurring. No state could conduct foreign policy. No state could place any tax or tariff on trade with any other state. No state could coin money or establish other rates of exchange. The power of the states was considerably weakened.

Further, the Senate granted determination in the Senate to state governments. Each state legislature could appoint two Senators to the upper house, which meant that Delaware had as much say in the Senate as Pennsylvania. At a time when Delaware had legitimate reason to worry about conflict with Pennsylvania, including embargo or even invasion, it seemed like a good safeguard.

There were two legislative houses. One was to be elected by the people of the states and apportioned by state population. The other was to be appointed by the state government, and apportioned in equal measure to each state.

Given the measure of mistrust among the states and the general shakiness of the nascent nation, it seemed a good compromise, and indeed served the nation well for the next 127 years, when an amendment made the Senators elected by popular vote. There is no evidence that having Senators popularly elected was harmful, either.

Opinions on the role of the President differed among the delegates to the Constitutional convention. Some saw him as a king. Others saw him as a prime minister. Still others saw him as an administrator, just the head bureaucrat.

The ones who wanted a fairly powerful chief executive prevailed. While limited to terms of four years, and able only to execute laws that Congress had passed, he was allowed to veto laws passed by Congress, and was put in charge not only of the Executive branch, but the armed forces, and was allowed fill vacancies in public federal offices when congress was not in session. It was assumed from the start that the President would be elected by popular vote. However, the small states, such as Delaware, worried that a President would always be from one of the large states, and that his policies would be geared toward the large states only. So the Constitutional framers reached a compromise, stating that the President would be elected by electors sent by the legislature of each state, and that the electors for each state would be the same as the combined number of representatives and senators. Delaware had one representative and two senators, and thus three electoral votes. Virginia had 12 representatives and two senators, and so had fourteen electoral votes. It was left to the individual state legislatures to determine the manner of selection; whether on a winner-take-all basis, or prorated to the popular vote; but in any event, to be chosen based on the popular vote of that state. Indeed, most states–including Florida–have the voters select a slate of electors for the candidate on the ballots themselves, with the candidates’ names above each slate. Like most authoritarian right wingers who employ the so-called "strict constructionalist" standard and insist that if it isn’t spelled out in the constitution a right doesn’t exist, the folks who claim we have no right to vote for President are ignoring the 10^th amendment, and putting a twisted and rather dangerous spin on what happened in Florida. The Founders wanted to protect the states, but still wanted sovereignty to remain with the people.

In the earliest days, there were 65 members of the House of Representatives, and 26 members of the Senate. The Electoral college did play a significant role in rearranging the power structure in those early days, and made the Union more palatable to states like Rhode Island and Delaware.

By 1963, the House and Senate had assumed the now-familiar numbers of 435 and 100. The distortions in representation by the Electoral College was greatly diminished, but still had the ability to put the wrong man in office in a close race.

It’s been a long time–if ever--since the Electoral college did anything to protect the small states. Indeed, it’s been a long time since the small states actually needed protecting. I’m willing to bet the mortgage that the present Governor of Pennsylvania has never sat down with his aides and discussed invading Rhode Island. Despite reports of Californians getting a cold reception in Oregon, Grey Davis hasn’t threatened to send troops or launch an embargo.

Defenders of the EC (and there are some) claim that this election is proof that the EC works, and that it gave the residents of the small states a disproportionate voice and thus allowed them to prevail over Americans who live in big cities, who apparently are socialist, atheistic, non-white and other horrible things that justify giving them less of a vote than the salt of the earth types who are busily getting drunk in some podunk bar, coming home and banging the daughter.

But does the whole notion of representation weighted by states actually do what is claimed? Does it give the thinly populated areas more voice?

Republicans have been having fun passing around that map that shows the breakdown of the vote, county-by-county, with the Republicans in red and the Democrats in blue. The map shows concentrations of blue along the northeast coast, around the Great Lakes, and along the west coast, and only small scatters throughout the rest of the country. The image is overwhelmingly red. The Republicans claim that this shows that the simple farmers of the hinterlands, despite being vastly outnumbered, defeated the Zionist tycoons of our evil cities. It’s all very touching.

But it means nothing. Had a full count of the votes been done in three contested counties in Florida, Gore might have won the electoral vote without a single county changing color.

And it’s beyond dispute that Gore did win the popular vote. It was by a tiny margin–one half of one percent–but he won, nevertheless.

Then there’s the matter of the Senate. It’s set up to apportion by state, with the half-million people in the state of Wyoming getting the same number of Senators as the 34 million in California. If you go by that silly county vote map, there isn’t a dozen Democrats in the Senate.

But the Senate is split, 50-50. Evidently the hinterlands aren’t as American Gothic Republican as the Bush apologists would like to have us believe.

How could that be? Didn’t the Electoral College protect all those tiny states from the ravages of the Democrats? So how come Democrats are even in the Senate, even though they trail in the House? Could it be that the noise about the Electoral College "protecting" small states is pure nonsense, and the result in the college this time nothing more than a statistical fluke, one designed to create failed presidencies?

Nor does either the senate or the EC really help thinly populated areas. They merely try to punish states that have large cities. Casper, Wyoming has traffic lights, radio stations, at least one TV station, a couple of freeways, broadband, and a whole bunch of urban sorts of stuff like rush hours. I live in California, but where I live, there’s only two traffic lights within forty miles, the nearest TV station is seventy miles away, there’s no broadband (tone dial phones only came in 15 years ago), and our notion of a rush hour is two pickups arriving at the four way stop at the same time. (Don’t laugh: it can take hours to unravel if the drivers are both loggers...). To us, Casper is Bright Lights, Big City. But according to the Electoral College defenders, I’m an evil urbanite intent on destroying the bucolic and rustic charm of Casper.

Is there a reason why a store clerk in Wyoming SHOULD have more say in who the next president is than a store clerk in California? Does living in California make you less of an American, somehow? The defenders of the EC seem to think so.

Three times in the past, someone won the Electoral College while losing the popular vote. In all three cases, they were one term failures, and there is nothing to suggest that the "small states" benefitted even slightly from them.

The college was an unnecessary joke, one that could only do harm in 1793. 208 years later, it hasn’t improved. If someone wants to argue that Utah benefits from Bush winning the EC, they can feel free, but it’s going to be difficult explaining how New Yorkers benefit.

Unless, of course, they want to argue that New Yorkers are worthy of less representation, a really stupid assertion to make in a land that was once known as "The world’s greatest Democracy."

It’s time to get rid of a safeguard that neither guarded nor ensured anyone’s safety. Press your congressional representatives for a constitutional amendment, and free the American people from the shackles of the fears of long-dead Tories.