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Alaskans differ
over Electoral College
Fairbanks Daily News-Miner
Editorial
November 10, 2004
As the nation waited on Election Day to see whether Ohio would
fall to President Bush or to Sen. John Kerry, political analysts and
historians began asking what they had asked following the 2000
election: Could it be time for the nation to decide if the Electoral
College should be modified or eliminated?
The issue should be of great interest to small electoral states
such as Alaska, because proponents of changing the method of
presidential election list among their complaints the
disproportionate Electoral College allocation given to lightly
populated states. Alaska finds itself among the states that
presently have the minimum number of electors possible, three, with
the others being Delaware, Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota,
Vermont and Wyoming. The District of Columbia also has three. At the
top end, California has 55 electoral votes.
The concerns about the Electoral College, which is established in
the U.S. Constitution and was the subject of the 12th Amendment in
1804, are many and are illustrated clearly in Alaska.
First, it's true that Alaska's Electoral College allocation is
three times what it would be if the allocation were based on
population. Alaska would have one elector under that scenario,
which, using today's U.S. population total, would have each elector
representing just under 550,000 people. Critics of the college argue
also that small states are already overrepresented elsewhere in
government by having two senators, the same number as the
most-populous states.
Second, there was no denying in this election that Alaskans who
had decided against voting for President Bush were not going to have
their vote count for anything but principle. Alaska and its three
electoral votes had long ago been put in the column of the
Republican candidate, as they had been in 2000, 1996, 1992 and every
preceding election except 1964, when the state voted for President
Johnson.
Similar outcomes were recorded in other Republican strongholds:
Utah, Texas, Nebraska, Oklahoma are but a few. It was the reverse in
Democratic sureties - California, New York and Massachusetts, among
others - where resident Republicans could only hope, much like
Alaska Democrats, that some extraordinary event would make their
vote matter.
And third, as a result of Alaska's consistent Republican leaning,
residents see virtually nothing of the major party candidates.
Imagine the past two presidential elections but without the
Electoral College. Rather than the long campaign steadily being
reduced from 10 or so swing states to half a dozen and then to a
determination that whoever wins two out of Pennsylvania, Florida and
Ohio will prevail, candidates would have to continually look for
votes across the land, including Alaska.
Perhaps that is why, way back on Feb. 7, 1950, this newspaper
endorsed a constitutional amendment that would have retained the
Electoral College but required that each state allocate its electors
based on the proportion of the popular vote in that state. That
would prevent the occurrence, which has afflicted the nation three
times now, of having a president who lost the popular vote but had
the greater number of electoral votes.
The newspaper wrote that the amendment, which failed, would
"bring about much-need reform" to a system that is
"outdated."
More recently, others have been calling for change.
Why is this worth being aware of now? Because with an electorate
so divided, so entrenched in position, tight presidential elections
remain a real possibility for several presidential cycles to come.
And it is entirely possible the problem of an electoral and popular
vote imbalance will lead to further calls for change.
The Alaska Legislature, however, made its position clear in 2001
when it overwhelmingly approved a resolution asking that the
electoral system remain in its present form.
Other Alaskans will disagree, to be sure. And at the center of
the debate, perhaps never to be answered, is this question: Should
every vote count, even though it is being counted?
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