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The Electoral
College has outlived its usefulness
Martin Dyckman
St. Petersburg Times
November 7, 2004
It ought to be good news that Congress is showing some interest
in changing the way we elect the president. Alas, it doesn't go
beyond allowing naturalized citizens - i.e., Arnold Schwarzenegger -
to be eligible.
We could do worse than Arnold, I suppose - we so often have - and
the natural-born-citizen provision long ago fulfilled its purpose of
keeping George III from planting a ringer to get his 13 colonies
back.
But that's the least of the anachronisms that outlived their
intended usefulness some 200 years ago. Though it didn't happen this
time, the nation is still vulnerable to producing a president who
lost the popular vote, as Bush did four years ago, or to having the
decision go to the House of Representatives because of a tie or a
third-party candidacy. Rob Richie, executive director of the Center
for Voting and Democracy, points out that the electoral votes would
have been tied at 269 this year if fewer than 50,000 voters had gone
to Kerry instead of to Bush in Iowa, Nevada, and New Mexico.
In that event, the crisis would have lasted a lot longer than 36
days and divided the country much more deeply and bitterly than a
Supreme Court decision did.
There are people who say it's worth these hazards for the sake of
a system that requires the winning candidate to earn support
everywhere, not just in big cities.
That would be true if the premise were true. But it works just
the other way. The cartoonist Tom Toles illuminated the fallacy by
redrawing the national map as "The Undecided States of
America," occupied by only ten of them.
The system forces candidates to campaign not nationwide but only
in those states where the votes might be close. Everyone else is
taken for granted.
This is why Florida got 67 campaign visits subsequent to Sept. 3,
according to the New York Times, while California, New York
and Texas, though larger, scarcely saw anyone from the two tickets
except for an occasional fundraising fly-by.
Nearly 120-million voted, according to Curtis Gans at the
Committee for the Study of the American Electorate. But fewer than a
third of them lived in the battleground states. Meanwhile, there
were some 50-million whose votes didn't count at all, because they
were Bush voters in states that Kerry carried or Kerry voters in
Bush states.
Though the turnout percentage was the highest since 1968, Gans
pointed to significant variations, not all of which owe to the
Republican Party's superior mobilization. Turnout increased by 6.3
percent in battleground states but by only 3.8 percent in the
others. In New York, where nothing was in doubt, the increase was
less than 1 percent.
It bears keeping in mind that the House of Representatives,
because of ruthless gerrymandering by both parties, is so utterly
uncompetitive that 416 of the 435 seats went by landslides or
default. That and the electoral system comprise a mortal long-term
danger to the republic.
The 18th century xenophobia that obstructs the fulfillment of
Schwarzenegger's American dream is a relic of founders who did not
trust the people to elect a president or senators, and to whom it
never occurred that women ought to vote. The weighting of electoral
votes was the byproduct of the complex congressional compromise
that, among other things, preserved slavery by giving the South
excessive weight in the House.
All of those reasons are long since obsolete. In practice, the
electors are only proxies. The people, not the legislatures, elect
the Senate. Women vote; so do the descendants of slaves. Georgia had
a county unit voting system modeled on the Electoral College, and
the Supreme Court threw it out as a blatant denial of equal
protection of the law.
But the 14th Amendment did not trump Section 1 of Article II, and
so the Electoral College endures - not simply because it would be so
hard to change, but because nobody can agree on what the change
ought to be. Direct election, at first glance the obvious choice,
would be the hardest, and, according to Gans, the worst. It would
mean "a national media campaign without any grass-roots
activity . . . it would render the individual's vote perceptibly
meaningless in the welter of millions."
Awarding congressional votes by districts, as Maine and Nebraska
already do, would be the easiest. It would give incentives to
Democrats to compete in the South and to Republicans to contest New
England, the Northeast and the West Coast, because there would be
potential electors everywhere.
The hitch, as Gans concedes, is that the congressional districts
are rigged. The presidency would be another disincentive to fair
districting. Without districting reform, that alternative is
dangerous.
But the worst option is to do nothing. If the Republicans want
Schwarzenegger eligible, electoral reform should be part of the
bargain. As it takes three-fourths of the states to amend the
Constitution, Democratic legislatures could, and should, insist on
it.
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