http://www.opinionjournal.com/editorial/feature.html?id=110005582
Electoral College Mischief
How to make the 2000 Florida brouhaha look like a kerfuffle.
Wednesday, September 8, 2004 12:01 a.m. EDT
"The Electoral College is so 18th century," read a protester's T-shirt slogan before the Republican National Convention. Since the 2000 election dispute, serious people have sounded the same theme, including New York Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, who after Al Gore's defeat called for direct popular election of the President. But since America has survived as a democratic republic for more than two centuries, we're inclined to think the Founders got it right.
The rap against the Electoral College is that it's undemocratic. As one recent newspaper editorial complained, "The majority does not rule." Strictly speaking, that's not true. The Constitution requires a majority of electors to choose a President; otherwise,
the House decides, which hasn't happened since 1824. True, the popular majority doesn't rule, but only one Presidential candidate--Samuel Tilden, in the disputed election of 1876--has ever lost while exceeding 50% of the popular vote.
Under direct popular election, the majority often would not rule either. In six postwar elections--1948, 1960, 1968, 1992, 1996 and 2000--no candidate had a popular majority. If it's an outrage against majority rule that President Bush was elected while receiving only 47.9% of the popular vote, would it be that much less so if Mr. Gore had won with 48.4%? And what about Bill Clinton, who mustered a mere 43% of the popular vote in 1992?
This points to one of the Electoral College's great virtues: Under normal circumstances, it strengthens the Presidency by transforming a popular plurality into a majority, or a majority into a bigger majority. Mr. Clinton's 370-168 electoral victory over George H.W. Bush in 1992 put to rest any doubt about the new President's legitimacy. In every election since 1828, when popular balloting for Presidential electors became the rule almost everywhere, the winner's proportion of electoral votes has been higher than his share of the popular vote. Only three times--in 1876, 1888 and 2000--have the popular and electoral votes diverged.
Direct popular election would also vastly increase the risk of corruption and electoral disputes. With every vote competing directly against every other vote, dishonest politicians everywhere would have an incentive to engage in fraud on behalf of their parties. And a close race would make the 2000 Florida brouhaha look like a kerfuffle. Every one of the nation's 3,066 counties could expect to be overrun by lawyers demanding recounts.
Similar objections apply to a mischievous measure that will appear on Colorado's ballot this November. It would divide the state's nine electoral votes according to each candidate's proportion of the popular vote, so that if, as expected, Mr. Bush carries the Centennial State, John Kerry would still pick up three or four votes.
Supporters argue this is a more democratic way of doing things. But if this system had been in effect nationwide in 2000, Mr. Gore would have edged out Mr. Bush, 269-263, with Ralph Nader picking up six electoral votes, all in large states. This would have thrown the election to the House, where Mr. Bush presumably would have won--unless Mr. Gore managed to manufacture a plurality in Florida, which would have swung one electoral vote and increased his total to 270, a bare majority.
But Mr. Bush could have waged his own challenges to the vote in places like New Mexico, where he was 366 votes short of a plurality, and Hawaii, where an extra 137 votes would have given him an additional elector under the proposed Colorado system. Columnist George Will has calculated that nationwide proportional allocation of electors would have thrown the elections of 1948, 1968 and 1992 to the House.
The Colorado initiative is a transparently partisan effort to give Mr. Kerry a few additional electoral votes, and Coloradans, even those who support the Democrat, would be foolish to back a measure that would diminish their state's influence by taking most of its electoral votes out of play.
The effort to institute direct popular election of the President is also likely to go nowhere. That's because the Electoral College benefits two groups of states--sparsely populated ones, whose representation in the College is disproportionately high relative to their populations, and closely divided "swing" states like Florida, Ohio and Pennsylvania, where both parties have a decent shot at winning.
Based on 2000 Census data and election results, only 11 states are both populous and politically monolithic enough that their influence would grow with popular election of the President: California, Texas, New York, Illinois, New Jersey, Georgia, North Carolina, Virginia, Massachusetts, Indiana and Maryland. Amending the Constitution to abolish the Electoral College would require the assent of 38 state legislatures, so at least 27 of them would have to vote against the interests of their own states.
No President has ever won re-election after "losing the popular vote." If Mr. Bush does so, and if the GOP holds both the House and Senate, we could be in the early stages of a prolonged period of Republican majority government. Democrats doubtless will try to explain away Republican success as the product of an "undemocratic" fluke in 2000. Given the futility of the campaign against the Electoral College, one suspects it is less a serious effort at reform than a pre-emptive attempt to rewrite history.
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