[StBernard] Save the Electoral College

[Westley Annis]

Save the Electoral College
by Paul Greenberg

For about as long as some of us can remember, there 
have been proposals around to junk the Electoral College 
and find some other way to elect a president of the 
United States. Whether a new system should be devised 
was a national debate question when I was in high school, 
and that was a long, long time ago. Yet for all the 
dissatisfaction with the Electoral College over the years, 
no one has been able to sell the American people on an 
alternative. 

The alternatives do change from time to time, and their 
very prolixity is another sign that devising a better 
system isn't easy.

How about a straight popular vote, winner takes all, 
no matter how slim his margin of victory? But that 
change could attract so crowded a field of presidential 
candidates that it might take only a small percentage 
of the votes cast to win. Would we really want a pres-
ident elected with, say, only 20 percent of the vote?

OK, how about a Plan B? Why not have a run-off if the 
leading candidate got less than, say, 40 percent of the 
popular vote? (Which might have eliminated Abraham Lin-
coln in a run-off, since by the best guesstimates he got 
only 39 percent of the popular vote in 1860 yet a major-
ity of the Electoral College.) The French have such a 
system -- and risk having their presidential run-off 
feature the two most extreme candidates, the many moder-
ate candidates having split the moderate vote.

Then there was the proposal to elect the president by 
congressional district, but that approach wouldn't 
guarantee that the winner would have more of the popular 
vote nationwide, either.

This year's alternative to the Electoral College is to 
get states with a majority of the electoral votes to 
agree beforehand to cast them for whichever candidate 
polls the most votes nationally. Even if that candidate 
didn't carry all those states.

It would be hard to imagine a scheme that did more to 
destroy the integrity of the ballot. For it would give 
the winner of the popular vote nationally the electoral 
votes of states he didn't carry, overturning the will 
of the majority in those states. This plan isn't so much 
a reform as a legalized conspiracy to get around the 
Electoral College.

But here's what may be the most troubling question rais-
ed by this end run: What would happen to the two-party 
system? Right now, each party must achieve consensus 
within itself in order to nominate a candidate who can 
appeal to the broad middle of public opinion, and so 
gain a majority of the Electoral College.

But if a presidential candidate needed only a plurality 
of the popular vote, the candidates on the fringes would 
be encouraged. Because they'd no longer need the backing 
of a national party and a majority of the Electoral 
College to win -- just more popular votes than the rival 
with the next highest number of votes.

Does anyone envy the way the French elect their president? 
Look what happened in that country's national election 
back in 2002: Between them, the three leading candidates 
barely managed to poll half the vote. What happened to 
the other half? It was divided among the remaining 13 -- 
count 'em, thirteen -- presidential candidates.

Result: The second round of voting pitted a less-than-
popular conservative against a right-wing radical. It 
was as if a presidential election in this country had 
been determined by the Ralph Naders and Pat Buchanans. 
The principle of One Person, One Vote was upheld, all 
right, and it produced one big mess.

Inspector Clouseau could doubtless deliver a perfectly 
logical Gallic defense of such a system: Une personne, 
une voix! But to English speakers, at least the kind who 
know their Burke and, yes, their Tocqueville, the word 
for electing a president this way is wacky. Also, danger-
ous.

And if just the popular vote counted, every close pres-
idential election could prove as messy as the one in 
2000, only with the vote totals in every state as hotly 
contested as those in Florida were that confused year.

Edmund Burke tried to warn us: "The Constitution of a 
State is not a problem of arithmetic." Rather, it is a 
way to take into account the many dimensions of an 
electorate and forge a consensus that is greater than 
all its parts.

That's where the Electoral College comes in. It may be 
an antique piece of clockwork, but it usually performs 
its valuable function smoothly. So smoothly that lots 
of folks have no idea how it really works, which is a 
shame because the Electoral College needs every defender 
it can muster.

And yet the country is in danger of approving a sneaky 
way around the Electoral College that could have all 
kinds of unintended, and unpleasant, consequences. What 
we have here is an abstract idea untested by our actual,
historical experience as Americans. Or as Mark Twain 
once said of another terrible idea: "It is irregular. 
It is un-English. It is un-American. It is ... French!"