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Monday, October 25, 2004
Electoral college trap: Where's the escape?
Neal Peirce
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It's nail-biting time -- not just for Kerry and Bush partisans, but for an entire nation wondering if the rickety old Electoral College will again misfire and repudiate the will of most Americans.
But it's hardly a new issue. For half a century, clear majorities of Americans have told Gallup pollsters they want a straightforward, direct vote system for president. But self-interested politicos have resisted. And our political commentary elites have mostly just muddied the waters.
Take the strange reaction to the 2000 election. Across America, more than 100 million people voted. But by the chance fallout of tiny vote margins controlling blocks of electoral votes in a handful of close states, the candidate most Americans voted for failed to be certified the winner. In Florida, where a chad-shadowed margin of 537 votes determined the outcome, serious racial antagonisms were fired up. The U.S. Supreme Court, in a decision opponents viewed as partisanly tinged, decided the election.
So what were some reactions? "Our system of constitutional democracy worked well,'' wrote columnist George Will. "Democracy is an approximation and the Electoral College is probably no more approximate than any other arrangement,'' Michael Kinsley observed. Norman Ornstein of the American Enterprise Institute wrote there was "no need to repeal the Electoral College'' because "three (or four) crises out of more than 50 presidential elections is remarkably small.''
In the face of this wall of complacency, political scientist George C. Edwards III of Texas A&M University has burst through with the most exquisitely precise and sweeping case I've ever seen for abolition of the Electoral College and adopting a straightforward vote of the people.
I know that's strong praise for Edwards' analysis, in his new book, "Why the Electoral College Is Bad for America'' (Yale University Press). But it's an issue I've struggled with for decades, since my book, published in 1968 -- "The People's President: The Electoral College in American History and the Direct Vote Alternative.''
For years I worked with the late political scientist Larry Longley on books analyzing our election system and prospects for constitutional change. I thought I'd heard all the arguments on reform, pro and con, many times.
But Edwards mobilizes the case for sweeping reform with special force. His central focus is political equality, the bedrock principle that no person's vote should count more than another's in choosing a single officer to lead a nation.
As for the argument the Electoral College somehow protects American federalism, Edwards notes first how the system was invented by exhausted delegates to the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, not out of high principle but as a jerry-rigged improvisation to get around immediate political problems such as slavery and achieve ratification by suspicious state legislatures.
As for small states' alleged advantage, Edwards notes that the great battles of American history have been over ideology and economic interests, virtually never on the basis of small versus large states. Presidential candidates don't seem swayed by small state clout anyway: in the 2000 presidential campaign, they visited only one of the seven smallest states, and then just once.
Electoral politics are driving attention to 15 or so "battleground'' states. Regarded as "safe,'' even megastates such as New York, California or Texas (with their tens of millions of voters) get ignored.
Edwards discounts halfway reform measures, including the proportional division of a state's electoral votes (on the ballot in Colorado Nov. 2). Partial reform measures, he argues, leave room for reversing the popular will and/or throwing elections into the U.S. House when there's no electoral vote majority.
He rejects the direct vote proposals that stipulate a runoff if no candidate gets 40 percent of the popular vote. That happened only once in U.S. history (Abraham Lincoln's election in 1860). Simple plurality votes do well for all elections across America, argues Edwards, including governorships, where it's rare for winning candidate to get less than 45 percent. Even with more than 100 candidates on the ballot, Arnold Schwarzenegger got 49 percent in California's 2003 recall election.
So what of the argument that a direct nationwide vote would be like Florida writ large, with fraud, recounts, and late absentee votes? Balderdash, says Edwards, it's the current system that puts a premium on such skullduggery as stuffing a ballot box or disqualifying minority voters in a razor-close, electoral vote-heavy state like Florida. Stealing the hundreds of thousands if not millions of votes necessary to swing a nationwide presidential vote would require fraudulent effort of unprecedented proportions.
Writing an introduction to Edwards' book, I asked if it's too much to ask: Couldn't we all have a vote for president that really counts, and counts as much as anyone else's? Edwards makes it clearer than ever -- the only way we can get there is a constitutional guarantee of a direct, equally weighted vote for every American voter.
Neal Peirce's e-mail address is nrp@citistates.com.
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