interesting article about electoral college- philadelphia enquirer:
Electoral College: Will it serve or pervert the political process?
At a Bush rally the other day, an otherwise well-informed Republican voter asked me what happens if George W. wins the popular vote but Al Gore comes away with a majority of electoral votes.
Would Bush be able to launch a court fight? Or would he just have to sit back and accept the outcome?
I informed him, to his chagrin, that the electoral vote would rule. And I decided the time had come to write about the Electoral College, and how it may serve or pervert the political process on Tuesday.
The Electoral College is one of those odd, last-minute compromises that emerged from the Constitutional Convention of 1787.
After rejecting the idea of having Congress pick the president - there was little sentiment for letting the people do the job - the Founders chose to create a separate body, this college, in which each state would have the same numbers as in the House and Senate. As a result, the door was opened to the possibility that one candidate could attract the largest number of votes and still lose the election.
This unsettling scenario hasn't come to pass since 1888 (although we did come close in 1976), and it probably won't occur next week. But this year, it's less improbable than usual for two reasons.
One is that the polls suggest that Gore is doing a bit better in the big battleground states than in the country as a whole. If he squeaks through in enough of those key states while getting beaten soundly elsewhere, he could wind up with more electoral votes than Bush - and fewer real people behind him.
The other is a phenomenon that comes around every 20 years: The allocation of electoral votes among the 50 states is a full 10 years out of date.
An allocation based on the current population, rather than on the 1990 census, would shift eight or so electoral votes to Arizona, Georgia, Montana, Nevada, Texas and Utah, all likely Bush states. Those votes would come from Connecticut, Illinois, Michigan, New York, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, all must-win for Gore.
In other words, the popular and electoral votes are out of sync in a way that could work to Bush's detriment, perhaps significantly so in a close contest.
And while we're considering possibilities, the question arises: What would happen - other than a national nervous breakdown - if Bush and Gore split those 538 electoral votes right down the middle, 269 apiece?
Answer: The race would go in January to the newly elected House of Representatives, in which each state would be entitled to one vote. A candidate would need 26 votes to win. In the current House, Republicans have the majority in 25 state delegations, the Democrats 21. The other four are split evenly.
And how would the members of Congress behave? You'd figure that they'd feel some obligation to follow the will of their constituents rather than vote by party. But who knows what the heck they'd do?
If we get any outcome other than he-who-gets-the-most-votes-wins, there will surely be a movement to amend the Constitution to switch to direct election.
Of more immediate concern, we'd have a shocked, perplexed and perhaps disillusioned electorate and a weakened president at the helm.
In all likelihood, though, none of this will transpire, and the Electoral College will perform its usual, often overlooked and rather noble function: making the election result look more definitive than it really is, thereby enhancing the legitimacy of the winner.
Forty years ago, for instance, Democrat John Kennedy beat Republican Richard Nixon by fewer than 119,000 votes out of 69 million cast, a margin so small it might as well have been a counting error. But the Electoral College gave Kennedy a clear win, which Nixon acknowledged and the country accepted.
In 1968, in a three-way race with Democrat Hubert Humphrey and third-party candidate George Wallace, Nixon got only 510,000 more votes than Humphrey and 43 percent overall. But the college gave him an absolute majority.
In 1992, Bill Clinton got far less than half the vote against George Bush and Ross Perot but won overwhelmingly in the electoral vote.
The odds are that something like that will happen again next week, that one man will win the popular vote narrowly and the electoral vote more decisively. If so, we'll be thinking that the Founders knew what they were doing after all. |
