join Lucius Wilmerding in contending that the apportionment gives influence to the "will of the non-voters." There is little appreciation now for virtual representation where men might claim to represent the interests of the non-voting women and teenagers of their families; and the case is even weaker for upperstatus voters representing lower-status non-voters, Probably no one now would want to associate with Wilmerding's contention of 20 years ago that abolition of the electoral college would deprive disfranchised blacks of the indirect gains achieved through the apportionment that he argued augmented the power of southern states for the advantage of all of their residents."

The geometric logic applied to the electoral rules suggests that the electoral college falls short of direct election in promoting broadly representative transnational coalitions. Direct election would eliminate the apportionment and gerrymander biases whose distortion of the representation of the nation's voters might upset the ticket favored by the national popular vote. Because direct election conforms with both democratic norms and public expectations of a proper presidential election, most responsible political leaders advocate abolishing the electoral college.

The academic supporters of the electoral college, however, contend that their case rests ultimately on historical experience. “While advocates of direct popular election rely primarily on highly abstract and deductive arguments," says Donald R. Matthews, "defenders of the present system are concerned with practical consequences." ."17 In Max Power's characterization, defenders of the electoral college are in the "empirco-pragmatic tradition," arguing that the electoral college "works" and that experience is a better guide than logic.18 The thesis of this paper holds that shunning logical constraints has led to a misreading of experience and the mistaking of correlation for causation. The electoral college works in an unobjectionable manner only when voter coalitions have the national support sufficient to subordinate the electoral outcome to the apparent popular vote preference. If there have been few electoral college upsets of popular vote preferences, it is because the net biases favored the more popular ticket, as should occur about the half the time with two competitive parties, or because the majority coalition was large enough to overcome the unfavorable bias. The geometric analysis provides ample evidence of the deficiencies of the electoral college when it cannot count on a dominant voter coalition subordinating the electoral result to the apparent popular result.

THE ELECTORAL COLLEGE AND NATIONAL DISINTEGRATION: THE GEOMETRY LESSON OF 1860

Logic is no impediment to historical analysis, and the geometric scheme will expose the salient features of the electoral system as they operated in thei critical election of 1860. The geometric analysis starkly reveals that a sectionally based minority voter coalition was favored in 1860 by a spectacular gerrymander that overcame an unfavorable apportionment. Figure (11) below was constructed from voting data gathered by Svend Petersen and presented in Table I.1o The state segments of the 1860 electorate are arrayed from left to right in descending order of the percentage of popular support attributed to the winning Republican ticket headed by Abraham Lincoln. The jagged line divides the Lincoln voters, represented by the shaded area, from the unshaded opposition voters. The coalition division line bends sharply to efficiently encompass the voters essential for a Republican electoral majority.

16 Lucius Wilmerding, The Electoral College (New Brunswick, N.J.: 1958), pp. 98-110. 17 Donald R. Matthews, "Introduction," Perspectives on Presidential Selection, pp. 17-19.

19 Max Power, "Logic and Legitimacy," Perspectives on Presidential Selection, pp. 235238. The experience over logic argument is also explicit in Sayre and Parris, p. 147 and Best. p. 208.

19 Svend Petersen. A Statistical History of American Presidential Elections (New York: Ungar, 1968), pp. 35–38.

20 By convention, presidential tickets are attributed the popular votes cast for the top vote-getting elector pledged to the ticket. In modern presidential elections, many states do not even list the pledged electors on the ballot but indicate only the presidential and vice presidential candidates to which the slates of electors are pledged. In 1860. state parties printed their own partisan tickets containing their slates of electors, and the voters used these party-provided tickets as ballots.

New Jersey.

Oregon..

15,941

California.

118,840

60.4

33.0

32.4

28.9

Delaware.

16, 097

.3

72.8

186

61.4

23.7

6.6

45.6

24.0

Missouri.

165, 518

3.5

76.3

195

64.4

10.3

35.5

18.9

35.3

Maryland..

93, 234

2.0

78.3

203

67.0

3.1

6.4

45.6

44.9

Virginia.

167, 301

3.6

81.9

15

218

71.9

1.2

9.7

44.5

44.7

Kentucky.

146, 216

3.1

85.0

12

230

75.9

.9

17.5

36.3

45.2

Alabama.

90, 357

1.9

86.9

9

239

78.9

15. 1

54.0

30.9

Arkansas..

54, 053

1.2

88.1

4

243

80.2

9.7

53.2

37.2

Florida..

14, 347

.3

88.4

3

246

81.2

2.6

59.6

37.9

Georgia..

106,794

2.3

90.7

256

84.5

10.9

48.8

40.3

Louisiana...

50, 510

1.1

91.8

262

86.5

15.1

44.9

40.0

Mississippi

69, 120

1.5

93.3

7

269

88.8

4.8

59.0

36.2

North Carolina.

96, 230

2.1

95.4

10

279

92. 1

2.8

50.4

46.8

Tennessee.

148, 574

3.2

98.6

12

291

96.0

7.7

44.7

47.6

Texas..

62, 986

1.3

99.9

4

295

97.4

0

75.5

24.5

South Carolina.

None

None

99.9

303

100.0

0

0

0

The apportionment bias ran against the Lincoln coalition, because its string of states essential to an electoral majority contained about 60 percent of the 1860 voters as represented by the area to the left of the solid vertical line. If the combined opposition had carried the pivotal state of Indiana as well as the states where Lincoln was less popular. its winning coalition would have contained states with only about 46 percent of the votes as represented by the area to the right of the broken vertical line. Thus, in a two coalition contest, one ticket would need the support of an essential segment containing 30 percent of the voters and the other would require the support of an essential 23 percent. This bias was generated by apportioning electors to each state based on the state's congressional representation, regardless of its voter turnout. Indeed, the Constitution does not require popular voting for electors, and in 1860 South Carolina alone among the states continued to choose electors by legislative appointment. Thus, South Carolina's eight electoral votes were awarded to the opposition without the need of popular voting in the state. The opposition was also aided by the apportionment favorable to the South's voters because the "house" apportionment of 237 electoral votes was based on each state's free population plus three-fifths of its slave population. Thus, the approximately 20 electoral votes attributable to the slave population were available to be cast against the ticket most hostile to slavery. The "senate" apportionment of 66 electoral votes also favored the opposition because an essential coalition of states for an opposition electoral majority would include 20 of the 33 states casting electoral votes compared to an essential coalition of 14 for Lincoln. Other biases due to the method of apportionment affecting the relative electoral power of the competing coalitions included the time lag in reapportionment, differing proportions of state populations qualified to vote, and differing rates of voter turnout among the states. The net impact of all the apportionment-related biases favored the states most opposed to the Lincoln coalition, as the geometric scheme clearly reveals.

The sectional character of the Lincoln voter coalition and its lack of overwhelming popular majorities in carrying most of its electoral votes permitted it to capture an essential segment of the voters, as defined by the popular and electoral majority rules, while wasting relatively modest popular support outside the essential segment. The gerrymandered distribution not only overcame the unfavorable apportionment, but allowed its coalition of less than 40 percent of the voters to defeat any combination of the vast majority of the voters. The ability of the electoral college ot grossly misrepresent the nation compared to direct election was obscured in 1860 by the internal division of the opposition. These divisions may have been irreconcilable, but the electoral system would have withheld victory from the opposition even if it had been able to build a large majority of popular support.

Although defenders of the electoral college argue that it fosters the two-party system, which direct election would allegedly undermine, the fragmentation of the electorate in 1860 was facilitated by the electoral college, while direct election might have promoted fewer, larger, and more broadly representative coalitions. This conclusion is substantiated when the rules are analyzed in the context of a four-coalition contest, which was produced in 1860 by the north-south split in the Democratic Party and the inability of either of the Democratic factions or the new Republican Party to absorb most of the southern supporters of the defunct Whig Party. The percentages of electoral votes and attributed popular votes won by the four presidential tickets in 1860 are presented in Table 2 below. TABLE 2.-The percentages of popular and electoral vote strengths of the 4 major tickets in 1860 as drawn from table I

The northern Democratic ticket headed by Douglas mobilized the runner-up coalition in popular votes, but its concentration in the free states dominated by the Republicans left Douglas with a few electoral votes." The southern Democratic ticket headed by Breckinridge mobilized the next most popular coalition and won the most opposition electoral votes drawn from southern and border states. The Constitutional Union ticket headed by Bell was least popular nationally, but provided serious competition to Breckinridge in the South and won the electoral votes of Virginia, Kentucky and Tennessee on the plea for national reconciliation.

Lincoln obviously would also have won under a simple popular plurality election, given the divided opposition. But the electoral college provided little incentive in 1860 for major components of Lincoln's opposition to consolidate, while direct election would have encouraged fusion of opposition groups. When the competing coalitions were first mobilizing, each of Lincoln's opponents had a plausible chance of winning under the electoral college. Anticipated popular weaknesses of the Breckinridge and Bell coalitions could be offset because their popular strength was generally concentrated in the slave states which cast electoral weight disproportional to their popular voting. Thus, an essential segment of the electrode for either Breckinridge or Bell was much smaller than for Douglas or Lincoln.

Moreover, each of the opposition presidential candidates enjoyed a prospect of winning the presidency under the electoral rules even if he could not hope to win an electoral majority. The three-way split of the opposition popular vote did not throw any electoral votes to Lincoln, except for seven votes on the West Coast that the Republicans carried by pluralities, not majorities. The special sectional appeals of the tickets, on the other hand, provided an opportunity to block an electoral majority for any ticket, thus forcing a contingent election in the House of Representatives. With an absolute majority of the state delegations in the House choosing from among the top three candidates, Breckinridge, along with Lincoln, would almost certainly qualify for the contingent election. Although the Republicans controlled the largest number of state delegations, with 15 of 34,2 Breckinridge could hope to win based on a coalition of Democrats and slave-state, third-party congressmen. However, northern Democrats and southern non-Democrats might be expected to push for a compromise election, and neither Breckinridge nor Lincoln supporters could win a majority of the delegations on their own. Both Douglas and Bell in 1860 could have hoped at least to place among the candidates eligible for contingent election, and either would have been a potential compromise choice against the extreme choices of Lincoln or Breckinridge.

By contrast, a simple popular plurality election in 1860 would have removed the apportionment biases favoring the two least popular coalitions and foreclosed the possibility of the supporters of weaker tickets forcing a contingent election which their most preferred candidate might win. With the target voter coalition able to win the Presidency, supporters of the weakest popular coalitions would risk "wasting" their votes. Although there is no direct measure of the relative popular support of the four tickets in 1860, the conventional attributions of popular support based on popular voting for pledged slates of electors roughly approximates the relative strengths of the competing tickets. These attributions

The correlation between the free states and the states supporting Lincoln is remarkable. Lincoln carried popular pluralities in all states in which there were no slaves according to the U.S. Census. Generally considered a "free" state, New Jersey was nevertheless somewhat tardy in eliminating slavery as indicated by the Census, which reported a small but declining number of slaves in New Jersey immediately preceding the Civil War. A narrow popular plurality in this state is attributed to Douglas, but the Republicans were nevertheless able to win four of the seven electoral votes. New Jersey's ambiguous status as a free state was thus matched by its ambiguous support of the Republican ticket.

The newly admitted state of Kansas did not participate in the selection of electors in 1860. but because it sent a delegation to the 1861 session of Congress, it would have participated in breaking an electoral deadlock.