"WHAT CAN BE DONE ABOUT THE ELECTORAL COLLEGE?" If about 10,000 people in Ohio and Hawaii had voted differently on November 2, the electors who voted today would have elected Gerald Ford rather than Jimmy Carter. Jimmy Carter would still have had a clear national plurality but because of the weaknesses in the present electoral system, he would not be the President-elect. In last week's series of editorials, we pointed out that three Presidents have been elected in spite of someone else having pluralities and how in the future, a president could be elected with the approval of just 12 states. The system is antiquated, dangerous and needs to be changed. Some possible variations: Allow each congressional district to have one electoral vote. In that way, any candidate would have to campaign nationally and not just concentrate on heavilypopulated areas. But the fallacy of this plan is the weight of the individual vote depending on the population of each district. The popular vote could still be defeated but less risk. Another idea would be the division of electoral votes depending on the percentage of votes gained by each candidate in that state. As it is now, all votes in the state go to one candidate or the other. Disenfranchising completely 30 or 40 percent of the voters who favor the second candidate. A prorata share of state electors would certainly be a safer system than we have now. But in this day of fast communication, well-informed voters, computers, television and satellites, why not a presidential election system that gives each person an equal vote with every other voter in the nation? Isn't it time we had a true democratic election by all the people? Though the Founding Fathers who wrote the Constitution did not have enough confidence in the people of the new nation to allow them such a privilege, they did have the intelligence to make a flexible Constitution that could be changed if a day of jet planes and instant communication ever arrived. That day is here and we have a system of changing the Constitution, but it is lengthy and complicated. It starts in Congress with a proopsed amendment to the Constitution followed by eiher ratificatoin by state legislation or by a vote of the people. Let's hope some member of Congress will start it in the 95th. [APPENDIX 22] NEWSPAPER AND MAGAZINE EDITORIALS AND [From the Washington Post, October 12, 1976] PERILS OF AN ELECTORAL COLLEGE MISFIRE With changing odds in the Ford-Carter presidential race, the nation may face the greatest threat in this century that the antiquated electoral college system will choose a President who lost the popular vote. The prospect-known to be a real concern of campaign strategists on both sides is that Jimmy Carter, bolstered by strong majorities in his native South, could lead by as much as 1,000,000 to 2,500,000 votes in the national popular vote, but still lose in the electoral college because of narrow margins for President Ford in big Northern states with heavy electoral vote blocks. Given such an outcome, Gerald Ford, already laboring under the uncertain mandate of being the nation's first non-elected President, suddenly would find himself the first chief executive of the 20th century trying to assert the authority of the presidency after losing in a vote of the people. A Democratic Congress and indeed many average Americans might challenge the legitimacy of his leadership. In the wake of Watergate and sky-high public disillusionment with the government, one can scarcely imagine a worse outcome of this election year. Carter and Ford partisans alike should hope for a clear verdict-no matter which man wins. Yet political analyst Kevin Phillips shows how easily the elector-popular vote split could occur, given three plausible assumptions. Carter's support remains overconcentrated in the South. Eugene McCarthy, who's likel yto end up on the ballot in close to 40 states, wins 5 percent or more of the national vote-mostly otherwise Carter-voting Northern Democrats. President Ford, scoring the hair-breadth pluralities that are enough to deliver all of a state's electoral votes, wins narrowly in such big Northern states as Illinois, Ohio, California, New Jersey, Michigan and Pennsylvania. Added to Ford's base of support in farm and mountain states, that could add up to a narrow electoral college majority. Ford might, for instance, win 311 electoral votes, 41 more than the required majority of 270, even though Carter led him by 3 percentage points (48 to 45 percent, or more than 2,000,000 votes, in the national popular count. (This assumes that 7 percent of the vote might go to minor party candidates.) Carter, in that projection, would carry the South 56 to 42 percent, but lose in the electoral college because Ford edged him, 47 to 45 percent, in the North. Any such scenario, of course, is hypothetical. A Southern surge by Ford could whittle down Carter's lead in Dixie. Either Ford or Carter could gain such nationwide momentum in the final weeks of the campaign that there'd be a clearcut victory, both in electoral and popular votes. But should the electoral college not elect the man who won the most popular votes, how could the outcome be explained or justified? That some hocus-pocus of an 18th-century counting device is more important than the popular will? That the popular votes of Southerners, because they happen to be geographically concentrated, are less important than the votes of other Americans? The prospect goes far beyond the bitter blow that would be dealt the South in the first year since 1848 that it has produced a major party presidential nominee. The mystery is why, 200 years after independence, we still have not created an understandable, fair, direct vote system to choose the President of the United States. No one can blame the American people. The Gallup poll has reported 81 per cent of them in favor of a direct national vote for President. The villains of the story-and it has many-are the politicians, advocates of regional, racial or ideological causes. They've long claimed, without credible evidence, that the electoral college bolsters Ametrican federalism or the two-party system. But their real motivation in blocking reform has been a desire to protect some perceived advantages for themselves. On the "right," if you will, are small state conservatives who've fought to preserve the system because they see an advantage in the apportionment scheme that guarantees each state, however tiny its population, a minimum of three electoral votes. On the “left” have been big-city and minorities spokesmen who detect, more accurately, that the shift of a few hundred or thousand popular votes in a big state has much more chance of affecting the outcome of a presidential election. Neither position is defensible. Both smack of a political opportunism in which one would rather have a minority President he prefers than a popularly chosen one he dislikes. And both run the danger of a fatal misreading of the political tea leaves, in which one assumes that the political balances of the present will hold true for all time to come. The last of any attempts to abolish the electoral college occurred in the wake of the 1968 election, so tightly contested in electoral votes that George Wallace was almost able to use his 46 electors to bargain for concessions from Richard Nixon or Hubert Humphrey. The reform effort came tantalizingly close to success. A direct vote constitutional amendment won wide support, not only in national polls but from an unprecedented lobbying coalition including the American Bar Association, the Chamber of Commerce of the U.S., the AFL-CIO, and the League of Women Voters. The House approved the amendment by an overwhelming 333-to-70 vote. But Senate backers fell five votes short of the two-thirds they needed to break a Southern-led filibuster and send the amendment to the states for ratification. Since 1970, proponents of a direct vote amendment have eliminated the controversial provision for a popular runoff if no candidate gets 40 per cent of the vote. Now, in that unlikely event, a decision can be reached by vote of a joint session of Congress. Some opponents of the 1970 version, such as Sen. Robert Dole, this year's Republican vice presidential nominee, support the revised direct vote amendment. The direct vote, Dole says, is needed to eliminate electoral college pitfalls that could "seriously jeopardize the governing and leadership ability of the person chosen to be President" and at worse "plunge the country into paralysis and chaos." The record shows that three times in U.S. history (1824, 1876, and 1888) the popular vote loser was elevated to the presidency, and that four times in this century (1916, 1948, 1960 and 1968) minuscule shifts in the popular vote in a handful of statets have frustrated the popular will again. Curiously, the only redeeming feature of the present system may be the muchdisputed independence of electors. Should Carter win hte popular vote but face electoral college defeat, some Republican electors might switch to him-just as, as 1968, there was talk among some Democratic electors that they might vote for Nixon if he had won the popular vote but faced defeat because of the vagaries of electoral vote distribution. Such a possibility is a faint substitute for real reform, however. As Sen. Estes Kefauver lamented in 1961: "Every four years the electoral college is a loaded pistol aimed at our system of government. Its continued existance is a game of Russian roulette." The distinct danger is that 1976 may be the year the pistol goes off. [From the New York Times, Nov. 2, 1976] RACE COULD GO TO NOMINEE WITH SMALL POPULAR VOTE (By David E. Rosenbaum) WASHINGTON.-Nov. 1. Tomorrow's Presidential election is expected to be so close that it is possible that, for the fourth time in history, a President will take office after receiving fewer popular votes than his opponent does. The possibility exists because, under the Constitution, Presidents are elected not by popular votes nationwide but by the Electoral College. There are 538 members of the Electoral College, a body that never meets as a group and whose members are little known to the public. Each state has as many electors as it has Senators and Representatives combined. In addition, there are three electors from the District of Columbia. All the electoral votes from a state go to the candidate with the highest popular vote in that state, regardless of the size of his majority or plurality. EXAMPLES ARE GIVEN Thus, a candidate who carries Alaska receives three electoral votes, whether he wins the state by 50 votes or 50,000. Similarly, a candidate who carries California will receive all 45 electoral votes even if he has only a few more votes than his opponent has. To be elected President, a candidate must receive a majority, or 270, of the votes in the Electoral College. If no candidate wins a majority of the electors, the election is decided by the House of Representatives. Although in years past there has been a real possibility of the decision's being thrown into the House, it is highly unlikely that such will be the case this year. That is because it appears inconceivable that any third-party candidate will carry a state and thus win electors this year. The House will be called on to settle the election, therefore, only if Jimmy Carter and President Ford each receive precisely 269 electoral votes. Three times in the 19th century a man who lost in the national popular vote was elevated to the Presidency. NONE OF 4 GOT MAJORITY In 1824, four men received electoral votes and none received a majority. The election was decided by the House of Representatives, which gave the Presidency to John Quincy Adams, even though Andrew Jackson received half again as many popular votes. In 1876, Rutherford B. Hayes won in the Electoral College by a one-vote margin, although Samuel J. Tilden had received nearly 51 percent of the popular vote and more than 280,000 more popular votes than had Hayes. In 1888, Benjamin Harrison, by carrying such large states as New York and Pennsylvania with small pluralities, won a clear victory in the Electoral College, although Grover Cleveland had 100,000 more votes nationwide. Four times in this century-1916, 1948, 1960 and 1968-small shifts of the popular vote in a few selected states would have changed the outcome in the Electoral College. In 1916, for example, Woodrow Wilson received 600,000 more popular votes than did Charles Evans Hughes, but a switch of fewer than 2,000 votes in California from Wilson to Hughes would have given the Electoral College majority to Hughes. In 1960, to take another example, a shift of fewer than 12,000 total votes in five states would have elected Richard M. Nixon instead of John F. Kennedy. In some states, electors are not bound to vote for the candidate who carried their states, and occasionally electors have indeed cast ballots for other candidates. Such stray votes, however, have never affected the outcome of an election. There is a strange case in Vermont this year, in which Senator Robert T. Stafford is listed on the ballot as an elector pledged to President Ford. However, under the United States Constitution, no Federal official can serve as an elector. If President Ford carries Vermont tomorrow, the matter of what happens to the Stafford electoral vote will have to be settled in the courts. The winning electors will meet in their state capitals on Dec. 13 to cast their votes. The ballots will be sent to the President of the Senate (Vice President Rockefeller), who will open them in the presence of the Senate and the House on Jan. 6. [From the Chicago Tribune, Nov. 3, 1976] ABOLISH THE ELECTORAL COLLEGE (By Jerald terHorst) WASHINGTON.-The people have spoken; we have had our straw poll for President. Now we must wait until January to see if the Electoral College will go along with the people's choice. And that's ridiculous. |