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The old College try
Submitted by SHNS on Fri, 07/18/2008 - 12:27.
Lately, there has been a push to get rid of the Electoral College -- the way we choose presidents -- and replace it with a pure popular vote.
Rhode Island Governor Donald Carcieri recently vetoed one such plan called the National Popular Vote, which former Massachusetts Gov. Michael Dukakis has been pushing hard. In 1969, President Richard Nixon similarly sought to deep-six the protections afforded by the Electoral College.
Before citizens jump on the bandwagon, they would be wise to consider what the Founders were trying to do in creating what has turned out to be the most successful federal, not unitary, republic in history.
They worked hard to devise a government that would tend to protect the liberties of minorities (except tragically, most notably, the African-American population for many years). They understood that majority rule unmitigated by checks and balances historically marked the path to dictatorship and tyranny.
They also sought to retain a system in which the states would maintain much importance as political and governmental entities. That was a way to keep government close to the people, and what Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis later called great "laboratories of democracy," able to try different policies, the best of which could be emulated by other states.
The Electoral College system, which seems so crankily 18th Century, is an important and ingenious part of our federal system. It turns the presidential race into 50 separate state races (plus the District of Columbia).
The virtues of this quintessentially federal system are manifold:
-- Similar to the U.S. Senate, it gives smaller states (such as Rhode Island, Massachusetts and Connecticut) disproportionate power (more electoral votes per capita than more populous states such as California and Texas). That makes it harder for big states to steamroll over smaller states' interests.
-- It protects the rights of rural states, which could otherwise be a mere afterthought. The Founders believed that the values inculcated in rural America were an important part of the country's fabric.
-- It promotes the interests of ethnic minorities, such as blacks and Hispanics, since they can have a strong influence in state races that they would not have if presidential elections were purely national popularity contests.
-- It forces candidates to take on a more national perspective and thus usually more moderate policies than they otherwise would. Were a pure-popular-vote system installed, a candidate could theoretically roll up huge vote totals in one state or a small region, lose throughout the rest of the country, and still win.
-- It makes it easier to limit the effect of corruption. If corrupt voting practices let a candidate roll up a huge majority in one place, the Electoral College would tend to wall off the effect to that one state.
No system is perfect, of course, and the Electoral College sometimes -- though very rarely -- does defy the will of the common majority. It did in 2000, when George Bush narrowly lost the popular vote but won the electoral votes of 30 of the 50 states, albeit controversially when the Supreme Court ruled for Bush regarding recounting the Florida vote.
But the experience of the last 219 years suggests strongly that the system has usually (nothing is always in the affairs of people) worked well to protect Americans and their liberty. It should not be tossed aside casually.
(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)
Support the National Popular Vote bill
The small states are the most disadvantaged of all under the current system of electing the President. Political clout comes from being a closely divided battleground state, not the two-vote bonus.
Small states are almost invariably non-competitive in presidential election. Only 1 of the 13 smallest states are battleground states (and only 5 of the 25 smallest states are battlegrounds).
Of the 13 smallest states, Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, North Dakota, South Dakota, and Alaska regularly vote Republican, and Rhode Island, Delaware, Hawaii, Vermont, Maine, and DC regularly vote Democratic. These 12 states together contain 11 million people. Because of the two electoral-vote bonus that each state receives, the 12 non-competitive small states have 40 electoral votes. However, the two-vote bonus is an entirely illusory advantage to the small states. Ohio has 11 million people and has "only" 20 electoral votes. As we all know, the 11 million people in Ohio are the center of attention in presidential campaigns, while the 11 million people in the 12 non-competitive small states are utterly irrelevant. Nationwide election of the President would make each of the voters in the 12 smallest states as important as an Ohio voter.
The fact that the bonus of two electoral votes is an illusory benefit to the small states has been widely recognized by the small states for some time. In 1966, Delaware led a group of 12 predominantly low-population states (North Dakota, South Dakota, Wyoming, Utah, Arkansas, Kansas, Oklahoma, Iowa, Kentucky, Florida, Pennsylvania) in suing New York in the U.S. Supreme Court, arguing that New York's use of the winner-take-all effectively disenfranchised voters in their states. The Court declined to hear the case (presumably because of the well-established constitutional provision that the manner of awarding electoral votes is exclusively a state decision). Ironically, defendant New York is no longer a battleground state (as it was in the 1960s) and today suffers the very same disenfranchisement as the 12 non-competitive low-population states. A vote in New York is, today, equal to a vote in Wyoming—both are equally worthless and irrelevant in presidential elections.
Support the National Popular Vote bill
Keep in mind that the main media at the moment, namely TV, costs much more per impression in big cities than in smaller towns and rural area. So, if you just looked at TV, candidates get more bang for the buck in smaller towns and rural areas.
For example, in California, candidates for governor or U.S. Senate don't campaign just in Los Angeles and SF, and those places don't control the outcome (otherwise we wouldn't have recently had governors Reagan, Dukemejian, Wilson, and Schwatznegger). A vote in Alpine county is just an important as a vote in Los Angeles.
If the National Popular Vote bill were to become law, it would not change the need for candidates to build a winning coalition across demographics... any candidate who yielded, for example, the 21% of Americans who live in rural areas in favor of a "big city" approach would not likely win the national popular vote. Candidates would still have to appeal to a broad range of demographics, and perhaps even more so... because the election wouldn't be capable of coming down to just one demographic, such as voters in Ohio.
Support the National Popular Vote bill
Senator Birch Bayh (D–Indiana) summed up the concerns about possible fraud in a nationwide popular election for President in a Senate speech by saying in 1979, "one of the things we can do to limit fraud is to limit the benefits to be gained by fraud. Under a direct popular vote system, one fraudulent vote wins one vote in the return. In the electoral college system, one fraudulent vote could mean 45 electoral votes, 28 electoral votes."
In Illinois in the 1960s, accusation of vote fraud by both political parties were commonplace. In 1960, a switch of 4,430 votes in Illinois and a switch 4,782 votes in South Carolina would have given Nixon a majority of the electoral votes. However, 4,430 votes in Illinois were only a focus of controversy in 1960 because of the statewide winner-take-all rule. John F. Kennedy led Richard M. Nixon by 118,574 popular votes nationwide, so 4,430 votes were not decisive in terms of the national vote count. Of course, if Nixon had carried Illinois and a state such as South Carolina in 1960, Nixon would have won a majority of the votes in the Electoral College, despite not receiving a majority of the popular votes nationwide.
National Popular Vote Bill
The National Popular Vote bill has been vetoed by the Republican governors of California, Vermont, Rhode Island and Hawaii. (In Hawaii the bill was enacted over the governor's veto by the required 2/3 vote of each branch of the legislature).
Republicans tend to do better when voter turnout is low; and a National Popular Vote would increase voter turnout because every vote would be equally important. This may be a big part of the reason why the bill was vetoed by 4 Republican governors, even though their states are mere spectators in the general election, because they are not swing states. But a preference for voter suppression is not a moral reason to keep the current system.
Moreover, the current system does not necessarily favor Republicans. In 2004, if 60,000 Bush voters in Ohio had instead voted for Kerry, Kerry would be president, even though he lost the popular vote by about 3 million votes.
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