Campaign Relief: This College Is Messed Up

By: John Hanchette Until four years ago, I held the impression that a goodly proportion of Americans thought the Electoral College had a student union, a library, and a football team (probably Division II).

This is an old joke, but unfortunately a revealing one, because it took the fiercely disputed presidential election of 2000, Florida's 537-vote margin for George W. Bush, and a Supreme Court decision to re-focus the populace's attention on an enduring controversy in our republic: whether the incontrovertibly outdated Electoral College should be abolished and our quaint system of electing presidents changed.

There are plenty of news people who don't understand the current election process either. Despite all the boilerplate editorial hoo-ha about your single vote counting on Nov. 2, as John Tierney put it bluntly Sunday in The New York Times, "No matter what state you live in, you have a much better chance of being struck by lightning on the way to the polls than of casting a decisive ballot in the presidential election."

This is because you aren't really voting for a president. We do not pick our president by direct popular vote. You are choosing instead a slate of electors who meet shortly before Christmas in their separate states to cast ballots for the party candidate they are pledged to. They are usually political party leaders and officials. This indirect electoral process was set up at the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in 1787, and it was controversial even then.

The Founding Fathers realized few Americans were literate in the nation's early days, and that communication by horseback and sail was slow and unreliable. Someone in rural Virginia had little way of learning about a candidate from Massachusetts. Ordinary voters would be inclined to vote only for somebody from their home state. This would give the big states all the power.

So the founders set up a system whereby voters would pick some of the smartest and wisest men from their own state and let them choose a president. Each state would pick as many electors as it had members of Congress, and their votes would be awarded on a winner-take-all basis.

As one might suspect, this buggy-whip system has led to all sorts of trouble. Every once in awhile, a candidate wins the popular vote, and loses the election because his opponent carried enough states to triumph in the Electoral College.

It happened last election. It also happened in 1800, in 1824, in 1876, and in 1888. It came close to happening in 1948 and 1960.

So, every four years or so around this time, some newspapers call for abolishing the Electoral College. This year, The New York Times, previously a defender of the Electoral College, weighed in with a strong editorial in late August attacking the current system and terming it "a ridiculous setup, which thwarts the will of the majority, distorts presidential campaigning and has the potential to produce a true constitutional crisis."

The Times keeps pounding away on that theme, as in a well-written Oct. 17 analysis by John M. Broder, who observed, "If either candidate wins without leading the popular vote, as Mr. Bush did in 2000, there could be serious calls to abolish the Electoral College and make other fundamental changes in the machinery of American democracy."

As The Times and other papers stress, modern presidential elections, with their daily polling and sophisticated vote-potential measurements, are all about closely contested states, where a voter's predilection truly does have some clout. "A few swing states take on oversized importance, leading the candidates to focus their attention, money and promises on a small slice of the electorate," said the Times.

For instance, the Bush campaign has already conceded New York and its 31 electoral votes to Sen. John Kerry, but not the possibly crucial 5 electoral votes of Nevada. Thus, we hear more campaign argument about the suggested storing of hazardous waste in that state's Yucca Mountain (an issue keenly followed by 2.2 million Nevadans) than we do about securing ports against terrorism, which might capture closer attention from New York's 19.2 million residents.

This is one reason why almost all datelines of political stories in the coming week will be from Florida, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Minnesota, and Wisconsin. My vote in upstate New York will be an exercise in good citizenship and little more.

Calls for abolition of the electoral system, of course, bring out equally fervent defenses.

Paul Greenberg, writing recently in The Washington Times, observed that a close election like the one four years ago would lead to a monumental and almost impossible recount if we went to a popular vote system: "At least the Electoral College confines fights over contested votes to decisive states. ... Suppose the presidential election hinged on disputed vote totals across the country. For those who thought the 2000 election was a confused mess ... you ain't seen nothin' yet."

Tony Hershey, in the Aspen Daily News, expressed similar fears about electoral reform Sunday: "Without the Electoral College a candidate could theoretically campaign and win in only the big cities. ... A direct election would allow a candidate to concentrate resources, time and political capital in winning the greatest numbers of voters in big states and cities."

My former colleague Chuck Raasch of Gannett News Service has devoted assiduous research to this subject and found that reformers have tried to change the Electoral College system no fewer than 700 times since its inception. He also notes that two states, Maine and Nebraska, already have provisions dividing their electoral votes based on the winners of congressional districts, and that Colorado voters will decide Nov. 2 whether to apportion its nine electoral votes based on the state's popular vote. If it passes, it would apply to the 2004 results.

Two Democratic congressmen (Reps. Gene Green of Texas and Brian Baird of Washington), Raasch noted in a recent column, have already introduced a fresh bill that would abolish the use of electors and go to a popular vote.

"The bill is not expected to pass," writes Raasch, "but it has raised the viability and fairness of using a winner-take-all system in a nation that is far more populous and far different than when the founders wrote the Constitution more than two centuries ago."

The public seems more aware of this issue than in 2000. A Gallup Poll last week showed 61 percent of those surveyed willing to dump the electoral system, while only 35 percent supported retaining it. That's surprising. But I wouldn't bet it's going to happen.

David Shribman, the executive editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and one of the best political analysts of his generation, seems to me right on the button with his mid-campaign reflection that "in the cool light of reason" the Electoral College may be an idea "whose time has come and gone. But it may never be gone."

Shribman explains "That's because there will always be a party, or an interest, or a political figure, who will see opportunity in the peculiarity of the system. ... And the opponents will inevitably wrap themselves in the old arguments of the sanctity of the states and will, disingenuously or not, summon arguments about the prerogatives of the smaller states."

That may sound cynical, but it's accurate. If you have to bet on its future, take the Electoral College and give the points.