Another Electoral College Nightmare?
Jules Witcover

Only a dozen years after the infamous Florida recount fiasco that put the loser of the national popular vote in the Oval Office, the specter of a repetition appears to be a possible outcome on November 6.

Various national and state polls, which this year have become epidemic and contradictory, hint that Mitt Romney might finish first in the popular vote but lose to President Obama in the Electoral College. If so, this time it will be the Republicans crying foul, just as the Democrats did in 2000.

It's not as if such an result would come out of the blue. Ever since George W. Bush became president, although Al Gore got more than half a million more popular votes, reformers have deplored the simple injustice of this denial of the popular will.

In 1999, I raised the peril myself in a book, "No Way to Pick a President," in a chapter called "An Accident Waiting to Happen," which the very next year did happen. Other calls for abandoning the Electoral College got nowhere; they are being heard again, and will likely meet the same fate if history repeats itself once more this year.

This "college" is really just a correspondence school of "electors" who never meet, merely mailing in their votes from their states. The electors customarily are party officials or political hacks who supposedly have free will but almost always follow the popular vote in their state. An occasional "faithless elector" goes off the reservation or votes for a third-party candidate, without affecting the outcome.

Defenders of the Electoral College note that "only" four times has the popular will of the electorate been thus thwarted. In 1824, Andrew Jackson won the popular vote but fell short of an electoral vote majority. The presidency went to the popular-vote runner-up, John Quincy Adams, when the election was thrown to the House of Representatives to decide.

In 1876, Samuel J. Tilden beat Rutherford B. Hayes by 250,000 popular votes but fell a single electoral vote shy. A special commission of congressional and Supreme Court members gave all 20 disputed electors to Hayes, and the election. In 1888, Grover Cleveland, seeking re-election, won the popular vote by 95,000 ballots but lost in the Electoral College to Benjamin Harrison, 233 to 168.

In 1960, John Kennedy won the popular vote over Richard Nixon by 112,000 votes, but he was credited with all of Alabama's Democratic ballots although six of the state's 11 electors cast their electoral votes for Sen. Harry F. Byrd of Virginia. Had Byrd's 176,000 popular votes not been counted for Kennedy, Nixon would have been the popular winner, though he lost in the Electoral College, 303 to 219.

In a 1956 debate with John Pastore of Rhode Island, Kennedy in defending the system pointed out that "Rhode Island is over-represented in the Electoral College today, based on its population." Pastore replied that he would do away with it, saying, "I would not care where the candidates came from, whether they came from the North, the South, the West or the East. We are all one country. I say let us vote for the best man. It is as simple as that. That is my idea of representative government. Everything else beyond that is a gimmick."

The Electoral College, a byproduct of the founding fathers' compromise over small-state vs. large-state power, was called later by constitutional scholar John P. Roche "merely a jerry-rigged improvisation ... a Rube Goldberg mechanism" akin to the cartoonist's bizarrely elaborate contraptions for performing simple tasks.

One founder, George Mason of Virginia, said during debate on the college that "it would be as unnatural to refer the choice of a proper magistrate (president) to the people as it would to refer a trial of colors to a blind man." Elbridge Gerry of Massachusetts agreed, warning that "the people are uninformed and would be misled by a few designing men."

Gerry's last comment may be even more applicable in today's campaigns run by political consultants flooding the air with negative television ads. However, that does not negate the validity of what the man from Rhode Island told JFK 56 years ago.

 

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Another Electoral College Nightmare? | Politics

 

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