June 8, 2006
The Old Electoral College Try Posted by Frederic D. Schwarz at 03:15 PM EST Regarding the Electoral College, I agree with John Steele Gordon that it’s not going anywhere. As is true of a related and far greater injustice, the assignment of two Senate seats to each state regardless of population, changing the rules would require federal and state lawmakers to vote against their own interest for the sake of nothing more than fairness. That isn’t going to happen. To read my 2001 discussion of this issue, which still remains largely valid, click here.
One point that could use clarification is that while abolishing or modifying the Electoral College would require a constitutional amendment, the states remain free to appoint electors as their legislatures see fit. One scheme that has been making the rounds lately is for the dozen or so largest states to agree to allot all their electoral votes to the candidate who wins the nationwide popular vote. [Note: I wrote this before reading Josh’s entry of 10:10 a.m. today on this subject.] Supposedly this would have the effect of always giving the election to the popular-vote winner.
It’s a clever idea, but there are a number of objections: (1) Losers could always claim that votes were suppressed or counted improperly, which would presumably release them from the agreement (some people still claim that the 2004 election was stolen, for example); (2) there would be no way to enforce the deal, and thus nothing to prevent a state from changing its mind on the eve of a close election or even afterwards, or for a subsequent legislature to simply decide that it was a bad idea; (3) it’s unclear what to do when there is a non-trivial third-party candidate; and, perhaps most important, (4) would New York’s legislature really have given the state’s electoral votes to George Bush in 2004 because a bunch of rednecks voted for him? Or in 2000, would Texas’s legislature have given its votes to Al Gore, thus swinging the election, to satisfy a bunch of bluenecks? In either case, how could they face the voters afterwards? In elections won by a comfortable margin, the compact would be unnecessary, and in close elections, it would just be one more thing for people to go to court about. (I suspect it would also exacerbate the “faithless elector” problem, since an elector voting contrary to instructions could say, “But I was just obeying the people of my state!”)
Another problem: You can’t have a meaningful nationwide popular vote without imposing nationwide standards. Otherwise there’s nothing to prevent a state from being lenient towards repeat voters, fake ballots, biased officials, and the like. Under the present system, in most states there’s no need to steal a presidential election because it’s clear in advance which candidate will win, and piling up extra popular votes doesn’t gain you any extra electoral votes. But suppose there’s a de facto national popular vote, and it’s a squeaker, and reports start circulating of illegal aliens voting by the thousand in big cities, or of dead folks flocking to the polls in rural outposts. What then? Or by the same token, what if there were lines around the block that discouraged people from voting, or excessive and picayune challenges or red tape that created delays and scared voters off? What political true believer would feel compelled to respect the results of a vote with so many irregularities? Not to mention the differing standards for things like postal voting, suffrage for convicts, and regulations governing ballots and computer software. The Electoral College does not eliminate these problems, but at least it confines them to one state at a time and erases their effect in most places. With a nationwide popular vote, every local irregularity would become a national problem.
A better idea would be to have a separate electoral race in each congressional district, as Maine and Nebraska now do, with the statewide winner receiving a bonus of two electors. This solves all the objections mentioned above except (2), which applies to any system including the current one. It eliminates the winner-take-all feature, though it could still result in a popular-vote winner losing the election, if you consider that a problem. The difficulty, of course, as with all such schemes, would lie in getting states to agree to it.
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