November 27, 2007
A New Yorker’s Objection to the Electoral College II Posted by John Steele Gordon at 12:05 PM EST I am not sure that abolishing the Electoral College would change the way elections are conducted in modern times in the way that Alexander Burns envisions. The Electoral College is biased in favor of the small states (which is most of the states). California has 55 electoral votes and South Dakota only 3. But California has about 600,000 people per vote and South Dakota only 200,000. So while there’s not much point in a candidate for President showing up in hopes of winning a majority of the minuscule popular vote in South Dakota (it’s a third smaller than New York’s Westchester County), three electoral voters can make all the difference in a close race. Bush beat Gore by only 5 electoral votes in 2000. So I think that in a race determined only by the national popular vote, much of “fly-over country,” as coastal elites call it, would be ignored, and the race would be fought in the great media centers (i.e., New York, Washington, and Los Angeles) and the major cities. That would not be a good thing. The Electoral College forces candidates to consider each of the 50 states and to spend time and resources in those that seem possible to win, no matter how small. Without it, they would ignore the Vermonts and the Idahos. Those states that are solidly one party or the other would be largely ignored with or without the Electoral College, unless, like New York, they are full of media. As Mr. Burns points out, there have been only three times that the Electoral College went against the popular vote. But each of these times the popular vote was so close that it was well within the margin of error, and we will never know in any absolute sense who won the popular vote in those elections. Yet in each case the Electoral College produced a clear winner, who thus had a legitimacy he otherwise would have lacked. Cleveland beat Blaine in 1884 by a mere 26,361 votes, less than .2 percent of the total. But he won in the Electoral College 219 to 182. Four years later, Cleveland beat Harrison by 90,596 votes, but lost in the college 233 to 168. In both cases we will never know who actually won the popular vote. And of course there have been several times when the popular vote was effectively a tie, with the winner in the college just barely edging out his opponent. Kennedy beat Nixon in 1960 34,226,731 to 34,108,157, but carried the college handily 303 to 219. Had Cook County, Illinois, politics been a bit closer to the ideal of a Jeffersonian democracy, Kennedy would have lost the popular vote and still have been President. He won Illinois by less than 10,000 votes, and Richard Dailey’s Cook County was remarkably late in reporting its results. Then there were the four times when no one had a majority of the popular vote (1860, 1912, 1992, and 1996) but someone carried the Electoral College handily. Wilson won only 45 percent of the popular vote but almost 82 percent of the Electoral College vote in 1912. Despite being a minority President, he had a very effective first term. Finally, imagine a squeaker election in these over-lawyered days without the Electoral College. In 2000, because of the college, the messy, divisive legal battle was fought only in Florida, and it still took over a month to sort out. But without the college it would have been fought in all 50 states, because each and every vote would have been precious. An army of lawyers would have had new Mercedes in their driveways when it was finally over, but the Republic would have been very ill served. Clear winners are always better than unclear ones, and the great virtue of the Electoral College is that it always produces clear winners.
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