November 28, 2007
A New Yorker’s Objection to the Electoral College IV Posted by John Steele Gordon at 03:10 PM EST A few points. 1) I didn’t say that “the United States is necessarily better off with an electoral system that theoretically favors small, rural states over big, urban centers.” I said it was better off with the present system than with a system based purely on the popular vote. The present system, devised 220 years ago in an utterly different world, is by no means without its flaws. No system is. One might have an electoral vote system, just for instance, where the votes were allocated not according to the state’s representation in Congress but according to its population: one electoral vote for each 100,000 citizens recorded in the last census. That would give California 359 electoral votes and South Dakota 8, a 44–1 ratio instead of 55 and 3, a 13–1 ratio. (To be sure, best of luck getting such an amendment ratified.) 2) Mr. Burns is taking rhetorical advantage of a careless choice of states, which is good for scoring college debate team points but not so good for finding the truth. Idaho and Vermont are both solidly in one camp and so would be largely ignored in either system. But there are plenty of small states that tend to move back and forth between parties: New Mexico, Nevada, Delaware, etc. I don’t think any candidate for President is going to say, “Oh, the hell with [fill in the name of a small toss-up state]” under the Electoral College. But who’s going to bother with the 371,000 voters in Delaware (which in the last 15 elections has gone Republican 8 times and Democratic 7) when they can concentrate on the rich vote mines of Florida, Texas, New York, and California instead? Delaware issues would be utterly unimportant. Candidates wouldn’t even have to know what they are. 3) Mr. Burns writes, “I’m not sure that Al Gore or Samuel Tilden would agree about the consistent clarity of the Electoral College . . .” Why wouldn’t they? They undoubtedly didn’t like the results in 1876 and 2000, but those results were clear enough. 4) I know of no evidence that either President Clinton in 1993 or George Bush in 2005 thought themselves the holders of overwhelming mandates. To be sure, Clinton won a fairly resounding Electoral College vote in 1992 (370–168), but that very savvy politician knew perfectly well that that was because of Ross Perot siphoning off votes in states that Bush might well have won in a two-man race. In 2004, Bush’s Electoral College victory was a mere 286–251. As Mr. Burns has pointed out, a shift of a mere 60,000 votes in Ohio would have made John Kerry President. Clinton’s health-care plan and Bush’s attempt to reform Social Security both failed, I think, for quite other reasons. 5) He writes, “If the 2000 election had been settled without the Electoral College, there would not have been a 50-state scavenger hunt for votes. In fact, there would not have been a ‘messy, divisive legal battle’ at all. The outcome would have been an indisputable victory for Al Gore.” I wonder how Mr. Burns can be as certain of this as he might be of the time the sun rose on the day after Election Day in 2000. A mere 544,683 votes, a little over 10,000 per state, separated Al Gore and George Bush, out of 101,463,105 votes cast. I imagine the Republicans would have fought just as ferociously and screamed fraud just as loudly all over the country as the Democrats did in Florida. Given the utterly disgraceful mess the voter registration rolls are in in most states, how easy it is to register without proof of being enfranchised, and how easy it is to vote without proof of identity, they would have found very rich pickings.
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