College Drop-Outs

The House and Senate of Massachusetts recently passed a bill designed as a first step toward replacing the Electoral College with the national popular vote. Deval Patrick will presumably sign the bill into law. When states containing a majority of electoral votes have passed similar bills, Massachusetts will allocate its presidential electors to the candidate who wins a majority of the popular vote, thereby ensuring that the candidate also wins the election.

This bill is perfectly constitutional, despite the objections of many of its opponents and its obvious misalignment with the intent of the Framers. Article II, Section 1: "Each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors, equal to the whole Number of Senators and Representatives to which the State may be entitled in the Congress...." The addition of senators to the Electoral College tally boosts the representation of small states relative to populous ones. This has historically led conservatives in Congress to defend the College against efforts to replace it with the popular vote, since they tend to come from the smaller states of the Plains and South. After the 1968 presidential election, the House passed a Constitutional Amendment replacing the College with the popular vote, but in the Senate, the Southerners and plainsmen (and, humorously, Hiram Fong of tiny Hawaii) killed it with a filibuster -- appropriately, the very antithesis of majority rule. In the 1968 election, Richard Nixon beat Hubert Humphrey by 500,000 votes, 0.7% of the total, although he won the Electoral College in a landslide, winning 301 votes compared to Humphrey's 191. The election was peculiar, however, in that George Wallace won 46 electoral votes in six southern states and almost 10 million popular votes.

Although the Massachusetts legislature is still seething over the result of Election 2000, in which Al Gore won the popular but lost the electoral vote, its law might result in the heavily Democratic state throwing its lot to the Republican popular vote-winner in a future election. In 2004, remember, George Bush defeated John Kerry by a sound margin of 3 million popular votes (2.5%), but eked out an Electoral College victory thanks to Ohio. Moreover, the Massachusetts law will unlock Republican votes cast in the state, which, thanks to the Electoral College and the state's solid Democratic majority, have played absolutely no role in most presidential contests of the last 50 years.

The Electoral College has significant advantages over the direct popular vote. First, recounts will be horrendous under the Massachusetts scheme. Living in Minnesota, I can attest to the inevitability of close recounts. In June of 2009, after eight months of recounts and legal challenges, Al Franken beat Norm Coleman by 312 votes -- 0.011% of the total. And in 1962, Karl Rolvaag defeated Elmer Anderson in the gubernatorial contest by 91 votes out of the 1.25 million cast. Now imagine what happens when a presidential candidate wins by 0.1% of the vote -- a reasonably high margin by Minnesota standards. A recount will have to occur, since the margin of error is also around 0.1%. But states tally their own votes, and some states will agree to the recounts while others won't. The candidates will attempt to cherry-pick states and counties they want recounted, like Al Gore did in Election 2000 only to have it backfire. The recount will stretch on indefinitely, except, unlike in Congressional elections, there's a solid January deadline to choose a president. Luckily for the Massachusetts lawmakers, Democrats tend to win recounts because of vote-counting inconsistencies which disproportionately occur in Democratic precincts. (One Minneapolis precinct in the Franken-Coleman race conveniently "lost" hundreds of votes which resurfaced during the recount -- and went heavily Democratic.)

Proponents of the popular vote claim that it will force candidates to campaign across the entire nation. Unfortunately for the Bay State populists, Massachusetts will obviously not be one of those places. Candidates will focus on areas with high population densities and ambivalent or undecided voters. In other words, Democrats will try to increase turnout in uneducated coastal regions, and Republicans will resort to milking Texas. The parties will, in effect, cater to their geographic base. But even if attention is spread evenly over vast, sparsely-settled swaths of the country, politicians will have to take their message to more people using more money. Imagine the campaign finance requirements of running ads in every state, the necessary reliance on corporate contributions, and how beholden the government will become to business interests. The Massachusetts bill's effects run counter to its populist intent.

Consequences even more dangerous than the vast financing requirements of a transcontinental campaign could result from ascendancy of the popular vote. The Electoral College promotes a two-party system, so that third-party candidates like Ross Perot, George Wallace, and Theodore Roosevelt (in 1912) can win a sizable percent of the popular vote but few votes in the Electoral College. (In 1992, Ross Perot won 18.9% of the popular vote and not a single elector.) The usual inability of third parties to consolidate around a viable presidential candidate promotes compromise and moderation in the other two, and also prevents sensationalists like Jesse Ventura from sweeping into office. In nations where small parties prosper, democracy suffers. Israel, to take an extreme case, has a parliamentary system which allocates seats by proportion of the popular vote received. Fringe parties thereby hold seats in the Knesset and force the major parties to form ruling coalitions with them. Ultra-Orthodox MPs stymie concessions in the West Bank; representatives of the old peoples' party occupy the ministry of old peoples' affairs. In the United States, when a third party coalesces around an issue that cannot be absorbed in the give-and-take of two-party politics, a new axis shoots out of the conventional political spectrum. This is how the Republican Party formed in the 1850s, extincting the Whigs and bringing the injustice of slavery to the forefront of the Northern political conscience. Thus, third-party politics exists as a nascent, moderating threat to the established order under the Electoral College system, but does not threaten to splinter the national democratic fabric, as it would with a popular vote. What happens when someone wins with much less than 50% of the popular vote? Would it be a legitimate victory? I, for one, cast my vote against the Massachusetts scheme and in favor of our stodgy old College.