The Hidden Beauty of the System
It gives the states a chance to be heard, but the electoral voting should be automatic
Jeff Greenfield
What the Electoral College needs is a neutron bomb--a weapon that
leaves the structure standing but wipes out the people. While
there are plausible arguments for preserving this 200-year-old
system, the first step is to cleanse it of its most dangerous
moving part: human beings.
Although today electors dwell in deserved obscurity, they still
have to gather, usually in their state's capital, a month or so
after Election Day and actually cast votes. They have carried out
that task with admirably robotic precision: only nine have ever
failed to vote as they pledged. But they could make mischief in
circumstances such as the ones we face today, in which the winner
of the popular vote may narrowly lose the electoral vote.
Consider what would happen if the electoral votes were
automatically cast: the winner would be settled as soon as the
popular votes were counted and certified. With humans involved,
however, another huge cloud of uncertainty may envelop the
process--especially if the margin of electoral victory is as thin
as this year's. There might be public pressure on electors to
cast their votes on behalf of the winner of the national popular
vote. Imagine the din from radio talk shows, the threats and
promises aimed at these electors. A few might withhold their
votes unless their candidate agrees, say, to ban the RU 486 pill.
And then what? Instead of concentrating on the President-elect's
appointments and agenda, we would see weeks of argument that he
should not, in fact, be the new President. We would see the new
Congress, whose first job is to certify or reject these votes,
embroiled in furious partisan debate. We're talking about the
de-legitimizing of the new President before he ever puts his hand
on the Bible on Jan. 20. The spectacle of the most powerful
country on earth enmeshed in a crisis-cum-farce would do us
little good in world opinion--or in the financial markets.
Eliminating live electors was recommended by a 1992 panel
commissioned by the Center for the Study of the Presidency. The
panel also argued for an electoral-vote presidential run-off if
no candidate gains an electoral majority. (In that event, under
today's system, the House picks the President. Each state's
delegation gets one vote, and a candidate needs a majority of the
states to be elected.)
So why not go to the next step and simply elect the President by
national popular vote? It seems logical enough, unless you think
there is still something to this federalism business. We are, of
course, a very different country than the one, riven by deep
regional suspicions, that the Framers cobbled together in that
Philadelphia summer. We are still not, however, one
undifferentiated national mass. The consumers of California do
not look on foreign trade in the same way Michigan's autoworkers
do. People view guns in the suburbs of New Jersey very
differently than they do in the towns of western Pennsylvania.
The drive toward smoke-free environments in California has
consequences for tobacco farmers in North Carolina.
A President needs to know how big and disparate this country is.
In an election driven by nothing but the nationwide popular vote,
would a campaign focus on America's geographic diversity? Or
would it act like a company marketing a product and see the
country as a collection of demographic subsets, definable by age,
gender, education and income--and disconnected from neighborhoods,
communities, the land? The state-by-state electoral contest is,
in a sense, a compulsory tutorial that a purely popular-vote
system would probably not provide. And if you think the Florida
recount is a mess, imagine what would happen in a popular-vote
system where the margin is as narrow as the Gore-Bush margin:
accusations of voter fraud across the length of the country;
demands for recounts, not in two or three states but in 50.
Maybe after this election the public won't accept a system that
can make a loser out of the candidate who wins the most popular
votes. But provided it knows the rules, it might. Defenders of
the Electoral College point out that we didn't complain in the
World Series of 1997 when the Cleveland Indians scored more total
runs (44) than the Florida Marlins (37), yet lost the series, 4
games to 3. Whatever the outcome of the broader debate, there is
one clear reform we need now: the electoral vote cannot be left
to the whims of 538 decent, fallible human beings.
JEFF GREENFIELD is a senior analyst at CNN
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