#419...the debate - those against...

The Pro’s and Con’s of the Electoral College System

There have, in its 200-year history, been a number of critics and
proposed reforms to the Electoral College system -- most of them trying to
eliminate it. But there are also staunch defenders of the Electoral College
who, though perhaps less vocal than its critics, offer very powerful
arguments in its favor.

Arguments Against the Electoral College

Those who object to the Electoral College system and favor a direct
popular election of the president generally do so on four grounds:

* the possibility of electing a minority president
* the risk of so-called "faithless" Electors,
* the possible role of the Electoral College in depressing voter turnout, and
* its failure to accurately reflect the national popular will.

Opponents of the Electoral College are disturbed by the possibility of
electing a minority president (one without the absolute majority of
popular votes). Nor is this concern entirely unfounded since there are three
ways in which that could happen.

One way in which a minority president could be elected is if the
country were so deeply divided politically that three or more presidential
candidates split the electoral votes among them such that no one obtained
the necessary majority. This occurred, as noted above, in 1824 and was
unsuccessfully attempted in 1948 and again in 1968. Should that happen
today, there are two possible resolutions: either one candidate could throw
his electoral votes to the support of another (before the meeting of the
Electors) or else, absent an absolute majority in the Electoral College, the
U.S. House of Representatives would select the president in accordance with
the 12th Amendment. Either way, though, the person taking office would
not have obtained the absolute majority of the popular vote. Yet it is unclear
how a direct election of the president could resolve such a deep national
conflict without introducing a presidential run-off election -- a procedure
which would add substantially to the time, cost, and effort already devoted to
selecting a president and which might well deepen the political divisions
while trying to resolve them.

A second way in which a minority president could take office is if, as
in 1888, one candidate's popular support were heavily concentrated in a few
States while the other candidate maintained a slim popular lead in enough
States to win the needed majority of the Electoral College. While the country
has occasionally come close to this sort of outcome, the question here is
whether the distribution of a candidate's popular support should be taken
into account alongside the relative size of it. This issue was mentioned
above and is discussed at greater length below.

A third way of electing a minority president is if a third party or
candidate, however small, drew enough votes from the top two that no one
received over 50% of the national popular total. Far from being unusual,
this sort of thing has, in fact, happened 15 times including (in this century)
Wilson in both 1912 and 1916, Truman in 1948, Kennedy in 1960, Nixon in
1968, and Clinton in both 1992 1nd 1996. The only remarkable thing about
those outcomes is that few people noticed and even fewer cared. Nor would
a direct election have changed those outcomes without a run-off requiring
over 50% of the popular vote (an idea which not even proponents of a direct
election seem to advocate).

Opponents of the Electoral College system also point to the risk of socalled
"faithless" Electors. A "faithless Elector" is one who is pledged to
vote for his party's candidate for president but nevertheless votes for
another candidate. There have been 7 such Electors in this century and as
recently as 1988 when a Democrat Elector in the State of West Virginia cast
his votes for Lloyd Bensen for president and Michael Dukakis for vice
president instead of the other way around. Faithless Electors have never
changed the outcome of an election, though, simply because most often their
purpose is to make a statement rather than make a difference. That is to
say, when the electoral vote outcome is so obviously going to be for one
candidate or the other, an occasional Elector casts a vote for some personal
favorite knowing full well that it will not make a difference in the result.
Still, if the prospect of a faithless Elector is so fearsome as to warrant a
Constitutional amendment, then it is possible to solve the problem without
abolishing the Electoral College merely by eliminating the individual
Electors in favor of a purely mathematical process (since the individual
Electors are no longer essential to its operation).

Opponents of the Electoral College are further concerned about its
possible role in depressing voter turnout. Their argument is that, since
each State is entitled to the same number of electoral votes regardless of its
voter turnout, there is no incentive in the States to encourage voter
participation. Indeed, there may even be an incentive to discourage
participation (and they often cite the South here) so as to enable a minority
of citizens to decide the electoral vote for the whole State. While this
argument has a certain surface plausibility, it fails to account for the fact
that presidential elections do not occur in a vacuum. States also conduct
other elections (for U.S. Senators, U.S. Representatives, State Governors,
State legislators, and a host of local officials) in which these same
incentives and disincentives are likely to operate, if at all, with an even
greater force. It is hard to imagine what counter-incentive would be
created by eliminating the Electoral College.

Finally, some opponents of the Electoral College point out, quite
correctly, its failure to accurately reflect the national popular will in at
least two respects.

First, the distribution of Electoral votes in the College tends to overrepresent
people in rural States. This is because the number of Electors for
each State is determined by the number of members it has in the House
(which more or less reflects the State's population size) plus the number of
members it has in the Senate (which is always two regardless of the State's
population). The result is that in 1988, for example, the combined voting age
population (3,119,000) of the seven least populous jurisdictions of Alaska,
Delaware, the District of Columbia, North Dakota, South Dakota, Vermont,
and Wyoming carried the same voting strength in the Electoral College (21
Electoral votes) as the 9,614,000 persons of voting age in the State of Florida.
Each Floridian's potential vote, then, carried about one third the weight of a
potential vote in the other States listed.

A second way in which the Electoral College fails to accurately reflect
the national popular will stems primarily from the winner-take-all
mechanism whereby the presidential candidate who wins the most popular
votes in the State wins all the Electoral votes of that State. One effect of this
mechanism is to make it extremely difficult for third-party or independent
candidates ever to make much of a showing in the Electoral College. If, for
example, a third-party or independent candidate were to win the support of
even as many as 25% of the voters nationwide, he might still end up with no
Electoral College votes at all unless he won a plurality of votes in at least
one State. And even if he managed to win a few States, his support
elsewhere would not be reflected. By thus failing to accurately reflect the
national popular will, the argument goes, the Electoral College reinforces a
two-party system, discourages third-party or independent candidates, and
thereby tends to restrict choices available to the electorate.

In response to these arguments, proponents of the Electoral College
point out that it was never intended to reflect the national popular will. As
for the first issue, that the Electoral College over-represents rural
populations, proponents respond that the United States Senate -- with two
seats per State regardless of its population -- over-represents rural
populations far more dramatically. But since there have been no serious
proposals to abolish the United States Senate on these grounds, why should
such an argument be used to abolish the lesser case of the Electoral
College? Because the presidency represents the whole country? But so, as
an institution, does the United States Senate.

As for the second issue of the Electoral College's role in reinforcing a
two-party system, proponents, as we shall see, find this to be a positive
virtue.