The Public Policy / Electoral College Reform: Benjamin Harrison Never Again
Plattner, Marc F.
"The Public Policy / Electoral College Reform: Benjamin Harrison Never Again" Benjamin Harrison Never Again Athough few Americans may be aware of it, the nation is currently in the midst of the latest in a...
...The main argument of proponents of direct election has been that such a reversal of the popular-vote verdict would cause consternation among the American people and severely weaken the legitimacy of a president elected under these circumstances...
...each state is free—within certain constitutional limits—to determine in its own fashion such matters as how parties and candidates qualify for a place on the ballot, how ballots are structured, who is qualified to vote, what the hours, places, and methods of voting are, and what procedures are used for vote-tallying and recounts...
...Yet many of America's most distinguished political scientists are opposed to direct election, fearing that it will bring certain consequences—largely unforeseen by its proponents—that would weaken the two-party system and the federal balance...
...The result would be a more plebiscitary style of presidential elections, with less of the coalition-building across ethnic and regional lines that now characterizes the campaign process...
...By the same token, these liabilities will generally be less acute versions of problems that beset the wholly national method of direct election...
...Under the national bonus plan, however, there would be 102 critical electoral votes contested on a national basis...
...The national bonus plan effectively meets the main objections put forward by opponents of the existing system...
...Although it promises to achieve the major objectives of supporters of direct election, the national bonus plan does not entail the same risks...
...22 The American Spectator June/July 1978 lar votes nationwide...
...Last year, with the support of President Carter, Senator Birch Bayh introduced a resolution that would amend the Constitution to provide for direct election of the President...
...This would prompt an even greater reliance on the media and a corresponding decrease in the importance of state party organizations...
...Most direct election proposals, including the Bayh Amendment, require that the leading candidate obtain at least 40 percent of the total popular vote in order to win the election...
...if no candidate receives that much, a runoff election is held between the two leading vote-getters...
...a direct-election amendment passed the House by a substantial 338-70 margin in 1969, but Marc F. Plattner is a Research Associate at the Twentieth Century Fund...
...Advocates of direct election argue that in states heavily dominated by one political party there is now very little reason for the other party to campaign very vigorously...
...If the national bonus plan had been in effect in past elections, the popular-vote winner would in every case have received the most electoral votes as well...
...This provision is likely to offer an incentive to new minor parties to enter the presidential race in hopes of forcing a runoff and thereby extracting concessions from one of the leading candidates in exchange for support...
...Another set of potential difficulties with the national bonus plan involves the counting of the national popular vote (which determines the award of the national bonus...
...Under the present system a splinter candidate would find it difficult to win many electoral votes, but under direct election he might realistically hope both to come in second in the popular vote and to prevent the winner from reaching the 40-percent threshold, and thereby have a chance for victory in the runoff...
...But under the national bonus plan, even if the two leading candidates had split the remaining state-based electoral votes evenly, the popular vote winner would still have gained an electoral-vote majority with the help of the 102-vote national bonus...
...And it maintains the federal character of presidential elections by leaving the states with a decisive constitutional role in the electoral process...
...Since the popular-vote winner is awarded 102 votes by the national bonus, he need receive only 219 of the 538 state-based electoral votes to gain an electoral-vote majority (i.e...
...In that event, the third-party candidate would be in a powerful bargaining position, whether the election were thrown into the House of Representatives or he chose to cut a prior deal in the electoral college itself...
...A11 these arguments in favor of and against abolishing the electoral college were recently debated by a Twentieth Century Fund Task Force on Reform of the Presidential Election Process...
...Although the attempt failed, the specter of another Wallace candidacy in 1972 spurred efforts at reform in the 91st Congress...
...Another danger in the present system is the possibility that a strong, regional third-party candidate may gain enough electoral votes to prevent either of the major-party candidates from winning an electoral college majority...
...This of course was George Wallace's strategy in 1968...
...fell victim to a filibuster in the Senate...
...There is a good case to be made for the desirability of uniform standards of election administration, but the nationalizing of this function could also open the way to serious partisan abuses...
...On the other hand, a much more populistic spirit reigns in the United States today than a century ago...
...Candidates would therefore be vitally interested in maximizing their popular-vote total even in states they had no chance of winning, and voters in one-party states would have a much stronger incentive to go to the polls...
...Second, the national bonus plan makes it almost impossible for a regional third-party candidate to produce an electoral college deadlock, as Wallace hoped to do in 1968...
...And it must be admitted that, even from the perspective of its detractors, the electoral college has not broken down since 1888, when Benjamin Harrison won the presidency despite running second in the popular vote—a "breakdown" that did not seem to shake the foundations of the Republic...
...Under the current system, the only official tally is the electoral vote count, and t Martin Diamond, The Electoral College and the American Idea of Democracy American , Enterprise Institute, Washington, D.C., 1977...
...Much of the impetus for the current effort at reform was provided by the close outcome of the 1976 presidential contest, in which a shift of about 8,000 votes to Gerald Ford in Ohio and Hawaii would have given him an electoral vote majority, despite Jimmy Carter's 1.7 million advantage in the popular vote...
...This whole question is one that merits further exploration and debate before any reform of the electoral college is enacted...
...The state and national votes would then be added together, and the candidate with the majority of electoral votes would be elected to the presidency...
...THE PUBLIC POLICY by Marc F. Plattner Electoral College Reform: Benjamin Harrison Never Again A(though few Americans may be aware of it, the nation is currently in the midst of the latest in a long line of attempts to abolish the electoral college...
...It offers no new incentive to minor-party or splinter candidates—if anything, it reduces some of the incentives that now exist...
...It might consequently lead candidates to focus their campaigns on relatively undifferentiated national constituencies and pay less attention to local concerns and ethnicor interest groups concentrated in particular states...
...In addition, direct election has been endorsed by a wide range of interest groups (including the AFL-CIO, the U.S...
...It is also worth noting a third complaint against the electoral college which is remedied by the national bonus plan...
...Such pressures would obviously be even sharper under a system of direct election...
...He helped to coordinate the activities of the Task Force on Reform of the Presidential Election Process...
...One Twentieth Century Fund Task Force participant was fond of citing not only Lord Falkland's epigram, "When it is not necessary to change, it is necessary not to change," but also its homelier American equivalent, "If it ain't broke, don't fix it...
...The late Martin Diamond, in a brilliant pamphlet defending the electoral college, f argued that a change to direct election would not make our presidential election system more democratic, but would transform it from a procedure that now is federally democratic to one that is nationally democratic...
...The American Spectator June/ July 1978 23...
...it may even be approved by the Congress this year (although the odds seem to be against it...
...Might there be other potential consequences of the national bonus plan that the Twentieth Century Fund Task Force has overlooked...
...This group, co-chaired by Jeanne Kirkpatrick of the American Enterprise Institute and Stephen Hess of the Brookings Institution, was composed of a diverse and bipartisan mix of political scientists, journalists, and political strategists (including Reagan advisor John Sears and Carter advisor Patrick Caddell...
...But since interstate variations might significantly affect the national popular-vote count, there would probably be considerable pressure for Congress to enact uniform national standards in this area...
...Chamber of Commerce, the League of Women Voters, and the American Bar Association) and politicians (including Gerald Ford and Robert Dole, as well as President Carter and Vice-President Mondale...
...Viewed in these terms, the Twentieth Century Fund Task Force's plan adds a distinctly national element (the 102-vote national bonus) to what remains a preponderantly federal method of aggregating the presidential vote...
...Moreover, the logic of direct election seemingly calls for a shift to national presidential primaries as well—a development that would further weaken the political importance both of the states and of state party organizations...
...In that year Wallace received 46 electoral votes, and if Nixon and Humphrey had split the remaining state votes fairly evenly, no candidate would have won a majority under the existing electoral system...
...It would theoretically be possible to allow for continued diversity in these matters under the national bonus plan...
...In other words, it could lead candidates to act as they would under a system of direct election...
...Throughout most of its deliberations, the Task Force was more or less equally divided between supporters and opponents of the electoral college...
...Direct election would deprive the states of any formal role in presidential elections...
...Yet the fact that over 80 percent of the electoral votes under the national bonus plan would continue formally to be awarded to the winners of individual states should pose a formidable psychological barrier to this nationalizing tendency...
...321 of the new total of 640 electoral votes...
...And given the risks to our political system inherent in direct election, there are strong grounds for constitutional conservatives to back the national bonus plan as a much safer way of remedying the defects of the electoral college...
...Authorities from Aristotle to James Madison may readily be cited on the undesirability of changing fundamental political laws for light or transient causes...
...It may be expected, then, that the potential liabilities, as well as the strengths, of the national bonus plan vis-a-vis the existing system will flow primarily from its nationalizing aspect...
...Any reform always carries with it the potential for unexpected mischief, but the national bonus plan is a conservative reform in the best sense—one designed to preserve insofar as possible the desirable features of the present system...
...but then the group hit upon a new compromise proposal, subsequently dubbed the "national bonus plan," which, remarkably enough, gained almost unanimous support and became the featured recommendation of the Task Force's report.* The national bonus plan, in the words of the report, "calls for adding a national pool of electoral votes to the existing state pool of electoral votes...
...Indeed, direct election might well be adopted without such a stimulus...
...Public opinion polls show that a large majority of the American people do not really understand the workings of the electoral college system and would favor a change to direct election...
...The national pool would consist of two electoral votes for each state (plus the District of Columbia), which would be awarded on a winner-take-all basis to the candidate with the most popu* The report, along with a background paper by William R. Keech will be published late this , spring by Holmes & Meier...
...Moreover, if a popular-vote winner's nationwide plurality derives from overwhelming support in a single region and only modest support elsewhere, there still remains the possibility that he could fail to gain an electoral-vote majority...
...Since the national bonus plan makes it all but certain that the popular-vote leader will win the presidency, it could conceivably encourage campaign strategies that ignore state boundaries and coalition building across regions and aim simply at amassing a nationwide plurality...
...furthermore, they allege that a citizen in a one-party state who favors the presidential candidate of the weaker party is effectively disenfranchised, since he knows his vote cannot help the candidate of his choice...
...First, it virtually eliminates the possibility of a divergence between the popular-vote and the electoral-vote outcome...
...Assuming that problems of election administration would not prove to be a significant liability, is it worth amending the Constitution to substitute the national bonus plan for the electoral college...
...That resolution passed the Senate Judiciary Committee by a narrow margin in September of 1977 and is expected to reach the Senate floor sometime this year...
...Hence it is likely that any future electoral college outcome that reverses the popular-vote count will, whatever its other consequences, spur a headlong rush into instituting direct election...
...The 40-percent threshold would also provide a greater incentive for "splinter" candidacies of major-party factions that lose (or choose not to contest) their party's nomination...
Vol. 11 • June 1978 • No. 8
