Where the News Ends
CHAMBERLIN, WILLIAM HENRY
WHERE the NEWS ENDS By William Henry Chamberlin Reforming the Electoral College THE AMERICAN method of choosing the President through an electoral college, with a "winner-takes-all" system for...
...Every state was supposed to choose a certain number of electors, determined by the combined number of its Senators and Representatives...
...Third, there is a distinct temptation to resort to fraud in the slum areas if the whole election turns on a few thousand votes in one or two states with big clusters of electoral votes...
...The deliberative function assigned to the electoral college has completely disappeared...
...Every vote would count...
...The political stagnation of the "one-party state" would disappear, because each party would have a strong incentive to bring as many of its followers as possible to the polls everywhere...
...he is interested only in the choice between candidates...
...Pressure group minorities would be cut down to size: they would be credited with their own votes, but they could not throw the electoral vote of a whole state to the party which courted them most assiduously...
...By and large the American Constitution has proved a durable and effective instrument of orderly self-government...
...There would be several benefits from this change...
...Second, under the present system, with the leading candidate taking the whole electoral vote of a state no matter how small his margin, minority groups—ethnic, religious, economic and whatnot—wield an influence out of proportion to their numbers because of the possibility that they may tip the balance and perhaps even decide the election...
...Illinois is a case in point, even though, in this particular election, a change of its vote would not have put Nixon in the White House...
...It was nullified by the tendency of political life to center in parties and the growing demand for direct democracy...
...Suppose, for example...
...The exceptionally even division of the popular vote in last November's election brings out three glaring defects in the present system which call loudly for reform...
...These electors, selected by the states, were then to meet and deliberate and finally select, by majority vote, the man who seemed best qualified for the Presidency...
...WHERE the NEWS ENDS By William Henry Chamberlin Reforming the Electoral College THE AMERICAN method of choosing the President through an electoral college, with a "winner-takes-all" system for the electors assigned to each state, is something like the weather...
...But their most conspicuous wrong guess was the assumption that the President could be chosen indirectly, without the immediate participation of the masses of the voters...
...This...
...this apathy has been encouraged because in this century close elections have been the exception, not the rule...
...And perhaps it might seem too violent a break with tradition...
...Today not one voter in a thousand knows or cares what the names of the electors for whom he is formally casting his ballot may be...
...This was the idea behind the electoral college...
...This contradiction between the popular and the electoral vote occurred twice in the 19th century: Both Rutherford Hayes in 1876 and Benjamin Harrison in 1888 got in with a smaller share of the popular vote than their opponents, Samuel Tilden and Grover Cleveland...
...however, would arouse objection in the less populous states, which get a little advantage under the present method...
...This procedure, outlined at length in Article 2, Section 2 of the Constitution, soon became, for all practical purposes, a dead letter...
...that New York was carried by a small margin with a large turnout of voters...
...First, there is the possibility that the candidate with the higher popular vote would be defeated in the electoral college...
...There are occasional complaints, but up to now there has been a general feeling that nothing could be done about it...
...otherwise their handiwork would not have endured so long and still stand so high in the esteem of the American people...
...Under the reformed system perhaps 23 would go to the winner, 22 to the loser...
...In 15 Presidential elections before the Kennedy-Nixon contest only two, the Wilson-Hughes in 1916 and the Truman-Dewey in 1948, were decided by narrow margins...
...But one provision of the Constitution which soon became as useless as the appendix in the human body is the institution known as the electoral college...
...The Founding Fathers were uncommonly wise and far-seeing statesmen...
...The reform of the electoral college that seems most feasible and desirable would be to divide the electoral votes on a basis of proportional representation...
...One method of attacking the abuses of the present system would be to scrap the electoral college altogether and have the President chosen by the most popular votes...
...As matters stand today this would mean that all its 45 electoral votes would go to the winner...
...Should there be no majority, the election was to be referred to Congress, each state voting as a unit...
...This could have occurred as a result of a shift of only 100,000 votes (in a total of over 68 million) from Kennedy to Nixon...
...And the results in the popular vote and in the electoral college would always coincide...
...Its finely conceived scheme of checks and balances has been a useful safeguard against tyranny...
Vol. 43 • December 1960 • No. 49
