What's Good About the Electoral College
Perkins, Paul M.
What's Good About the Electoral College by Paul M. Perkins It's open season again on the Electoral College. Reformist politicians and editorial writers are dreaming up disastrous election...
...This weighted edge of the College has also turned razor-thin popular majorities into decisive electoral majorities...
...Reformist politicians and editorial writers are dreaming up disastrous election outcomes that never happened and crying for its elimination...
...When other elections are extremely close, they are often followed by months of recounts and protests, and the seating of the person elected is frequently delayed...
...These changes could take place without meddling with the basic function of the Electoral College...
...A smaller, population-based Electoral College would have given Carter 57.3 per cent of its vote, instead of the 55.2 per cent that he got...
...This widening of the margin of victory happens because of the feature of the College that is most widely criticized: the winner in each state gets all the electoral votes of that state, no matter how small his majority there...
...For 152 years, the Electoral College has kept the presidential election out of the House-fortunately, because a grossly unfair one-state-one-vote system is the rule there...
...The best-known recent case is the New Hampshire senatorial election last year, but on lower levels it happens all the time...
...For most offices, we can endure the controversy...
...If we do, we’ll be abolishing a system that, however strange it may sound, has a great overriding virtue: it works...
...This would tend to widen the margins of victory even further...
...in a system based strictly on population, they would produce only ten per cent...
...In 1960 Kennedy had 49.9 per cent of the popular vote to Nixon’s 49.7 per cent...
...The 20 states that have fewer than seven electoral votes in 1976 produced 16 per cent of the total electoral vote...
...In 1968 Nixon’s uncertain 43.4 per cent of the popular vote became a solid 55.9 per cent of the electoral vote...
...After the two elections of George Washington in 1789 and 1792, the College has never operated as originally intended (the electors were supposed to make their presidential choice independent of the voters...
...for the presidency, we very likely could not...
...Paul M. Perkins is a senior judge on the Ohio common-pleas court...
...Elections for other offices are direct, of course, and they are often close, and the Republic survives...
...The three times Congress had a direct hand in determining the outcome of a presidential election (1800, 1824, and 1876) the result was temporary chaos...
...The College now reflects the size and state-bystate distribution of Congress as a wholeevery state, no matter how small, has two electoral votes corresponding to its two senators, as well as populationbased votes corresponding to its membership in the House...
...The College ought to reflect only the membership of the House, so it would have 438 electors instead of the present 538...
...It also seems pointless to keep on the books the completely ignored rule that allows electors to vote as they please, regardless of the popular vote in their states...
...still, it has survived 48 elections and has produced 48 peaceful successions of government, a record that few modern nations can claim...
...There are analogous problems with the other popular reform proposal, direct popular election of the President...
...It is a tribute to the strength of our political parties that so few electors have actually bolted, but if they ever did the results could be disastrous...
...The presidential elections in the twentieth century clearly show the stabilizing effect of the College...
...There are good reasons why it has worked so well and why, if its function is kept in existence, it will continue to work...
...We need not, in the name of reform, throw out the baby with the bath...
...Ford’s near-miss last year was the result of the exaggerated weight the College now gives these 20 states...
...But before we rush toward abolishing the College, we should take a closer look at its reliability and at some of its overlooked benefits...
...The Electoral College works because it expresses the will of the people in a way that tends to widen the margin of the winner and thus defuse the disruptive potential of the transition of power...
...The likelihood of a clear majority in any election might evaporate, and our presidential selection process might turn into a quadrennial battle between political fragments in the Capitol...
...Once, under such a system, people realized how often elections could go to Congress, far less power would be vested in the majority and far more in special-interest groups...
...In 15 of those elections, he has turned a popular plurality of less than 50 per cent into a clear electoral majority...
...Woodrow Wilson in 1912 and 1916, Harry Truman in 1948, John Kennedy in 1960, and Richard Nixon in 1968 were all elected with a plurality but less than a majority of the popular vote, but all got a decisive majority in the College...
...Thus the smallest states have disproportionate power...
...Thus in all 38 elections since 1824 the winner has had a higher percentage of the electoral vote than of the popular vote...
...this was translated into 56.4 per cent of electoral vote for Kennedy...
...But the presidency is of such overriding importance that it’s worth having a special device for widening the margins in its elections...
...in fact, a couple of changes are in order...
...This is not to say the Electoral College is perfect...
...If, by comparison, the electoral vote for each state had been cast in exact proportion to its popular vote, as reformers sometimes suggest, 40 per cent of the elections since 1824 would have been without a majority and gone to the House for resolution It is staggering to imagine what uncertainties, backroom deals, specialinterest pressures, and volatile passions would have actually decided all those elections...
...We’re lucky to have an Electoral College filled with the obedient machine politicians the editorialists are always warning us about...
Vol. 9 • April 1977 • No. 2
