The United States is perhaps the only country in the world where a candidate running for the office of Head of State can (legally) win the national popular vote but loose the election. Not only is this possible, it happened several times. The most recent occurrence was in 2000, during one of the most controversial elections in the history of the United States. Nationwide, Democrat Al Gore received half a million more votes than Republican George W. Bush. But, given the archaic rules of U.S. presidential elections (plus the influence of friends, family, and conservative judges in high places), 527 votes in the state of Florida tipped the race—and the White House—to Bush.

Many people worried that the 2004 election would turn out similarly. It almost did. If John Kerry had only finagled 136,000 more votes in Ohio (or 3% more votes in Florida), he would have won the presidency while finishing three million votes behind Bush in the nationwide popular vote. In the end, it didn’t happen, but the fact remains that both of the most recent elections were decided by voters in a handful of key states. Why?

Answer: the Electoral College—an overwhelmingly unpopular, yet unwaveringly resilient relic of American Federalism—one of the most curious forms of government in the world. Between the creation of the American constitution in 1787 and 1968, 534 amendments were tendered to modify the Electoral College—more than for any other cause—but only one was ratifi ed. As Frederic D. Schwarz writes in his article How It Got that Way and Why We‘re Stuck with It, “nobody really loves the Electoral College—until a specific alternative is proposed.‿

But what exactly is the Electoral College? How did it come about and why is it so resilient? Should it be—could it be—revamped, or scrapped, or let alone?

What is it?

The president of the United States is elected federally, not nationally. That is, the states elect the president, not the people. Or, more precisely, the people indirectly elect the president through the states they live in. This mechanism is known as the Electoral College.

Actually, there are 51 Electoral Colleges—one for each state plus the District of Colombia. The size of each state’s Electoral College is determined by the number of seats that state holds in the House of Representatives plus Senate. (The District of Columbia gets four.) Once every four years, each state convenes an Electoral College and each member of this body—each elector—casts a ballot for the president and vice-president. These electoral votes are then forwarded to the House to be counted with the electoral votes of all the other states.

The constitution leaves the choice of electors up to individual state legislatures. Accordingly, many states did not have a popular presidential election until well into the nineteenth century. Today, however, all states have popular presidential elections, and almost all handle them in the same way—the candidate with the most votes is allowed to choose all that state’s electors. Maine and Nebraska are the only two exceptions. Those states split their electors in proportion to the votes each candidate received.

A candidate must receive a majority of votes in the Electoral College to win the presidential race. If no candidate receives a majority, then the House of Representatives chooses the president from the top three presidential candidates and the Senate chooses the vice-president from the top two vice-presidential candidates. Normally, each member of the House has one vote; but in the case of choosing a president, the representatives from each state join together to cast a single ballot. They repeat this process until one candidate gets a majority. If they cannot decide, then the Vice President (already chosen, presumably, by the Senate) fills the office.

Hundreds of constitutional amendments have been tendered to modify the Electoral College but only one was ratifi ed. Originally, electors put two names on their ballot—both as presidential candidates. In the 1800 election, Thomas Jefferson won 78 of 130 electoral votes. As per the rules, all of Jefferson’s electors put his name and his running mate’s name (Aaron Burr) on their ballot without specifying which name was for which office. Technically, this resulted in a tie. Jefferson’s opponents in the House of Representatives only conceded him a majority on the 36th vote. The Twelfth Amendment, ratified in 1804, simply requires electors to specify the office of the candidates they vote for.

Distortions

The Electoral College works very differently than the framers of the Constitution intended. Most significantly, the framers didn’t think it would actually end up deciding the presidential contest very often. In the absence of political parties and campaigning—things that the framers detested and didn’t imagine would become part of the American electoral process—they assumed that electors would submit so many names that no candidate would get the requisite majority. The Electoral College, therefore, was intended to be a filtering mechanism—providing Congress with several suitable candidates rather than making the choice itself. In fact, George Madison of Virginia thought that the electoral college would only end up choosing the president one in fifty times!

The framers also profoundly distrusted the ability of American people to wisely select a president. In the days before railroad, telegraph, and mass communication, they didn’t see how the average citizen could be informed well enough about all the candidates to make an appropriate decision. Accordingly, they designed the Electoral College as a method for convening people they deemed capable of such a weighty task. Even today, electors are not legally bound to vote for the candidate that appoints them. This came into play in the 1824 election, when two of Henry Clay’s electors defected and voted for other candidates. Another two of Clay’s electors didn’t make it to the state capital in time to vote. Accordingly, Clay finished fourth among the five candidates with electoral votes and was edged out of the race.

Reform

Thanks to the advent of party politics, campaigning, mass communications, and statewide public presidential votes, the Electoral College functions very differently than the framers intended. To understand this distortion one must keep in mind that presidential elections were designed to be a federal process, not a national one. In other words, states were meant to be the functional units in deciding the President, not individual voters across the nation. Accordingly, the framers didn’t foresee the conflict between nationwide popular vote and electoral votes. Nor, necessarily, did they even envision statewide popular votes to choose the electors.

This explains the formula the framers chose for apportioning electoral votes. Large states felt that they should have more votes than small states because they were more populous.

However, small states knew that they would become insignificant if population was the only deciding factor. The final formula, whereby a state’s electoral votes equal the number of representatives they have in the House plus Senate, was a compromise. It rewards populous states because the number of seats in the House corresponds to population. At the same time, the formula compensates smaller states because every state has two senators, regardless of population.

Thus, Federalism lies at the heart of the Electoral College. Most legislation proposed to reform it aims to transfer power away from states and into the hands of individual voters. As Gary Glen writes in an article in Perspectives on Political Science, “The electoral college reformers, like their forbearers in the Constitutional Convention, want our government to be more national and less federal.‿

In principal, this is acceptable to more Americans today than it would have been during the era of the Constitutional Convention. Then, the United States had just won the War of Independence and many Americans were leery of a national government with too much centralized authority. As Carol Berkin writes in her book A Brilliant Solution, “The Revolution was not one battle for independence but thirteen—proof that a profound localism still trumped any embryonic identity as ‘Americans.’ . . . Thus, when Patrick Henry declared in 1774 that he was no longer a Virginian but an American, his countrymen took this for the rhetoric that it was.‿ (17)

“One person, one vote‿ is the slogan of people who favor abolishing the Electoral College and replacing it with a nationwide popular vote. They claim that individuals in thinly populated states like Wyoming shouldn’t have more voting power than voters in mega-states like California and New York. In other words, only population should determine voting power. This is an argument that can only be proffered now that it’s probably safe to assume the allegiance of most present-day Americans lies with their country rather than their state.

However, it seems unlikely that the electoral college will disappear any time soon—even though “one-person one-vote‿ rings true to American ears, even though a majority of Americans favor abolishing the electoral college (Sheppard), and even though national identity has trumped state identity. The reason is simple. A constitutional amendment requires approval by three-quarters of the states and two thirds of the House and Senate. Given the special interests at stake, this will be almost impossible to achieve.

Thinly populated states don’t have much incentive for switching to a system where population is the only determinant of voting power. Take Alaska. In the present system, Alaska has 3 of 536 electoral votes, or 0.57% control. This isn’t much, but the alternative would set Alaska back even further—it only has 0.22% (2000 Census) of the country’s citizens. A switch to direct proportional voting would more than half Alaska’s influence in presidential elections.

Enter party politics. Alaska votes Republican. Always. (Okay, almost always.) The same is true of many other thinly populated states like Wyoming, North Dakota, Montana and Utah. These states, with their electoral votes and winner-takes-all system, give the Republican party a huge advantage in presidential elections. Unless Democrats take decisive control of the House, Senate, and most state legislatures, the Electoral College will stay. But wait—if that occurred, it would mean that the Democrats had taken over the Republican’s edge in the Electoral College. What incentive would they have to dismiss it then? In short—the Electoral College tends to benefit the people in charge.

Emancipation offered another excellent example of this dynamic. The Confederate South had to ratify the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments to be re-admitted into the Union. In doing so, they substantially increased their population—and voting power—by endowing slaves with the other two-fifths of the humanity that corresponded to them. However, when it came to voting (when it came to most things) former slaves were effectively disenfranchised. Accordingly, the people in charge—the white plantation owners—benefited.

Prognosis

Like many Americans, I believe the electoral college is antiquated and ought to be abolished. Its problems are numerous. Voters in some states have more power than voters in other states. Candidates pay disproportionate attention to the concerns of voters in swing states. And, in states that heavily favor one party, the winner-takes-all system discourages voters from the other party from turning out to be counted.

However, I don’t expect any constitutional amendment to abolish or reform the Electoral College to be ratified any time soon. It would take, I think, more than two close elections with at least as much controversy as Bush’s ostensible win in 2000. Even then, I doubt that three quarters of the states would ratify it because of the prerogatives the Electoral College confers on thinly populated states and the Republican Party.

More likely, the electoral college will change on the state level. Since the Constitution doesn’t regulate how state legislatures choose electors, it is possible that individual states will move away from the winner-takes-all system. Probably, this could only occur in states like Michigan, Ohio, and Florida where the voting population is somewhat evenly split along party lines. In those states, proportionally splitting electoral votes would make individual voters more powerful.

However, the negative consequences for states who split their electoral votes makes even the prospect of state-level reform look bleak. Look at Colorado—voters there recently rejected a bill that would have seen the state proportionally distribute its electors. As Peter Coy wrote (before the election) in Business Week Online, “If Colorado dropped its winner-take-all system and allocated electors based on the popular vote, candidates would lose interest in the state, Malakoff [an MIT physicist and specialist on the Electoral College] argues. That’s because narrowly winning the state . . . would make a difference of only one elector in the Electoral College instead of nine. Sames [sic] goes for all the states classified as swing states this year.“

Perhaps, if bills were dogs, Colorado’s defeated bill would slink away, tail between its legs, to lick the wounds of other rejected bills. Perhaps it would even fl op down next to Resolution 31 of 1955. This resolution, sired by Albert Gore Sr., father to Albert Gore Jr., proposed to replace the Electoral College with a nationwide popular vote. Senator Prescott Bush, grandfather of George W., was among those who voted it down.

Works Consulted

• Berkin, Carol. A Brilliant Solution: Inventing the American Constitution. Harvest: Orlando, 2002.

• Coy, Peter. Smart Idea for the Electoral College? MIT’s Alan Natapoff is a physicist, but he has a plan that just might make the presidential electoral process somewhat fairer. Business Week Online, Sept 15, 2004.

• Glenn, Gary. The electoral college and the development of American democracy. Perspectives on Political Science, Winter 2003 v32 i1 p4(5).

• Loiacono, Kristin. Amending the Constitution. (In regards to the Electoral College). Trial, Jan 2001 v37 i1 p12.

• Schwarz, Frederic D. How it got that way and why we’re stuck with it. American Heritage. Feb 2001 v52 i1 p43.

• Sheppard, Simon. The Electoral College and American Politics. Contemporary Review, June 2001 v278 i1625 p344.

• U.S. Census Bureau. Highlights from the Census 2000 demographic profiles. http: //factfinder.census.gov/servlet/SAFFFacts