By David S. Broder
Thursday, October 21, 2004; Page A29
With another close presidential contest in store, that hardy if
indecipherable oddity of American politics, the electoral college, is back in
the news. My esteemed colleague William Raspberry has lent his powerful voice to
those who for decades have railed against the injustice of the unit rule, which
gives all of a state's electoral votes to the candidate who wins a plurality
from its voters. Because of that rule, Raspberry wrote in a column the other day, nearly half
of the Floridians who battled butterfly ballots and official obstacles to vote
in 2000 "might as well have stayed at home," because a tiny margin of
537 votes in the official tally gave George Bush all 25 of the state's electoral
votes -- and the presidency. The same complaint could be made by those who voted Republican in Iowa,
Wisconsin or New Mexico, narrowly won by Al Gore. The unit rule is used
everywhere except in Maine and Nebraska, which award one electoral vote to the
winner of each congressional district. To solve the problem that vexes Raspberry and a great many others, a Colorado
voter initiative on next month's ballot would divide the state's nine electoral
votes according to the share of the popular vote each candidate wins. That is
only one of the proposed remedies that have been considered -- and one of the
easiest to debunk. If the proportional system, as it is known, became the
standard for all states, the most predictable effect would be to throw more
presidential elections into the House of Representatives. A study by Congressional Quarterly, quoted by professor Judith Best of the
State University of New York at Cortland in the Spring 2004 issue of Political
Science Quarterly, found that at least four of the elections since 1960 -- those
in 1960, 1968, 1992 and 1996 -- would have gone to the House under that system.
The 2000 election might have wound up there, too, depending on how fractional
votes were rounded. The Constitution requires someone to win a majority of
electoral votes; otherwise, the House chooses the president from among the top
three finishers. How do you think the public would react to the discovery that in such a
contingent election, each state delegation has one vote, regardless of its size
-- the Democratic majority from California being matched by the single
Republican member from Delaware? Because that idea seems so flawed, most of those who support
electoral-college reform favor going all the way to direct national election of
the president. A constitutional amendment to abolish the electoral college and
substitute direct election actually passed the House in 1969, only to fail in
1970 and again almost a decade later in the Senate. In the same issue of Political Science Quarterly, professor Jack Rakove of
Stanford makes the modern case for direct election. He points out that it would
force candidates to compete everywhere, including in such "safe"
states as Texas and New York, whose residents now see them only at fundraisers. Modern polling, he correctly notes, allows candidates to target their
appearances and their advertising on a few closely contested states -- fewer
than one-third of the 50 at any point in this campaign -- and virtually ignore
the rest. Direct election would also end what he calls the weighting of the
electoral-college system toward small-population states because each state, no
matter how lightly populated, is awarded a "bonus" of two electoral
votes. But direct election, however appealing, has plenty of problems built into it.
When Congress debated it after George Wallace threatened electoral deadlock with
his third-party candidacy in 1968, opposition came from small states, whose
senators feared they would be overlooked by the candidates, and from urban
constituencies, who feared diminution of their power to swing big blocs of
electoral votes through the unit rule. A bigger problem, Best and others argue, could be the effect on the two-party
system. Most proposals for direct election specify a minimum percentage for
victory -- usually 40 percent or 45 percent -- with a runoff between the top two
contenders if no one reaches that threshold. But as soon as you introduce the possibility of a runoff, you create an
incentive for minor parties to form, in hopes of bargaining for favors or policy
concessions from the runoff opponents. In such a system, a John McCain might
have continued running after the primaries of 2000 to extract a promise from
Bush to sign campaign-finance reform, or a Howard Dean this year in hopes of
swaying John Kerry's policy on Iraq. I suspect this whole electoral-college issue is due for serious debate in the
next Congress. But prudence dictates a long, skeptical look at the seemingly
easy solutions.