IT'S LATE. Al Gore is in bed, lying on one side, then the other. He gets up and paces, then lays back down, eyes wide. It's days before the election, and, in his mind, he's counting electors. "Eleven in Missouri, thirty-three in New York, four in Hawaii'." After a while, he drifts off, then wakes screaming from a dream in which he and Bush tie in electoral college votes: 269-269. The House of Representatives picks the president, voting straight down party lines. Gore loses. If only he'd taken Delaware.
George W. Bush is also sleeping fitfully. He kicks the sheets. Beads of sweat form on his brow. He is dreaming that Democratic electors are attacking him, bombarding him with votes for Gore. He retreats eastward from California as Gore takes the country, state by state. Bush wakes and looks at the map of his probable states. They total 220 electoral votes, still short of the 270 needed to win. Seven states are a toss-up (representing 77 electoral votes). He will not sleep again tonight.
The only votes that count in this election will be cast in mid-December by the 538 members of the electoral college. That's who you and I will vote for on November 7: electors for Bush or electors for Gore, and their votes are the currency of presidential politics. Each state gets as many electors as it has representatives and senators. In all but two states, the winning party takes all the state's electoral votes.
Bush and Gore care only about these electors. They are constantly mapping them out, hoarding them, coveting them, needing them. Electors in their locked-up states are like gold coins running through their fingers. Electors in toss-up states are like treasure they must capture before November 7. It's a giant board game, and electors are the prizes. The candidates must maneuver carefully, strategically, and take enough states to send 270 electors to the electoral college. Beyond that, nothing matters.
The game they are playing is an old one, with rules set down long ago. Since the eighteenth century, there have been more than seven hundred attempts to rewrite or eliminate them. Still, the game hasn't changed much since 1804. At MIT, however, there is a man who claims to have uncovered the scientific laws that he says make the electoral college scheme brilliant, subtle, and complex. His conclusions run counter to what most of us think about the electoral college, but if he's right, they may have more of an impact in next Tuesday's hotly contested presidential race than in any other.
THE IDEA for the electoral college came at the very end of the Constitutional Convention, and was the work of the unprestigious "Committee of Unfinished Business." It was, like all matters at the convention, a careful balancing act of the demands of those involved. A minority -- James Madison among them -- favored direct election. A majority wanted a president chosen by Congress. "Radically vicious," was one majority member's of Madison's plan. In the end, the compromise of an electoral system was seen as the best way to keep the president independent while assuring that he would be beholden to so many constituencies that no one would have more say than another.
YET THE Constitution is vague about the electoral college. It says only that each state will choose its electors as it sees fit, and that the electors will choose the president. It doesn't say who these electors should be (other than no one holding public office), how they should vote, or why they're even needed. One thing, though, is clear: It does not guarantee the public the right to vote for the president.
At first, in several states, there was no popular presidential vote. For decades after 1787, in states like Delaware, New York, and Georgia, the legislatures chose the electors. In South Carolina, there was no popular vote for the chief executive until 1860. But today, party loyalty prevents electors from acting as the free agents envisioned by the founders. In 99% of the cases, the electoral vote is a formality.
Still, critics of the electoral college, like Neal Peirce, a columnist with the Washington Post Writers Group, point to several dangers of the current system. One is that if no one gets fifty-one percent of the electoral votes, the House of Representatives chooses the president--with one vote per state, while the Senate picks the vice president. This has happened twice, and was narrowly avoided eight times. Thomas Jefferson called this provision "the most dangerous blot on our constitution."
Another problem is that it's possible--mathematically--for the candidate with the most popular votes to lose in the electoral college. This happened in 1888, may have happened in 1876, and almost happened in several other elections. Some say it did happen in the 1960 Nixon-Kennedy race. According to Peirce and Lawrence Longley in The Electoral College Primer 2000, there have been twenty-two elections in which a small popular vote shift would have either sent the election to Congress or given the office to the popular loser.
GIVEN ALL THIS, who still thinks we need an elite class of voters? And what is this elite comprised of anyway?
Electors tend to be either ordinary people -- teachers, carpenters, middle managers, retirees, and lawyers ' or party activists sent to the state capital for half an hour of raw power. Some, like Marc Abrams, a 1996 Oregon elector I talked to in the course of researching this article,, are blasi about choosing the most powerful man on earth. They voted in a room in the Capitol basement. It took about twenty minutes, and hardly anyone noticed they were there. When I asked Abrams how it felt, he said, "It was sorta cool."
Those involved in the electoral college vary widely in their opinions of the institution. Some have a deep reverence for it. Others are disgusted with it. A few distrust the masses. One nominee I talked to had forgotten he was nominated. Another, a bubbly, twenty-three-year-old Republican nominee was in total awe of her position. "I wish I could have been in it when Reagan was alive," she said, "because Reagan's rad!" One eighty-six-year-old woman thought it was a waste of time and wondered what the weather would be like that day. Most electors I spoke to were as ambivalent about the process as the rest of us.
That doesn't include Margarette Leach, however -- the last so-called "faithless elector." In 1988, Leach was a nurse from West Virginia and a Democratic elector for Michael Dukakis. But after the November election, she learned that she wasn't bound by the popular vote and found herself in a position of enormous power. She was so alarmed that'in protest'she voted for Lloyd Bentsen as president and Dukakis as vice president. Her vote didn't matter much in light of the numbers in 1988. But it might have made a big difference in 2000.
"I just wanted to show people that there is a danger here, that it could be done," Leach told me, speaking from her home in West Virginia. "Nobody talked to me about it ahead of time. Nobody asked me how I was going to vote. I was trying to call attention to how easy it is. Every four years when I go to elect the president, I think about it."
ABOUT HALF the states bind their electors to the popular vote, but the Constitution gives all electors the right to vote as they want. But when I asked some of this year's nominees if they could think of anything that might change their electoral vote, no one could. Some said that even if their candidate died between November 7 and December 18 they would still vote for him. Most electors would never change their vote for the same reason they joined their party: They are believers, not rogue thinkers. They would just as soon betray their parties as their mothers.
Yet it seems wrong to most of us to have a special class of voters. Wrong to give someone the power to deny us our choice, even if they never exercise it ' to live in a state where it all votes are equal, but some are more equal than others. Which brings us to Alan Natapoff, a research scientist at MIT and a steadfast champion of the electoral college. Talking to him, what seems like a black-and-white issue fades quickly to gray.
After twenty years of trying to get his argument down to a mathematical theorem, in 1996, Natapoff published a paper in Public Choice with a deluge of charts and formulas and functions that he says proves one thing: The electoral college--as it's arranged now--increases your voting power.
For most of us, Natapoff's arguments might as well be written in Sanskrit. But his gist is that, in a state-districted electoral system like ours, each vote has a greater chance of tipping the state election, which, in turn, has a greater chance of tipping the national election, than if we voted in one giant national district. A typical state election is much closer than a national one. So the chance that a person's or a group's vote would tip Iowa's election is far greater than the chance of their tipping a national election. That makes candidates want those votes. In a pool of a hundred million voters, the chance that your vote will turn the election is practically zero.
Critics point to the issue of equality. According to Peirce, "there's no way to create a system (except direct vote) that awards added theoretical voting power to some folks without taking it away, with thin or nonexistent rationale, from others'. The inherent problem in anything save direct election is that some members of the voting pool, because of the way electoral votes are distributed, end up with more effective voice than others in the pool."
Natapoff disputes this, but is quick to point out that equality alone is not always in the voters favor ' it has arguably produced Hitler's chancellorship and Milosevic's Serbia, where the majorities can abuse minorities at will. What protects us from this in our country is that voting power is spread thickly throughout the country, state by state, maximizing each voter's individual power.
"We don't want to make it easy for [the candidates] to harvest their votes anywhere," says Natapoff. "They have to harvest them in every locality, every state, otherwise their chances of winning should be punished badly'. So they can't ignore Mormons in Idaho, and they can't ignore farmers in Massachusetts even though those are minorities. They have to look at everybody, majority and minority in every state, because even small numbers of votes can influence close states."
The math behind this is complicated, with a paradox at its center -- a problem, according to Natapoff, in inverse game theory. But the key factor is the how close an election is. The closer it is, the more a candidate will want your vote, and the more power you have. Districting by state essentially takes an election that would never be close enough for individual or small groups of votes to matter, and breaks it into to two elections that are. "It's a technical question of how closely contested these various districts would be," says Natapoff, "and the general rule is that the largest possible close district is the one you should use."
Natapoff often falls back on the baseball metaphor: In the World Series, the team with the most games wins, not the one with the most runs. He believes that this forces teams to fight harder for each individual run and game, and keeps the game fair. In an election, the states are games. It's a mathematical explanation of why the state-districted electoral system spreads influence more evenly throughout the country and makes it much harder for a small faction (or a large, nonmajority one) to take over the presidency. If you took away the human electors, he says, the process would be the best we could do with a simple system.
Critics like Peirce are dismissive of Natapoff's numbers. "Throughout American history," says Peirce, "politicos and theorists have been coming up with reasons why a certain person or group's voice is magnified by the current electoral system.... In past times, [defenders'] motivations were political. Now it's a sports analogy'. To gain democratic consensus, there is also value in simplicity. The electoral college itself is a mystery to many folks. The Natapoff rationale is so obtuse it will escape all but a handful."
But if Peirce and others are unbending in their critique of the electoral college and their advocacy of direct election, their arguments have yet to make an impact, while Natapoff has provided a compelling case for keeping things as they are.
Frank Bures is a freelance writer in Portland, Oregon.
Is the Electoral College a worthless relic, or an ingenious necessity? Share your thoughts in the Loop.
FEED Lo-Fi Home | FEED Hi-Fi Home | Media & Culture | Technology | Loop
©2000 FEED Magazine
