The Electoral Quagmire

Scholars of the Twelfth Amendment have never had it so good. With the elemental chaos in Florida showing no sign of abating, these lonely academics have been thrust onto center stage, asked repeatedly to justify the complicated (and, some argue, archaic) system by which America chooses its presidents. The conventional wisdom has turned against the Electoral College, with Senator-elect Hillary Rodham Clinton leading the charge for its abolition. Yet the search for a perfect election, for a "magic bullet" that solves our political problems, is likely to be frustrated--and the American people should get used to the fact that there are no easy electoral choices.

Opponents of the Electoral College system have argued quite convincingly that it restrains popular choice. The reasons for its original adoption--a desire to empower states and fear of regional candidacies--were undemocratic and no longer apply to modern society. Because the Electoral College separates the election into districts, it enables a candidate who has lost the popular vote to take the White House; it also may discourage from voting those who are in a local minority, such as Massachusetts Republicans.

Yet moving to a popular vote is not a full answer. For one thing, an amendment to remove the College would never receive support from three-fourths of the states, as small states receive more electoral votes per capita than their larger peers. For another, popular votes would have a greater chance of fraud or ballot error, as 200,000 fraudulent votes nationwide would be less noticeable than 19,000 errant ballots in Palm Beach County.

In fact, the objections to a popular vote are more serious than mere mechanics. In an election segmented into districts, voter power is higher--an individual's vote matters more because it has a much greater probability of swaying an election. No national contest could, like the present election, be decided by a few hundred votes. A districted election would also force candidates to have wider geographic appeal, a factor which may have lessened in importance since the constitutional convention but is still crucial to national unity.

To win a popular vote, candidates can focus their efforts on "rallying the base" in states like Massachusetts or Texas, where an extra vote may be easier to win than a new convert in undecided states like Michigan or Pennsylvania. Districted elections force candidates to be centrists, winning states that are split between political parties. They test the candidates in a variety of contests, preferring slow-moving World Series victories rather than one-shot Super Bowl blowouts. Although the institution of actual electors casting votes in the college (sometimes contrary to the will of their electorate) is obsolete, there are good reasons to keep some kind of districting in an election.

Yet compromises between the two visions, of popular and districted votes, generally create more problems than they solve. Maine and Nebraska base their electoral votes in part on smaller districts, such as Congressional districts. This move increases individual voter power, but unfortunately also gives gerrymandering an importance of presidential proportions--and such a system would become incredibly confusing to campaign in once the locale moves from Maine and Nebraska to 52-district California.

Another proposed solution would be to establish some degree of proportional representation within states, so that if 30 percent of a state's popular vote is Republican, the GOP receives 30 percent of the electoral votes. Doing so might make the votes of a local minority more meaningful, but the rounding errors involved in awarding 30 percent of eight electoral votes would magnify small differences in the popular vote. There is a virtue in simplicity as far as elections go: The more complex solutions become, the harder it will be to divine in advance the situations under which the system might break down.

If Americans are eventually unable to decide between a popular vote and the Electoral College, one final option exists--namely, to split the difference and make the popular vote a "state," with five or 10 electoral votes going to the winner. In such an election, states would still matter, but the candidate chosen in the popular vote would have a better chance of reaching the White House. At some point, however, the system runs into a brick wall--if it's impossible for the popular vote winner to lose, we might as well have a pure popular vote system.

The American people will either have to strike a balance between these interests or live with the present system and its faults. In the current climate, it's inevitable that constitutional amendments to change the election process will be introduced in Congress next year, but Americans should be wary of claims that one solution is entirely fair. Simply put, we can't have our electoral cake and eat it too.