The Electoral College system has already directly affected American history. We will look at those situations in detail. But first, we should recall why we have this system, instead of simply electing the President by direct popular vote. The architects of our political system established the Electoral College process because they did not trust the average voter to understand the issues or know the political leaders of the new nation well enough to make informed choices. So originally, state legislators chose electors, who were not to be professional politicians, but citizens of exemplary knowledge and sophistication. These “electors” would then choose the President of the United States.
In the first two Presidential elections under the new Constitution, there was no contest at all. The electors correctly chose George Washington as the best man for the job. His choice was unanimous, and there was no real test of the system. And since George Washington resisted the idea of political parties, the influence of political parties on the Electoral College system was not felt in those first elections.
But the election of 1800, only the second truly contested Presidential election, resulted in a major malfunction of the system. By then, a two-party system had clearly formed, and the contest was between Democratic-Republican Thomas Jefferson and Federalist incumbent John Adams. At the time, the Electoral College system had electors casting votes for two candidates, without specifying choices for President and Vice President. So the Democratic-Republican electors dutifully cast their two votes for Thomas Jefferson, and the party’s choice for Vice President, Aaron Burr. When the votes were counted, there was a tie between Burr and Jefferson. Jefferson was the clear choice of Democratic-Republicans, and the best choice for President. But the election went to the House of Representatives because of the tie, and four states in the House voted for Burr. (Jefferson won, of course.) By the 1804 election, a Constitutional amendment was adopted to have electors specify their votes for President and Vice President.
In 1824, we had the only election that ever went to the House of Representatives using the current Electoral College format. In that election, Andrew Jackson won by a substantial plurality in the Electoral College, and was the clear first choice of the American electorate. But there were three other candidates, so he did not get the required 50% of Electoral College votes. When the election went to the House of Representatives, John Quincy Adams apparently cut a deal with third-place candidate Henry Clay to appoint him Secretary of State, in exchange for Clay’s support. It is evident the first choice of the electorate was Andrew Jackson. But the Electoral College system allowed the second choice candidate to scheme his way into office. The long-term effect of this distorted result was probably negligible. In 1828, Andrew Jackson won the first of two terms by a wide margin over John Quincy Adams.
In 1872, one of the candidates died after the November election, but before the Electoral Votes were cast in mid December. Confusion was avoided, because it was losing candidate Horace Greeley who died. Ulysses S. Grant won his second term. But suppose this situation had occurred with the winning candidate. Since World War II, 8 of the 13 winning candidates for President have been 55 or older, and 3 older than 65. So the death of a candidate between Election Day and Electoral College day is not out of the question. Under these circumstances, what are the electors supposed to do? Should they vote for the Vice Presidential candidate? If their party wants to insert another name, should they vote for that candidate? Are they obligated to vote the party’s preference, or are they on their own to vote their consciences? In the 1872 election, the Electoral College final results reflect this confusion. The Vice Presidential candidate B. Gratz Brown received 18 votes for President and 47 votes for Vice President. Three other candidates received 45 votes for President, and 17 votes were not counted.
The 1876 election result had a much profounder effect on American history. The Electoral College system allowed back-room Republican political operators to steal the Presidential election. In 1876, the United States was heavily mired in reconstruction politics. Federal troops still occupied southern states. The country had suffered through the ineffectual and corrupt administrations of Andrew Johnson and Ulysses S. Grant. Samuel Tilden, the Democratic candidate for President, appeared to have won both the popular and electoral vote counts as the electorate signaled its desire for a change in leadership. But the Republicans disputed the elector slates from the four states of Florida, Louisiana, South Carolina and Oregon. These states had apparently been won by Tilden. And the number of votes involved was just enough to give Republican Rutherford B. Hayes a one vote victory in the Electoral College, if they were all awarded to the Republicans.
Considerable maneuvering took place, with the Presidency up for grabs. Without detailing every move, a special commission chose to honor the Republican claims, and Hayes won the Presidency by one vote just a few days before Inauguration Day. But historians agree that the commission finding merely served to ratify a back-room deal between Republicans and southern Democrats. The southern Democrats agreed not to contest the commission findings if the new Republican President would agree to withdraw Federal troops from the South immediately. It is unlikely that Samuel Tilden, from New York, would have been so quick to take this action. Unsettled issues about the political operation of the South remained. The abrupt withdrawal of Federal troops from the South left political control in the hands of the traditional southern leadership, with all the racial bias and prejudice still left over from many long years of slavery. It can be persuasively argued that the withdrawal of Federal troops at this time guaranteed 90 years of oppression against African-Americans in most of the readmitted southern states. Without the Electoral College system, Samuel J. Tilden would have been elected, and history could have been very different.
1968 was another year when a crisis could have been generated solely caused by the Electoral College process. Three major candidates ran for President: Republican victor, Richard Nixon; narrow Democrat loser, Hubert Humphrey, and “American Independent,” George Wallace. Wallace at that time was an avowed segregationist with enough regional appeal to carry a number of southern states. In this close election, Wallace could have easily ended up controlling the deciding votes. Richard Nixon carried his three largest states by only two to three points. If Hubert Humphrey had won California, or both Illinois and Ohio, Richard Nixon would not have captured more than fifty per cent of the electoral votes, and Wallace’s votes would have been the difference.
Could Humphrey have carried those states? Humphrey started almost 20 points behind Nixon after the melt-down of the 1968 Democratic Convention. But he came back every week, closing the gap continually as Election Day approached. Some experts stated at the time that if the election had been held a few weeks later, Humphrey might have been President.
If George Wallace had held the deciding votes, he would have had six weeks to offer his electors to either Nixon or Humphrey. So an unabashed racist, with a Vice Presidential candidate (Curtis Lemay) advocating the use of tactical nuclear weapons in Viet Nam, at a time of great divides and social stresses in American society, could have been positioned to choose the new President. Add to this scenario the fact that Congress was Democratic, and the House would have probably chosen Humphrey. If Wallace had swung his deciding votes to Nixon, there certainly would have been a Congressional investigation, and a Constitutional crisis (four years early). And I hate to imagine the Nixon Presidency, with all its right wing paranoia, functioning with the added debt to reactionary George Wallace. Only the Electoral College system created these possibilities.
We may ask if any of this has relevance to today’s political world. A few scenarios show that it certainly could. In my novel, The Election, a third alternative candidate wins enough electoral votes to deny the Republican candidate victory by one vote. The Democrats control the House of Representatives. In the six weeks between the popular vote and the Electoral College vote, the unscrupulous fictional Republican candidate tries to induce one of the third-party candidate electors to defect to him. The equally unscrupulous Democratic candidate schemes to prevent a defection, by any means necessary, to ensure a vote in the House. The Electoral College system creates the havoc.
In the novel, People’s Choice, by Jeff Greenfield, the winning Presidential candidate dies between the popular vote and the electoral vote (like in the 1872 election described above). In this scenario, the Vice Presidential candidate is totally unsuited to be President, but will not step aside for the party’s new choice. The system itself again creates the confusion.
Another scenario is the 1968 situation. If a radical third party candidate (probably regionally based) captured a few swing votes in a close election, that candidate could try to extract promises from the mainstream candidates in exchange for the deciding votes. The system would act to give power to this fringe candidate out of proportion to the candidate’s popular support.
The scenario becomes even more confusing when we recall that there is nothing legally binding electors to candidates. The Constitution never mentions political parties, not even in subsequent amendments. So though a third party candidate could obtain a promise from one of the other candidates, his electors don’t have to go along with the deal. Do electors have any legal duty to vote for the candidates they are pledged to? No one really knows. The issue has never been litigated. Can electors be asked to sign an oath, as Perot’s slate of electors have? How binding would such an oath be? Since World War II, there have been elector defections in five of the thirteen elections. Their votes have been duly counted and noted. They have not been challenged, probably because they did not affect a final result.
Even a close two party race could give a block of maverick electors enormous power to control a final result. Suppose one candidate has won by eight electoral votes. A shift of five votes would change the result. Is it inconceivable that five unscrupulous electors could band together and quietly make it known to the candidates that the highest bidder would receive the Presidency? If the apparent winner lost in the Electoral College, we would most certainly see a commission, like the 1876 commission for the Hayes-Tilden election (see above). Another back-room deal is certainly possible under those conditions. Again, this sort of convoluted scenario is only possible because of the Electoral College system, not because of political instability in the United States.
The fact is, this is an easy problem to fix. All we need is a Constitutional amendment that mandates choosing the President by popular vote. We may or may not wish to require a candidate to receive more than 50% per cent of the vote. We could have a run-off election, if we want the winning candidate to have 50% or more of the votes cast.
“Majority preference voting” is another interesting idea. (I first saw this proposed by 1980 third-party candidate, John Anderson.) This idea is only possible in our computer age. Essentially, voters rank their preferences. Votes are tabulated. If no candidate receives more than 50%, then the bottom vote-getter drops out and the second choices of those voters are redistributed. The process is repeated until a candidate has received more than 50% of the vote. This makes third party candidates more attractive because the old argument that voting for a third party candidate is a “wasted vote” becomes invalid. In effect, voters for a third party candidate can help choose from the less-preferred candidates if their first-choice candidate has no chance of winning.
Almost any reasonable thinker about American politics today realizes the Electoral College system is outdated, and no longer functions for the purpose its creators intended (if it ever did). By looking at past twists, and future possibilities, we should realize that the time to fix this outdated process is before it malfunctions, not after the inevitable systemic crisis occurs.
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