Polk County Democrats

There is an idea whose time has come, a controversial one, to be sure, but it's high time to get rid of the Electoral College.

The Electoral College is a relic in the Constitution, representing the political realities of the eighteenth century and probably indispensible then, but having nothing to do with our world today.  Remember, in 1787 the concept of "America" was virtually non-existent.  When Thomas Jefferson referred to "my country" he meant Virginia, not the United States, in fact so did Robert E. Lee 50 years later.  It wasn't until long after the Civil War that Alexander Hamilton finally won his war with Jefferson, and people began to accept the idea of a strong central government that superseded the states.

Because of that state-centered orientation, the Constitution specified that the election of the President -- the only nationally-elected office -- was not to be by popular vote at all, but rather by an Electoral College that voted by state.  Each state voted independently, and awarded all its electoral votes to whichever candidate won in that state.  The problem is obvious.  The presidency is a national office, not a state one, and all the votes of the losing candidate in each state simply vanish: it is as if those people, today in their millions, never voted at all.

It means that, when the electoral votes are counted, the candidate who won the popular vote could lose.  And it's happened four times:

* In 1824, when John Quincy Adams lost to Andrew Jackson by 45,000 votes -- and won.

* In 1876, when Rutherford B. Hayes (you mean you didn't know he was a president?) lost to Samuel Tilden by 264,000 votes -- and won.

* In 1888, when Benjamin Harrison lost to Grover Cleveland by 96,000 votes -- and won.

* Worst of all, in 2000 when George W. Bush lost to Al Gore by 544,000 votes -- and won.

There were also some close calls, notably in 1800 when the popular-vote-loser Aaron Burr nearly won too.  True, Jefferson won in 1800 and both Jackson and Cleveland had their revenge in the next election, and the 39 other presidents were all elected properly, but when you've got a system that gives you the wrong answer that many times -- fix it.

But we have never seen fit to fix it, and the Electoral College remains the law of the land to this day.  Why, when the flaw in the Electoral College is so obvious and dramatic in its effect, don't we fix it, as we've already done 27 other times with the Constitution?

Because of politics.  The flaw benefits the dominant party in each state, since, in a state like New York that votes Democratic virtually every time, all the millions of Republican votes cast there are just heaved into the Atlantic Ocean.  Democrats like that.

In Texas, where the opposite is true, it is the Democratic votes that mean nothing, and it is the Republicans that like the system.  All those discarded votes mean that the wrong person could win, and if the wrong person is your guy -- you like the system just fine.  If it's the other guy you hate the system, and so it goes.  It hasn't changed in 250 years.

Actually, that's not strictly true. Two states, Maine and Nebraska, have have since adopted a fairer method of assigning their electoral votes by Congressional district rather than statewide, with the winning candidate in each district getting one vote and the candidate winning the state the two votes from the Senate. That throws away a much smaller number of votes, but still throws them away.

Pennsylvania is now (9/11) set to join them, but for reasons having nothing to do with fairness: PA is a blue state, but has many red districts, all of whose huge Republican majorities there go right into the three rivers for all the good they do. The electoral college system kills the Republican presdiential vote in PA, and after 2010 the Republicans there control the redistricting, which will get them more seats, but not the state. Going the ME/NB route will get them more votes for President, too, so guess what they're going to do?

It's fairer, but it still has its own problems, beginning with the fact that the wrong guy can still win. In 1960, Richard Nixon (barely) lost the popular vote to JFK and (by a greater margin) the electoral college, but under the PA system he would have won the election. It also dilutes the importance of the states. PA, for example, has 20 electoral votes and thus is a great prize to win under winner-take-all, but if as predicted its districts split 50-50 under the new plan, then PA recedes in political value to that of a state half its size.

That's not the answer.

However, craftier heads have come up with the real solution: keep the Electoral College, but form a compact among the states that assures that the needed number of electoral votes go to the winner of the national popular vote.  Here's how it works:

Each state, at its leisure, creates a law which specifies that its electoral votes be assigned to the winner of the national popular vote if states with a combined electoral vote of more than the 270 necessary to elect the President have a similar law.  That's a lot of states (North Carolina, a big state,  has only 15), and the law has no impact until states with all 270 come on board.  But when enough states to reach the 270 all have such laws, then the Quincy Adamses, the Hayeses, the Harrisons, and the W. Bushes become impossible.

Will we ever do it?  Very possibly.  Hawaii, Maryland, Massachusetts, Illinois, New Jersey,  Washington State, Washington DC, and, drumroll, now California have already passed the laws, which is 48% of the needed 270.  The effort is very real, and is widely supported.

It's a hard sell, though, because many people intuitively rebel at the thought that one candidate could win in their state but the other guy gets the state's electoral votes, which is completely possible.  It's hard to make them see that, in the case of President, every vote in every state has the same weight, and throwing any of them away, which is what we do now, is just wrong. 

Let's add North Carolina to the list of states supporting this. George W. Bush happened because of a flaw in the system that we should be honor-bound to eliminate.