On December 19 when the Electoral College officially elected George Bush the 41st President of the United States, the CBS-TV Evening News pompously referred to this institution by which we elect our chiefs of state as “antiquated,” and NBC-TV editorialized that many people think it should be abolished. This quadrennial event always produces a spate of statements from liberals urging abolition or reform of the Electoral College.
The commentary ought to be just the opposite. The two-century success story of the Electoral College is unique in the annals of history; it has produced a President every four years since 1789.
No other government in the world can boast of such a remarkable succession of peaceful transfers of power. When we count our blessings flowing from the inspired wisdom of the Founding Fathers at the 1787 Constitutional Convention, near the top of the list should be the provision they designed for an orderly change of Presidents.
Pseudo-intellectuals and ivory-tower academicians look down their noses at what they think is a Rube Goldberg apparatus, clumsy, complicated, not understood by the public, and an anachronism. But it works, and the proof of the pudding is in the eating.
The Electoral College’s critics have not come up with a process that can reasonably be predicted to work better. Of course there would be no way to prove that any other system would work better because, in all history, none has.
The most disingenuous argument made against the Electoral College is that it permits a President to be elected who does not receive a majority of the popular vote. All the proposals to replace the Electoral College with direct popular election of Presidents provide that a candidate can win with a plurality of only 40 percent.
This is because direct popular election of a President would have to accommodate the problem of a third (or forth, or fifth) candidate in the race. Once that happens, it becomes unlikely that a major part candidate would receive 50+ percent of the votes, and it would become the custom rather than the exception for a President to be elected by less than a majority.
If we had direct popular election followed by a runoff election, which is the practice in primaries in many southern states, there would be no more assurance that the original top vote-getter would win the runoff than there is under the present system.
Critics of the Electoral College complain that it violates the one-man-one-vote rule, that the votes of citizens in small states count for more than the votes of citizens in large states. However, our country was not established on a one-man-one-vote foundation, but on a unique and carefully-crafted federal system.
The Electoral College was part of the Great Compromise at the 1787 Constitutional Convention, by which the conflicting interests of the large states and the small states were balanced into one Union. That’s why our constitutional government came into existence in the first place, and why it has endured for two centuries. It would be foolhardy to tamper with that design now.
America is a democracy harmonized into a federal republic, and knocking out one leg would distort the remaining checks and balances. Anyone who wants to disrupt this design of proven success has a heavy burden of proof to show that his alternate proposal would be more successful and effective.
The political ramifications of shifting to a direct popular vote would be massive. Even more than now, candidates would concentrate their campaign time and effort in the big population states, making the small states politically irrelevant and the electronic media more important than ever.
Then there is the matter of election frauds. In a close election with charges of voting irregularities, the country could deal with recounts in a couple of states, but probably would not survive the trauma of recounting votes in 50 states to determine whether a candidate received a few more or less than 48,000,000 votes.
The specter is often raised about the so-called “faithless elector,” the problem raised by an elector voting for a presidential candidate other than the one supported by the people who selected the elector. Electors have the legal right to vote for whomever they choose.
However, this is hardly a problem that requires throwing out the baby with the bath water. It has happened only five times since 1789, and it has never come close to affecting the outcome of a presidential election.
Complaints about the Electoral College should be considered just Leap Year foolishness. As the old saying goes, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.
