George Washington oversaw the signing of the U.S. Constitution in 1787. Yet Americans
are still scratching their heads over their electoral system.
Protestors wave signs and hurl hollowed-out televisions into the Boston Harbor to
protest the exclusion of third party presidential candidates from the televised debates
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Relic
or remedy?
It’s hard
not to smirk about the fact that U.S. citizens don’t vote for their president. Instead
they vote for a slate of electors who are supposed to cast their ballots for a particular
candidate. Every state has as many votes in the Electoral College as the total number
of its senators (two) and representatives (based on population) in Congress. If no
candidate receives a majority of electoral votes, the House of Representatives chooses
but each state has only one vote. What did the constitutional framers have in mind?
It is often assumed that the College arose out of mistrust of the masses. But 200
years ago, the voting population consisted exclusively of an elite group of white
men. The framers were looking to break the communications gap: neither media nor
political parties existed to spread the word of the candidates. The solution: elect
a council of wisemen to keep abreast of the issues and potential presidential candidates.
According to John Samples of the libertarian Cato Institute, the framers deliberately
sought to complicate the electoral process to ensure that the president would represent
local and national constituencies. In this way, they could balance the interests
of both small and large states.
Yet behind the federal debate lurked the scourge of slavery. According to Akhil Reed
Amar, a Yale University law professor, the southern states feared that they would
be outnumbered in direct elections because their huge slave populations could not
vote. They sought a remedy in a previous compromise in which they won the right to
count each slave as three-fifths of a person in determining the number of representatives
they could send to Congress. They wanted the same principle applied in the Electoral
College.
In many ways, “the framers’ argument is irrelevant,” says George C. Edwards III,
director of the Center for Presidential Studies at Texas A&M University. For
example, the framers never even imagined that states would allocate their electoral
votes on a “winner-takes-all” basis. More importantly, “One of the clearest trends
in American constitutional history has been the expansion of franchise–with amendments
to give the right to vote to minorities, women and the residents of the District
of Columbia. Since the 1960s, we have become dedicated to the principle of ‘one person,
one vote.’ Every elected official is selected that way–except for the president.”
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The
debate is only beginning over how the U.S. elects the world’s most powerful leader
Before laying the U.S.
presidential election saga to rest, let’s revisit a favourite bedtime story: The
Three Little Pigs, featuring Ralph, Al and Dubya.
The scene opens in the Green wilderness where Ralph puts up a tent and lights a campfire
as young friends gather to revel in his stories of slain corporate giants. To stoke
the excitement, Ralph suddenly cries “Wolf!” In the confusion, he runs to a house
nearby where he finds a warm meal and bed. Cunning as a fox, he continues his “Wolf!”
cry and crosses the country in style.
Enter Al: a serious piggy, who has spent years laying the foundations of his fine
home. The problem is that Al invested so much in the bricks and mortar that he overlooked
a few details, namely little holes in the ballot-lined roof. So after a few weeks
of huffing and puffing, the wolf blows his house down to a pile of chads.
Finally, Dubya (referring to the middle initial of George W. Bush) and the clan arrive
to reclaim an old stomping ground, the Electoral College, a fortress dating back
over 200 years, whose framers examined every nook and cranny before sealing it constitutionally
(see box). The wolf ferociously attacks, enlisting the majority of voters who throw
their weight against the candidate, but the College doesn’t budge.
But here’s the twist: the wolf is still scratching at the College–which looks increasingly
like a crumbling relic. And his howls are bouncing around the halls of Congress and
state legislatures, sending shivers up the spines of politicians now faced with a
flurry of petition drives and Internet campaigns by interest groups seeking reform.
In fact, there are now three congressional bills to scrap the Electoral College and
have voters elect the president and vice president directly1. If a candidate failed
to secure 40 percent of the vote, a run-off election would ensue. Ironically, the
most consistent call for reform has come from a Republican, Representative Ray LaHood
of Illinois. “It’s a slap in the face to have a select group of elites elect a president
a month after the people have cast their votes,” he says.
Before turning to politics, LaHood was a highschool teacher in a quandary: he had
to instruct students about an electoral system he considered archaic. “I always knew
it would take a crisis to provoke a controversy and now we have it,” referring to
the bitter disputes over the popular vote for Al Gore. “My own party doesn’t support
this… But for me, it’s a matter of principle.” Lahood notes “a huge shift in public
support,” especially since high-flying Democrats, like the newly-elected Senator
Hillary Rodham Clinton, began climbing aboard the bandwagon.
A constitutional amendment would require two-thirds approval in the House of Representatives
and the Senate,
followed by a majority vote by three-quarters of state legislatures. While LaHood
foresees hearings in the House this year, he expects small (low-population) states
to quash debate in the Senate just as they did to a similar bill in 1969 after Richard
Nixon almost lost the presidential election because of the “spoiler” George Wallace,
an independent candidate from Alabama with an anti-liberal platform. Just as they
did 30 years ago, most small states continue to believe that they have a decisive
advantage in the Electoral College. For example, the District of Columbia and the
five least populous states have a total of 2.6 million voting-age residents. Together,
they had 18 electoral votes in the 2000 election–the same number as Michigan, which
has 7.2 million voting-age residents.
Direct
elections: a formula for civil war?
But
let’s imagine–or predict, as many pollsters are already doing–that another razor-thin
election in 2004 results in a minority-elected president. Public support could reach
fever pitch and America might finally opt for direct elections. Or if the constitutional
amendment proves too difficult, the states could follow the path of Maine and Nebraska,
which allocate all but two of their electoral votes proportionally instead of a winner-takes-all
formula. The remaining two votes are awarded to the statewide winner. How would the
“little piggies” then fare in the future?
“They will go hunting where the ducks are,” says Judith Best, a political science
professor at State University New York at Cortland, who testified at congressional
hearings in 1997 about the Electoral College. In direct elections, candidates would
focus on winning votes in populous areas–namely the east and west coasts–and ignore
the middle of the country. In the race to run up a mathematical majority, they would
see no need to build a broad cross-national coalition. “This is a formula for civil
war,” she says. To govern such a vast and diverse country, the president must stitch
together a campaign based on local and national issues. “If you don’t have a system
which forces candidates to reach out to the diverse interests of people, they won’t.
Black and Latino influence, for example, would drop like a stone. Blacks represent
just 12 percent of the population,” she says, but they currently enjoy leverage “as
swing voters in many states.”
Best may want to check her arithmetic. According to David Bositis, a senior analyst
at the nation’s most respected black think-tank, the Joint Center for Political and
Economic Studies, “direct elections would not diminish the minority vote but may
enhance it. The minority population does not live in the small states, which have
the biggest favourable vote in terms of the Electoral College. A lot of the black
and Hispanic populations live in states like Mississippi, Texas, Alabama and the
Carolinas where they vote Democrat but the majority votes Republican. So their votes
don’t count.”
“The small states would get less attention but at least we would have more states
getting some attention,” says Harold Gold, an associate professor of government at
Smith College in Massachusetts. “This last election was fought in 17 states. The
others saw nothing of the candidates. Under direct elections, there are no safe states.
Al Gore could go to Texas [a Republican stronghold] and try to pick up the liberal
votes.”
But instead of actually visiting those “enemy states” and shaking hands with ordinary
folks, candidates would rely upon mass media campaigns, namely through television,
according to Curtis Gans, director of the Committee for the Study of the American
Electorate, a highly respected non-partisan, non-profit research institute. “A giant
media campaign would reduce any incentive for a grassroots campaigning and activism,”
he says.
There is one point of agreement: direct elections would offer a “more” level playing
field to third parties. “More” is key–for these new players would still suffer from
financial handicaps (parties must receive five percent of the vote in the previous
election to qualify for federal campaign financing). But they might finally break
free from the role of the “spoiler,” a nightmare for Ralph Nader’s campaign strategist,
Steve Cobble. “Ten days before the elections, the polls predicted that Ralph would
receive five to six million votes,” says Cobble. In the end, the vote was so close
that he only received about half that, largely because a vote for Nader was seen
as a vote for Bush. “In this country, we firmly believe in the benefits of competition,”
adds Cobble, “except in the field of politics. ”
Multiple-party systems are seen internationally as a sign of a vibrant democracy.
But critics from both the American left and right warn that “healthy competition”
could quickly degenerate into hyper-factionalism and the backroom dealing of the
Israeli Knesset, which is considered an emblem of instability.
“I think there is some middle ground,” says Rob Richie, of the non-profit Center
for Voting and Democracy. The solution lies in obliging the winning candidate to
gain 50 percent of the vote, explains Richie, and installing an instant runoff mechanism
so that voters could list their first and second choices on the same ballot. “With
an instant runoff, there wouldn’t be that nasty edge of one candidate trying to destroy
another, which turns off voters. [A candidate like] Nader could implicitly endorse
his opponent as a second choice, which is one way of building a more coherent system.”
How would third parties compete in the new landscape of direct elections? Would they
dynamize the debates? According to Democratic pollster Paul Maslin, “this past election
was the supreme example of how the Electoral College sets up a huge fight for the
middle.” Demographer Joel Garreau goes a step further. “Both candidates ran as Bill
Clinton, which is to say both were willing to do whatever it took in terms of degrading
their ideological positions to achieve the centre.” Al Gore, for example, ducked
the issue of gun-control to woo voters in the pro-gun swing states of Michigan and
Pennsylvania. George W. Bush raised the ire of the Republican conservative wing by
downplaying his anti-abortion position. Under direct elections, it would be more
efficient for major party candidates to run up their votes by moving closer to their
respective ideological poles, which would leave space in the middle for third parties.
Slipping
past the radar of the pollsters
“This
is one reason,” says Gerry Moan, chairman of the populist Reform party, “why we focus
on trade policy and campaign financing. Social issues get you caught in either the
left or the right–but the battle will be for the middle.”
So much for a new era of vibrant and diverse policy debates that third parties were
supposed to introduce… Other than “spoiling” an election, third parties can have
the most impact by pushing a main party into a new position, according to Garreau.
“If a third party starts to get traction on an issue that the majors didn’t expect,
then suddenly those positions become ‘safe’ for mainstream candidates.”
But given the sophistication of the demographics industry, can third parties get
far with a hot issue before someone like Ed Goeas, a Republican pollster, appropriates
it? “My radar system is constantly looking at the issues and agendas to incorporate
changes as they emerge.” Indeed, Goeas expects the current outrage over the Electoral
College to subside after a few Congressional hearings which most Americans will never
know took place.
But they may be in for a shock in 2004 if another razor-thin election materializes
and Republicans face their own “spoiling Nader,” in the form of John McCain. According
to many pollsters, the senator from Arizona (who lost the Republican nomination this
time round) could have won 25 percent of the vote as an independent candidate. In
which case, it may soon be in all parties’ interest to cast their ballots for direct
elections. |
