DANICA NOVGORODOFF/YH

General Challenge

No honors for the Electoral College

The original intent of the Electoral College was to choose qualified representatives to choose our president. Back in 1789, this was a legitimate concern. Voters were spread out thinly across the country, lines of communication were poor, education was spotty, and truth-in-media laws were virtually nonexistent. But today's College has created problems that are far worse than those it was formed to combat. If your state ballot bothers to show what's actually going on, as many don't, you'll find the allotted number of electors in tiny print under the names of each candidate. These are the people you're actually voting for. What's worse, these people aren't doing their constitutionally prescribed duty. They have already pledged to vote for "their" candidate; and if one exercised his judgment, saw that the opponent was better, and switched his vote, he would likely provoke a national scandal. Besides, mandatory education and modern communication technology have made possible an informed voting public, so the entire system isn't even necessary to begin with.

Though I'm not a big fan of majority rule, I'll take it over majority tyranny any day. All states except Nebraska and Maine operate on the "winner-take-all" system: the candidate winning the popular majority in each state takes all the electoral votes from that state, whether the split is 90-10 or 51-49. As for the minority of voters, they're simply silenced. Even worse, because all states, regardless of size, have two senators, smaller states are grossly overrepresented even as their constituent minorities are quashed.

Think of it this way: accord-ing to the Federal Election Com-mission, 10,019,484 people vo-ted in California's 1996 presidential election. If 49 percent, or 4,909,547 people, emigrated to Pennsylvania between censuses, they could establish an easy majority and win 23 electoral votes. Unlikely, I know, but still unsettling. If they distributed themselves to gain majorities in the states smallest in population, they could take the District of Columbia, Wyoming, Alaska, Vermont, North Dakota, Delaware, South Dakota, Hawaii, Rhode Island, Montana, Nevada, Idaho, and New Mexico—42 electoral votes in all. If the election is hotly contested in large states, a candidate can win a majority of popular votes but still lose in the Electoral College. In two cases, would-be presidents have been victims of this injustice, one of them Yale's own Samuel J. Tilden. I know that we are a republic rather than a democracy, but if we have a national election, let's at least let the winner take office.

The results of this system are exacerbated when third parties are considered. In 1996, Ross Perot took 8.4 percent of the popular vote. Though I supported Bob Dole, I did feel a sense of outrage at the electoral goose-egg next to Clinton's 379 and Dole's 159. And I'm not just feeling sorry for Perot. Whether it's he, Harry Browne, or even Eugene Debs, the Electoral College will keep third parties out of the national scene. A party must do well in one election to gain a foothold. If it weren't for Lincoln's skill in bringing his state-level debates to the national forefront, the Party of Abolition might have died with Lincoln's Senate defeat. As long as the system is in existence, it will prevent these parties from gaining full recognition, thus compounding the stranglehold of the two-party system.

In short, the time for the Electoral College has passed, if it was ever here. To eliminate it would require a constitutional amendment, but under a ratification system where the electoral vote-heavy states have no more say than the lighter ones, it's certainly possible. So let's count each vote in the national election, or at least persuade individual states to follow Maine and Nebraska's example and split their votes according to proportional representation. Whatever we do, we should do something to make the president what he should be: the people's choice.

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