ONE COLLAGE TOO MANY

 

 

                                     An essay by Charles Ebeling

 

 

                        Presented to the Chicago Literary Club

                                    At the Cliff Dwellers

 

 

                                        Election eve, November 3, 2008

 

        

                                        Copyright 2008, Charles Ebeling

 

 

Light begets color. And colors fan emotions. Facts and emotions churn together, and the resulting political party leanings are reflected in a patchwork painting – a colored collage of states on the map of America.  

What has come to be known as the Electoral College has given rise to a quadrennial, gerrymandered collage of crimson republican red and deeply democratic blue states, marginally aligned light-red and light-blue states, and a handful of fiercely contested states of purple hue, often called the swing or battleground states.

These colors, this collage, symbolize a historically novel compromise in the process for selecting American presidents. Individuals vote, not for candidates, but for state electors, and these votes are cast into massive statewide, winner-take-all electoral blocks of political tonality. The blocks are tallied up through an antiquated counting system administered, somewhat appropriately, by the National Archives.  This so-called Electoral College system causes campaigns to work their strategies with an abacus. It distorts expressions of the public’s will. The system has altered the march of history on several occasions, and will eventually do so again, if Congress and the states continue to do nothing about it. Hopefully, this great structural anomaly in our Constitution will not again color results tomorrow. 

Without the Electoral College, there’d be no such thing as red and blue states. It is an odd collage of a college, grown directly out of a rushed and convoluted 3-month, 18th century political quest, at the very end of the Constitutional Convention, for a middle ground among the founding fathers. The presidential electoral process represents a compromised straddling and intermingling of the principles of popular democracy and state’s rights federalism, along with those of a republican (with a little “r”) approach to government. Yet our system remains unique in the (small “d”) democratic world.  

My premise tonight, on the eve of another presidential election, is that in these times, we’ve seen one electoral collage too many. This anachronism of the Constitution receives failing marks, in a modern era when the electorate has easy access to full disclosure of fact and opinion regarding all the candidates via 24/7 media coverage and the internet. The presidency’s accountability is not just to the states, but clearly to the American people at large.

 We’ve come a long way from the time Convention delegate George Mason said, “The extent of the country renders it impossible that the people can have a requisite capacity to judge.”

Back then, the ownership of slaves in southern states granted extra votes in presidential elections. It is no accident that slave-owning Virginians served as president for 32 of the nation’s first 36 years. In the Electoral College’s original interpretation, white men without property could not vote.

We now live in an era in which our leaders and the populace have long since come to grips with certain glaring inequities in the presidential election process. The Voting Rights Act was adopted to provide access to the ballot regardless of race or ethnicity, and the Constitution was amended to grant equal voting status to women and allow 18-year-olds to vote, just as they’re allowed to serve and die for their country.

Still, gigantic inequities remain to be rectified. Thanks to the Electoral College, voters in what the late Tim Russert most recently dubbed the red and blue states, those that reliably cast their electoral votes for republicans and democrats, respectively, are generally discounted by the campaigns. In red and blue states candidates make fewer appearances and spend dramatically less on political advertising. And today, thanks to the allocation of electors, individual voters in big states are rendered relatively second class citizens in the electoral vote count compared with those of small states. For example, in 2004 in California, a popular vote had 84% of the weight of an average American vote, versus 323% in Wyoming; and in Illinois, the home of clout, a voter had just 90% of it, versus 250% in Alaska.

According to the Philadelphia Inquirer, a single voter in a closely divided state can be up to a thousand times more important to the outcome than a voter in a lopsided state. I recently read in the New York Times that 13 people, mostly from New York and California, are being investigated for renting a 3-bedroom house in Columbus, Ohio, and registering to vote there, just so their vote would actually count.

 

 

 

While it’s said that only professors and cartoonists get worked up about the Electoral College, this political anachronism has irritated me since I first wrote about it in a high school civics class 50 years ago.  Much more recently, I began writing letters to editors and speaking out, because it exasperated me that there was no sustained call for a Congressional amendment after the 2000 election, when one candidate won the national vote by a margin greater than the entire population of Milwaukee, and yet the rusty Electoral College sputtered and handed over the Presidency to the loser of the popular vote. (And that’s after the media focus on the heavy-handedness of the Supreme Court and the hanging chads of Florida.) What a travesty of common sense and fairness!

And yes, the Electoral College failed to follow the popular vote before. In 1888, Grover Cleveland squeaked by Benjamin Harrison in the popular vote yet lost to Harrison in the Electoral College.  It also happened in 1876 and 1824. Nearly two dozen presidential elections have been so closely divided that they could have ended up in the House of Representatives with the switch of just a few thousand votes in key states.

Still, our august leaders in Congress remain anchored to the status quo, and seem still afraid to touch the third rail of truth regarding the archaic Electoral College. It’s as if they wish to stretch the thin threads of civil society to the limits, and continue to test how much our federal government can ignore the demands of democracy, until the day something gives.     

Yet, a widespread view supports the premise that the Electoral College has generally served the nation well, and promises to continue to do so, in that it has awarded all but four of our past 55 presidential elections to the winners of the popular vote. Were we talking about a batting average, this might be OK. Classical conservatives argue that the current system, though imperfect, should not be changed, since traditional social structures, like today’s creaky two-party system, help insure social stability.

However, much evidence and opinion suggests, in today’s climate of deliberative democracy, that reform, replacement and even end-zoning the Electoral College is in the greatest interest of fairness to all.

 

 

 

To understand how, let’s look more closely at the current system. In presidential elections, each state decides the method by which it chooses electors, usually selecting political loyalists not in office. The Constitution provides that a state may name a slate of electors for each party. States receive one electoral vote for every U.S. Representative and one for each of its two U.S. Senators. Voters cast their ballots for the electors of one presidential ticket.  Since legislatures want to increase the voting power of the majority in their states, they use a winner-take-all system called the unit rule, where the slate that wins the most popular votes wins all that state’s electoral votes.

Maine and Nebraska, by the way, have adopted, but not yet implemented, a “district” system whereby electoral votes cast from Congressional Districts can be allocated to the popular vote winner in that District and the Senatorial votes go the state’s popular winner. Such a “District” approach might be a half-way solution to greater voting equality, and is within the rights of states to adopt without recourse to a Constitutional amendment.

A “National Bonus Plan” proposed by Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. after the 2000 election fiasco, would grant the popular vote winner in each state an extra two electoral votes, largely preserving traditional federalism while maintaining a better correlation between the Electoral College and the popular vote. Schlesinger concluded his own passionate essay on what he called, “the intolerable predicament,” by asking, “How many popular vote losers will we have to send to the White House before we finally democratize American democracy?”

One Yale Law School scholar said, “I consider the so-called Electoral College a brilliant 18th century device that solved a cluster of 18th century problems. Today,” he said, “our machinery of Presidential selection does not look so brilliant.”  Today, as just one example, if the archaic Electoral College should come up with a tie vote, which some have said is feasible, the election would be thrown to the House of Representatives, where each state, regardless of its population or votes cast, would have a single vote to select the president.

The issue of change or abolishment of the College has been brought up more than 100 times in the nation’s legislatures and courts. As Thomas Jefferson himself cautioned back in 1823, “I have ever considered the Constitution’s mode of election as the most dangerous blot… and one which some unlucky chance will one day hit.”

After the 2000 election, Hillary Clinton was one of the first and loudest of many to yell at the referee, and call for an amendment to abolish the Electoral College. Yet in months she became silent. Why had she and others in Congress backed off their outrage? I suspect it was because their pollsters and advisors told them the political truth – the public was largely without understanding of either how the Electoral College works, or why it matters.  This is despite the fact that polls have consistently showed that 60 to 80% of Americans believe they should be able to cast votes in the direct election of the President.  The irony is: I suppose many believe they already do.

While a much higher than normal voter turnout is expected this year, a 2005 Brookings Report pointed out, “The electoral college can depress voter participation in much of the nation. Because the Electoral College has effectively narrowed election to a quadrennial contest in a relatively small number of states, people elsewhere are likely to feel that their votes don’t matter.“  Where are McCain and Obama on all of this? They probably don’t care much about you, unless you vote in a swing state. Reform the Electoral College? Later, maybe.

Some sagely suggest that the Electoral College will only be severely challenged when the GOP loses an election the way the Democrats did in 2000. Must we wait for such a coup, when even conservatives like Nixon, Ford and Dole have pushed for abolition?

Congressional leaders are no doubt concerned that they should not waste time and energy on an issue that has not compelled the electorate. And many surely worry that the two-party system , within which they are all caught up in the perpetual campaign, might be threatened by a change from the state’s winner-take-all  electoral rules, which makes it all but impossible for a third party to gain a foothold in national elections.  Preoccupations with re-election, with wars in the Middle East, with big oil and with the staggering economy, have surely overshadowed Congressional interest in upsetting the electoral applecart. They were and are caught in institutional inertia regarding the Electoral College.

Despite that, at least one Senator or Representative in each of the 50 states has at one time supported a nationwide popular vote initiative. Bills calling for popular election were introduced in the U.S. House and Senate as recently as 2007 and 2008, respectively, and promptly buried in committee.

Others continue to search for new solutions. The most prominent such plan is called the National Popular Vote bill. It proposes a compact among the states, something like those that exist for pipelines and lotteries, which would guarantee the presidency to the candidate who receives the most popular votes in all 50 states and the District of Columbia. Passage could help to eliminate the current situation in which candidates have no reason to poll, visit, advertise, organize or pay much attention to states where they are safely ahead or hopelessly behind. Passage could engender nationally balanced campaigns focusing on centrist issues, instead of a system in which, in 2004, candidates concentrated over two thirds of their spending and campaign visits in just five states, and their messages were focused on swing voters.

Much has been written critical of the bill, suggesting that it circumvents the Constitution, and that a Constitutional amendment is the way to truly reform the Electoral College. Perhaps, in the end, if the Popular Vote bill threatens to pass by enough states to go into law in time for the presidential election of 2012, a new Congressional amendment may yet again be introduced, and finally, passed.

But don’t hold your breath. 

Way back, in 1787, James Wilson, author of our Constitution, sounded the plaintive cry, “Can we forget for whom we are forming a government? Is it for men, or for the imaginary beings called states.”  There’s no reason to think that giving presidential votes directly to the people, in this century, would affect states rights, or the republic, any more than taking Senate elections away from state legislatures and giving them to the people, did back in 1912.

The election of the President of the United States, I contend, should not be a contest between so-called red and blue states, and a few purple battlegrounds.  The president should be chosen by a majority of our citizens, with active contests throughout the nation. (By the way, isn’t it time to enfranchise U.S. citizens of our territories to also be allowed to vote for their president?) Shouldn’t we the American people, wherever we live, be equal electors of our president?

 

 

 

And importantly, all this should not be a partisan issue, but one of patriotism and principle. A popular vote for the presidency would be a meaningful step in restoring lost pride in and respect for our democracy, as we embrace the tumultuous 21st century. The rich and lively political mosaic of America deserves no less than a better presidential election process, so we might live up to the dictionary’s definition of democracy, “the belief in freedom and equality between people.” 

It took a perceptive Frenchman, Alexis de Tocqueville, writing about his visit to our heartland just 46 years after the Constitutional Convention, to observe, “America demonstrates invincibly one thing I had doubted up to now: that their middle class can govern a state…Despite their small passions, their incomplete education, their vulgar habits, they can obviously provide a practical sort of intelligence, and that turns out to be enough.”

Perhaps, that’s truer today than it was then. I hope you’re inclined to believe, as am I, that we’ve all experienced one red and blue collage too many. Isn’t now the time for a mosaic which honestly reflects the people’s choices, and might help us feel that each vote fully counts?

Echoing the rhetoric of a Great Communicator, I’ll close with an ardent admonition to the voters and America’s new leadership: Open the gate to democracy. Tear down this wall of an Electoral College, which stands in between you and your president!

Enough said, indeed.