Campaign Issue:
Targets in the Electoral College
by Hank Edson
What was once the key to building a democratic union has today become a means of isolating the weakest link by the anti-democratic ideologues that have taken over the Republican Party.
In two recent blog entries, I revisited Florida in 2000 and Ohio in 2004. That these phrases “Florida in 2000” and “Ohio in 2004” mean something to the American voter indicates that something terrible has happened to our political process. Why do we not say, “America in 2000 and 2004”? Why is the story of the first and second Bush Jr. presidencies, essentially the story of only a single state? The answer is that our political process has been targeted for short circuiting at its weakest link. To understand how this is possible, the American voter must have a basic understanding of the political process circuitry our Constitution has created for electing the president of the United States. This circuitry is called the electoral college.
The electoral college was originally conceived as a device to protect the interests of “small states” (states with low populations) by preventing regional and rural electoral majorities from being completely washed out by the election results of larger, more populous states. This is how the system was intended to work:
In the electoral college system, each state is accorded a number of electoral votes proportionate to its share of the American population, but each state’s electoral votes are an all-or-nothing proposition. The candidate who wins the majority in each state wins all that state’s electoral college votes. The result is that the popular vote is ultimately irrelevant in determining who becomes president of the United States. Instead, what matters is which candidate wins the majority of electoral college votes.
Consider, as an example, the scenario in which the Republican nominee wins the majority vote in each of six “small,” sparsely populated states. The collective population of all six states is fifteen million people.
In the popular vote system, if the Republican candidate won eight million of those votes and a majority in each of the six states, that candidate would have only a one million vote lead. This lead accumulated over six states could be quickly erased by an equivalent Democratic majority in just one city containing five million people, but voting 60% for the Democratic candidate.
By contrast, in the electoral college system, the million vote Republican lead accumulated over six states is amplified to a fifteen million vote lead when the Republican candidate gets all the votes. Meanwhile back in the five million person city, the Democrat’s lead is amplified from one million to five million votes.
Because this amplification happens in all states, including those with a majority Republican vote as well as those with a majority Democratic vote, the exaggerated leads from state to state largely cancel each other out. Originally this system provided some comfort to majority interests in rural agrarian economy states, because it ensured that the differences tied to regional economic needs would be more strongly identified with regional voters. As a result, the majority interests in different regions could demand that national policy be regionally tailored to the different agendas they wanted the government to pursue. Without this system for emphasizing majority interests by region, the “small states” were reluctant to join the Union because they felt that national policy would be dictated by the more populous cities oriented around trade and manufacturing.
By engineering the compromise of an all-or-nothing state by state electoral college, our founding father’s accomplished what many then characterized as “the impossible,” namely, the uniting of the disparate demands and agenda of the thirteen colonies in a single nation. Not only did this compromise prevent our democratic aspirations from being still-born, it actually managed to craft a compromise that remained focused on providing a political process rather than a rigid structure of authority. The electoral college was not perfectly democratic, but it was at least committed to creating rules to abide rather than rulers to obey.
Notwithstanding the significance of this accomplishment, there remain four major problems with this electoral college system, which the American people, by now, should be seriously considering scrapping.
First, there is serious cause to question whether the original purpose of the system is still or ever was legitimate. We must remember that our founding fathers resorted to several undemocratic compromises in drafting the Constitution because establishing “a more perfect” (meaning a yet to be perfected) union was of preeminent importance.
Thus, abolishing slavery was banned from even being discussed by congress for fifty years and the racist absurdity of counting slaves denied voting rights as three-fifths of a person were acceded to by otherwise brilliant democratic theorists simply because establishing the union of states was a necessity that trumped all other principles. Without these compromises, the slave states would not have joined the new nation.
Today, we have long since moved on from many of the illegitimate and anti-democratic compromises made by our founding fathers, but we retain the electoral college even though there is no legitimate purpose for doing so, and yet there are three more problems with the system that are also good reasons for getting rid of it.
Thus, the second problem is, obviously, that when the race for the presidency is close, the odds grow that the electoral system will put someone in office who has not won the majority vote.
But even where the electoral system does not create this undemocratic anomaly, the third problem is that the electoral system remains an awkwardly contrived method for approximating the popular vote through mutually cancelling exaggerated regional majorities.
Worst of all, the fourth and biggest problem with the electoral college, is that what started out as a compromise intended to induce small states to join a nation organized around a rule-based political process, in our modern world, has become a way of isolating the pivot points on which the electoral vote can easily be predicted to turn and then corrupting them. Knowing in advance the “battleground states,” allows corrupt political campaigns to focus all their energy on undermining the political process in just one or two states, rather than on the monumental task of trying to steal enough votes to offset the will of the people across the entire nation. This is why we are talking about “Florida in 2000” and “Ohio in 2004.” What was once the key to building a democratic union has today become a means of isolating the weakest link by the anti-democratic ideologues that have taken over the Republican Party.
A year before November 4, 2000, every talking head on TV knew the so-called “battle ground states” that would decide the election and so did the political strategists in each campaign. Karl Rove, mentored by one of Watergate’s convicted felons, and infamous for sleazy, contemptible strategies for obtaining power through dishonesty, had only to take a quick glance at the electoral college map in 1999 to realize that, not only was Florida one of the two or three swing states that would decide the presidency for the entire nation, but also that it was a state governed by his candidate’s brother!
Ultimately, to steal Florida’s electoral votes, the Bush-Cheney campaign would have to rely on not just one, but several, independently shocking ploys. A three-tiered effort to suppress the black and the larger democratic right to vote; a racist strategy for rejecting votes by black voters who actually got to vote; the use of Bush family connections inside Fox News to induce network news TV to call the state of Florida for Bush before the outcome was determined, and a campaign to prevent a recount that included abuse of power by the governor and secretary of state of Florida, the use of Washington D.C. underlings to physically intimidate re-count officials, and the partisan abandonment of legal principles by the Supreme Court of the United States.
Four years later, the sophistication of the Republican assault on the electoral apparatus in Ohio was even more astounding. One commentator who witnessed the election from inside Ohio wrote described a few of the devices employed by the Republican Party to steal the state’s electoral votes for George W. Bush.
Pre-punched ballots; touch-screen vote switching; more absentee votes than absentee voters; unfair provisional voter deletions; change of voting sites on Election Day; voter suppression; voter intimidation; double voting; malfunctioning machines; recalibrated machines; evidently rigged machines; and even 25 million negative votes registered in some races in Mahoning County! These were among the problematic incidents at a 3-hour public hearing on vote irregularities in the Mahoning Valley held on December 21 at the Warrant-Trumbull Public Library. [i]
As in Florida in 2000, the Secretary of State responsible for the integrity of the state’s political process was the co-chairman of the state Bush-Cheney campaign. As Secretary of State Kathleen Harris did in Florida, Ohio’s Secretary of State, Ken Blackwell showed no shame in using every means available to his office to bust the link his state represents in the political process chain that is the electoral college.
As 2008 approaches, the Democratic nominee should make scrapping the electoral college a campaign issue. By so doing, she or he will at least help focus the public eye on whether or not the integrity of the political process in which they are then participating is being undermined. Additionally, by advocating getting rid of the electoral college, the candidate will contribute to the essential, and as yet completely neglected, process of healing our nation must sooner or later undergo by calling attention to, recognizing, mourning, and responding to the loss of our democracy in 2000 and 2004. Such a campaign does not seek to punish the wrong-doers, but simply speaks the truth and offers wise medicine to a sick nation. Finally, when a candidate calls for getting rid of our electoral process, she or he is announcing her or his interest in democratic principles. This is an interest which, strangely, our Democratic candidates have not convincingly demonstrated to this point.
Copyright © Hank Edson 2007.
[i] Werner Lange, “Kerry votes switched to Bush and ballots pre-punched for Bush,” FreePress, December 24, 2004, http://www.freepress.org/departments/display/19/2004/1032.