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An Often Misunderstood Institution

The fate of every US presidential election rests with the ballots cast by the usually benign and anonymous US Electoral College, an often misunderstood institution. This additional procedure makes the presidential election into a somewhat convoluted system by which the people are actually voting for the person for whom the electors from their state are likely to vote. Likely, but not bound by law to do so. Those who do not are called "faithless electors". Arcane and quirky as it is, the Electoral College has more than once overturned the popular vote. Because of this, it has had numerous detractors as well as defenders, especially in the past 40 years.

According to accepted Constitutional theory, the US Electoral College — which of course, is neither a college nor a collective body, but merely a term used to describe the 538 electors (the number is equal to the total number of congressional representatives and senators) who meet in their respective states and in the District of Columbia to vote for the president and the vice president of the United States — signifies the rights of the states, as opposed to individuals, to choose the leader of the federal republic. Actually, it preserved the right of the oligarchy of the nascent United States, primarily those members of the landowning and merchant class, to select the nation's ultimate leader. This method of a select group choosing the leader has been, and continues to be, used elsewhere over the centuries from the Venetian Republic and the Soviet Union, to the Roman Catholic Church and China. In the United States, electors were originally chosen by the state legislatures — as were US senators prior to ratification of the 17th Amendment in 1913 — but with the evolution of democracy and the rise of the popular presidential vote, that method gave way to others. Nowadays, the majority of states and the District of Columbia use the so-called short ballot. It lists only those candidates who are running for president and vice president rather than the complete list of electors. The electors, essentially, are representatives of the political party whose presidential candidate received the most votes in the state. The various electors meet on the first Monday after the second Wednesday in December in their respective states to vote. By the time this occurs, the voting is merely a formality to ratify the winner of the popular vote, though it hasn't always been so.

As it was originally defined in Article II of the US Constitution, each elector was to vote for two candidates. The one with the higher number of electoral votes was elected president; the candidate with the second highest number of votes became vice president.

It didn't take very long before the vagaries of this system befuddled the outcome of an election. It happened during the fourth presidential election in 1800. Ostensibly, the race was between the incumbent, President John Adams, and Vice President Thomas Jefferson, the leader of the Democratic-Republican Party, forerunner of today's Democratic Party. However, opposition from within Adams' Federalist bloc, notably from former Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton, ensured that the Democratic-Republicans would gain the presidency. The party had won the election, but no individual had been chosen because the electors had failed to distinguish between Jefferson and Aaron Burr, who was technically running for vice president. Each received the same number of electoral votes, which threw the election into the House of Representatives, as required by Article II. Backroom politicking by Hamilton denied the presidency to fellow New Yorker Burr, and the House chose Jefferson as the nation's third president. As the candidate who finished second, Burr became vice president. That slight, along with future insults — Hamilton worked behind the scenes to deny Burr the New York governorship — led to the most famous duel in American history: On 11 July 1804 Burr shot and killed Hamilton in Weehawken, New Jersey, across the Hudson River from New York City.

Before Jefferson's first term expired, however, Congress had proposed an amendment to alter the manner in which the president and vice president were chosen. On 15 June 1804, the states ratified the Twelfth Amendment whereby "the electors... shall name in their ballots the person voted for as President, and in distinct ballots the person voted for as vice president...." The House of Representatives retained the power to choose the president if it turned out that no one received a majority of electoral votes. Twenty years later, that is exactly what happened.

The 1824 presidential election was bound to be a dust-up. Four years earlier, President James Monroe had won re-election on the Democratic-Republican ticket, running virtually unopposed. The Federalist Party had expired as a national force (though it still held sway in New England) and declined to nominate a ticket. That there was no opposition harkened back to the country's infancy when political parties had yet to form, and George Washington was twice unanimously chosen president by the electors. In fact, the early 1820s were known as the Era of Good Feelings. In the Electoral College, President Monroe received all but one vote (there were also three abstentions), and many believe that vote, cast by New Hampshire's William Plumer for Secretary of State John Quincy Adams, was done to preserve George Washington's standing as the only man unanimously elected president. Monroe, adhering to the precedent set by Washington and upheld by Jefferson and James Madison, chose to retire after the expiration of his second term. As the only national party, the Democratic-Republicans were once again assured of the White House, but Party unity along with the "good feelings" had eroded to a point that made the election a free- for-all.

In 1824, four men ran for president and the candidate who received the most popular votes was Andrew Jackson, the hero of the Battle of New Orleans, with 152,933 or 42.2 percent of the total, and 99 electoral votes. Next stood John Quincy Adams, with 115,696 votes, 31.9 percent of the total, and 84 electoral votes. The third-place candidate in the popular vote was Speaker of the House of Representatives Henry Clay with 47,136 votes, 13 percent of the total, and 37 electoral votes. But Clay was edged out in the electoral count by William H. Crawford, who received 46,979 votes, just 12.9 percent of the total, but 41 electoral votes. Since none of the candidates received a majority of electoral votes, the selection of the president was again thrown to the House of Representatives, and since Article XII of the US Constitution allows for only three names to be placed on the list from which the House must choose, Clay was the odd man out. Here, the Electoral College system denied a candidate the opportunity to move to the next round of selection. Nevertheless, Clay, an important figure in US history, was to play a major role in the final outcome by supporting Adams. His influence as speaker of the House of Representatives was such that Adams was chosen as the sixth president of the United States.

Jackson and his supporters immediately charged that there had been a backroom deal, and their cries of foul carried more weight after Adams took office and named Clay his secretary of state. Over the next four years, Jackson's supporters never failed to trumpet the charge of a back- room deal, as well as the fact that their man had garnered a plurality of the popular vote in 1824, while Adams had received less than one-third of the popular vote. By the time of the 1828 election, the Jackson faction of the party had become the modern Democratic Party and the Adams faction was known as the National Republican Party. This time around, Jackson trounced Adams in both the popular vote and the Electoral College. As a major political force, the National Republicans lasted less than eight years, replaced by the Whig Party, which elected two presidents in the 1840s, and was itself replaced by the Republican Party in the following decade.

Arguably the closest US presidential election in history wasn't the 2000 edition, but the 1876 contest between Rutherford B. Hayes, the Republican candidate and eventual winner, and Democratic candidate Samuel J. Tilden. It has been said that Tilden went to sleep on election night thinking he had won the presidency, only to wake up the next morning and discover he had been edged out by Hayes, despite the fact he had beaten Hayes in the polls by over 250,000 votes. However, Hayes received 185 electoral votes to Tilden's 184. How the Electoral College shook out was a different matter.

The 19 electoral votes of South Carolina, Louisiana and Florida were contested because each of those states had sent to Congress two sets of electoral votes: One reflecting the Republican Reconstruction government of each state and the other the "Solid South" Democratic opposition of the citizenry. It took a 15 member congressional commission — comprised of three Republican and two Democratic senators, three Democratic and two Republican representatives and three Republican and two Democratic Supreme Court justices—to sort out, or rather haggle over, the three states' votes. When the dust cleared, the commissioners voted, 8-7, along party lines to award all 19 electoral votes to Hayes. Hayes needed all the votes; if a single electoral vote had gone to Tilden he'd have won the election. However, like Albert Gore, Jr. nearly 125 years later, Samuel Tilden displayed little fight as the ultimate prize in US politics was snatched from his grasp.

The Democrats were as outraged this time around as they were when Andrew Jackson had lost the White House in 1824. The difference was that they had learned a few political tricks of their own during the intervening half century, and threatened to filibuster the Senate. What resulted from the threat was the Compromise of 1877 in which, among other points, federal troops were removed from South Carolina, Louisiana and Florida, and a cabinet position was reserved for a Southern Democrat. Hayes made good on both these promises, and the states in question soon reverted to Democratic governments after the military withdrawals.

In 1888, the Democrats again lost the White House when the electoral vote favored the Republican candidate, Benjamin Harrison, over the incumbent Grover Cleveland. Despite Cleveland's 100,000 vote advantage in the popular vote, Harrison received 233 electoral votes to the president's 168. Cleveland's defeat foreshadowed Gore's by the loss of his home state to his opponent, but unlike Gore, or any other defeated one- term president for that matter, Cleveland returned to the presidential fray four years later and trounced Harrison in a rematch. Unfortunately with the country headed for recession, his legacy would have been greater had he served only one term.

Depending upon one's point of view, the 2000 US presidential election either exposed the flaws in the voting system or maintained the balance. The whole election — more than two years of campaigning — came down to which candidate won the state of Florida, for that person would then have the required number of electoral votes to put him over the top. After weeks of wrangling, intervention by the Supreme Court, and a partial recount, the Democratic candidate, Vice President Al Gore, conceded the state and the election to his Republican opponent, Texas Governor George W. Bush. The rest, as they say, is history. Gore, in fact had outpolled Bush nationally, 51,003,893 votes to 50,459,211, but Bush prevailed where it counts most: He garnered 271 electoral votes to Gore's 266. Bush edged out Gore in the final Florida popular vote by 537 votes; and in the all or nothing world of the electoral count, he snagged Florida's 25 electoral votes. Many cried foul as the Florida debacle briefly revived the longstanding debate on whether or not to abolish the Electoral College: While some called for its abolishment altogether, others preferred the less radical path of reformation. As it presently stands, all of a state's, or the District of Columbia's, electoral votes are awarded to the candidate who receives the most votes, effectively disenfranchising the voters of the losing candidate. It also heavily favors the two-party system. One alternative presented was to apportion the electoral votes out according to the percentage of popular votes for each candidate.

For good or bad, two things the Electoral College does are provide a majority where there is none in the popular vote and amplify a plurality or a slim majority, sometimes making it appear as a landslide. For example, not many would consider 39.9 percent of the popular vote a mandate for a president, despite the fact that this slim figure was a plurality. Yet that same candidate, Abraham Lincoln in 1860, received 180 of the 303 electoral votes, or 59.4 percent. Almost as quirky were the totals of John C. Breckenridge, the National Democratic candidate who finished second to Lincoln in the electoral vote count with 72, while garnering only 18.2 percent of the popular vote. Breckenridge received more than 500,000 fewer votes than the Democratic candidate, Stephen A. Douglas, who came in last in the electoral vote count with a mere 12. Even the Constitutional Union candidate, John Bell, who polled 800,000 fewer votes than Douglas, managed to receive 39 electoral votes. And if that isn't a strange enough division of the electoral votes, it has been noted that if all of the votes that went to Lincoln's opponents were given to a single candidate, Lincoln still would have won the election because of the concentration of electoral votes in the northern states. Extreme as the 1860 election was, US presidential elections in which the winning candidate received a plurality, but not the majority, are not rare. It has happened 18 times.

Will the Electoral College ever again be changed or eliminated? The hue and cry of the post-2000 election aside, the latter almost happened following the 1968 election in which Richard Nixon defeated Hubert Humphrey by 510,000 votes. That amounted to seven-tenths of a percent of the total vote, yet Nixon received 301 electoral votes to Humphrey's 191. A call went out to change the system and this resulted in the Bayh-Celler Amendment (named for its Congressional sponsors, Senator Birch Bayh and Representative Emmanuel Cellar). The amendment called for direct election, with the winning ticket needing to receive only a plurality of at least 40 percent of the vote, otherwise a runoff election would be held. The amendment had the support of President Nixon and immense bipartisan support in the House of Representatives, but failed to make it to a vote in the Senate, due to filibustering by opponents from Southern and small states. The amendment died when the 91st Congress officially ended its business. Since then, neither of the two major political parties has been eager to alter the status quo.

Frank Caso. America's Electoral College. . October/November 2008.

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