Should we drop out of Electoral College? (second part of a three-part series)

So. In the United States, we have this goofy, complicated way of electing the president. In every state, voters go to the polls and vote for a list of people who promise to vote for a particular candidate when the real vote comes up in the Electoral College. (For details, see Part I of this series.)

Is this a good idea or not?

Although the United States was a very different country in 1789 when the Constitution was ratified, some folks argue that the method of electing a president that was adopted then still works well. William Kimberling--in an essay written in 1992, but widely circulated on the Web today--takes this position.

According to Kimberling, if presidents were elected by majority vote of the entire population, "presidents would be selected either through the domination of one populous region over the others or through the domination of large metropolitan areas over the rural ones." By contrast, the Electoral College system requires candidates to gain support from many regions of the country.

Kimberling also argues that "the votes of even small minorities in a State may make the difference between winning all of that State's electoral votes or none of that State's electoral votes." He says this gives "ethnic minority groups and other special interests" more power than they would have otherwise.

Kimberling seems to contradict himself with his next argument, that the Electoral College protects the political stability of the nation by strongly encouraging a two-party system For one thing, "it would be extremely difficult for a new or minor party to win enough popular votes in enough States to have a chance of winning the presidency."

In addition to protecting the presidency from impassioned but transitory third party movements, the practical effect of the Electoral College (along with the single-member district system of representation in the Congress) is to virtually force third party movements into one of the two major political parties. Conversely, the major parties have every incentive to absorb minor party movements in their continual attempt to win popular majorities in the States. In this process of assimilation, third party movements are obliged to compromise their more radical views if they hope to attain any of their more generally acceptable objectives. Thus we end up with two large, pragmatic political parties which tend to the center of public opinion rather than dozens of smaller political parties catering to divergent and sometimes extremist views. In other words, such a system forces political coalitions to occur within the political parties rather than within the government.

Stability and moderation sound like good things. But couldn't you also say that this system allows powerful elites to limit the influence of new movements and new ideas and keep their grip on power? Maybe this why there often seems to be very little substantive difference between the two major parties?

Whoops. Looks like my radical bias is slipping in here.

But you don't have to be a radical in order to advocate doing away with the Electoral College. A New York Times editorial from 2004 argues persuasively for just that course of action. (A more recent commentary in the Houston Chronicle makes similar points.)

The Times points out that the presidential candidates focus their campaigns only in those states where the vote is likely to be close. Surefire :"blue" (Democratic) or "red" (Republican) states are ignored by the presidential candidates. Voters in those states are likely to be discouraged from going to the polls, because whether in the majority or the minority, they have good reason to believe that their votes don't matter. (Oklahoma, though not mentioned specifically by the Times, is one of those states.)

The Times argues that Presidential candidates focus on issues important in a small number of swing states, and ignore issues that are of importance elsewhere. As an example, the interests of Cuban Americans get a lot of attention from the candidates--because most Cuban Americans live in the swing state of Florida. Because most people from Puerto Rico live in heavily Democratic states, their concerns are mostly ignored

Furthermore,

The arcane rules governing the Electoral College have the potential to create havoc if things go wrong. Electors are not required to vote for the candidates they are pledged to, and if the vote is close in the Electoral College, a losing candidate might well be able to persuade a small number of electors to switch sides. Because there are an even number of electors -- one for every senator and House member of the states, and three for the District of Columbia -- the Electoral College vote can end in a tie...In the case of a tie, the election goes to the House of Representatives, where each state delegation gets one vote -- one for Wyoming's 500,000 residents and one for California's 35.5 million.

The Times concludes that "The small states are already significantly overrepresented in the Senate, which more than looks out for their interests. And there is no interest higher than making every vote count."

Personally, before I started this set of blog posts about the Electoral College, I was neutral about whether it was best to keep it or best to get rid of it. It's true that if we had gone by the popular vote, Al Gore would have been elected president in 2000. But it's also true that even under the Electoral College system, if not for some very questionable practices in Florida, Gore would have won that state, and also the presidency.

But once I started learning more about the history of the Electoral College, I found myself becoming convinced that we really need to get rid of it. For more information about this history, see the final part of this series.