The Electoral College has outlived what little usefulness it has had.
Included in the U.S. Constitution as a way to ameliorate concerns from small states like Delaware that the presidency would be dominated by the larger states — and as a way to dilute the votes of actual citizens — the Electoral College offers little to American democracy.
The 2000 election, of course, proves the point, with a candidate taking the popular vote losing the election because he couldn’t cobble together the correct menu of states.
The 2004 vote, as well, plays into this. President George Bush won the popular and electoral votes, but the results in Ohio were close enough that there remains some doubt as to who won the state. Had John Kerry eeked out a win in Ohio, he would have bested President Bush and repeated the 2000 results — election of a president who lost the popular vote because he managed to win the right states.
So doing away with the Electoral College would seem a useful democratic reform. The trouble is that the changes on the table right now are flawed in various ways. In California, as John Dean points out, a politically motivated plan is being pushed by left-coast Republicans via the referendum process hoping to offset the incredible impact on the electoral vote that California’s backing of Democrats have.
In New Jersey, a plan to grant all of the state’s electoral votes to the winner of the national popular vote was tabled, while another plan — sponsored by state Sen. Joseph Kyrillos (R-Monmouth) — would be similar to the California proposal and has the backing of The Asbury Park Press.
The California plan would apportion electoral votes based on Congressional districts — an absurd approach that would be no more representative than the current winner-take-all setup now in place. The winner in each Congressional district would get that electoral vote.
There are two basic flaws in this approach. First, Congressional districts are, after all, gerrymandered to create safe seats and have little to do at this point with representative government. States controlled by Democrats, for instance, can gerrymander districts to enhance their numbers — witness the Texas debacle a few years ago when the GOP attempted a mid-cycle redistricting.
Just as importantly, state-by-state reform that is not tied to national reform will do little more than dilute the importance of individual states. So long as Texas maintains a winner-take-all approach, California’s reforms will backfire. Texas will still give its large number of electoral votes to the GOP while California under the proposed reform would split its votes, in this case weakening the chances of the Democratic candidate. Flip the circumstances and the GOP would suffer.
As I said, none of the plans on the tables in the various states are perfect. The right way to do this would be to amend the U.S. Constitution and eliminate the Electoral College — not an easy task.
So something short of that should be done. The New Jersey plan tabled Monday appears to be the best of a bad lot — but only when enough states sign on to guarantee at least half of the nation’s electoral votes would be decided in this manner.
Otherwise, there is too great a chance that reforms will backfire.
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Hank Kalet 