Nov. 12, 2000

KEEP THE ELECTORAL COLLEGE

Notwithstanding the undecided presidency, the Electoral College is working as it should, and America should keep it.

Not because of how this election will turn out -- we don't know that as I write, and probably won't for days. But because no alternative system can do any better.

"It's archaic," say critics. But that's not an argument; the White House is 200 years old too, and we're not agitating to tear it down because it's not modern enough. It's been remodeled and rebuilt as our national needs change, and it is still functional.

"It's not fair," say others, sounding for all the world like children whining on the playground. "Don't we believe in 'one man, one vote'?"

Well, as a matter of historical fact, we don't. The Electoral College, like the Senate, was devised to give smaller states slightly disproportionate voting power in the legislative and executive branches, and to insulate those choices from the perceived inadequacies of the popular vote.

The latter purpose has atrophied, as the Electoral College for the most part adopted the practice of giving all a state's electoral votes to the candidate who carried it, and the Constitution was amended to allow for the direct election of senators. But the former purpose remains significant for a federal republic like the United States.

You'll hear that the Electoral College is weighted toward the larger states, and that's true in the sense that California (54 votes) is a bigger prize than Wyoming (three votes). But each Wyoming voter has more voting power than any Californian.

The loser in California's Senate race, Tom Campbell, got 3.4 million votes, while the winner in Wyoming's, Craig Thomas, got 157,101. Is it fair that Thomas will be a senator but Campbell will not? It is simply illogical for anyone to favor scrapping the Electoral College but keeping the Senate.

Realistically, neither is going to happen. Amending the Constitution requires a two-thirds vote in both houses of Congress, plus approval by the legislatures of three-fourths of the states.

Why would the smaller states vote to do that to themselves? And even if they were willing, in principle, to consider such an amendment, it isn't enough that they agree on abandoning the Electoral College; they have to agree on a specific alternative.

And there is no better alternative. That's not an opinion; it's a theorem, proved by Nobel Prize-winner Kenneth Arrow, that every voting system violates some basic principle of fairness.

Elect the winner of the popular vote? Neither Gore nor Bush has a majority, and as recently as 1992 Bill Clinton was elected with only 41 percent of the vote.

Go to a runoff? In such a contest, for example, a candidate who is everybody's second choice could be eliminated in the first round.

There are other possibilities, most of which are used somewhere in the world, but they all have flaws. And there's no popular vote for prime minister in parliamentary democracies; they select their leaders by voting for parties, not people. That works too.

It's fallacious to say "Al Gore would be the president-elect today if it weren't for the Electoral College."

We can't know that. The average American who coasted through civics classes dreaming of "Baywatch" and tuned into the election somewhere around the third debate may be surprised to learn that someone can be elected president without winning a plurality of the popular vote, but it was no secret to the candidates or their campaigns. If the Electoral College had been amended away before the campaign began, it would have been a different campaign.

Even worse, we don't know for sure who won the campaign we did have. A margin of one vote in a thousand is too close for certainty. It's not just Palm Beach County. You have election officials in Gadsden County, Fla., scrutinizing spoiled ballots and trying to descry the voters' intention. And the woman buying votes for cigarettes in Detroit. And many other problems that happen in every election, but that we never hear about because they don't matter.

The Electoral College has provided the winner of the popular vote a clear margin of victory in every election since 1888. We know how it works, and no other system could guarantee any less confusion when the election is this close.

Scrapping the Electoral College for an untried system is unwise as well as contrary to our history.

You might even call it "a risky scheme."

(741 words)