'Great civics lesson' is about to begin

Tucson, Arizona Thursday, 9 November 2000

Electoral College
'Great civics lesson' is about to begin

By Robin Toner
THE NEW YORK TIMES
http://www.azstarnet.com/star/today/001109ELN-ELECTORAL-COLLEGE.html

WASHINGTON - Suddenly, the debate over the Electoral College got real.

For years, many scholars had predicted that this 18th-century institution was, as Professor Lawrence Tribe of Harvard put it, "a train wreck waiting to happen." How would today's voters react, they asked, if the Electoral College awarded the presidency to a candidate who did not, in fact, carry the popular vote?

Some scholars argued that a country that has come to revere majority rule and the principle of one-person, one-vote, was bound to chafe at an institution created by men who, in fact, were deeply suspicious of too much direct power in the hands of the voters.

Those constitutional what-ifs became very real yesterday, with Gov. George W. Bush of Texas on the brink of winning a majority in the Electoral College while falling short of Vice President Al Gore in the overall popular vote.

As Sen. Bob Torricelli, D-N.J., remarked, "Americans are about to engage in a great civics lesson."

"The Constitution has laid out very clearly how a president is elected and selected," said Sen. Tom Daschle of South Dakota, the Democratic leader. "It seems to me that there should be no doubt about that. We respect the process. We respect the Constitution."

But Daschle acknowledged that, looking forward, "There are many who will propose electoral reform and perhaps the abolition of the Electoral College."

In fact, this would be the first time in more than a century that an election produced a split result between the popular vote and the Electoral College; three times in the 19th century, the candidate who won the popular vote did not win a majority in the Electoral College. The elections of 1960 and 1968 did not produce such a result, but their closeness alone spurred interest in changing the system.

The Electoral College is, essentially, 538 people who elect the president and vice president, based on each state's popular vote. Each state gets one electoral vote for every member of the House and Senate; the actual electors are chosen by parties and voters in the states. Most states have a winner-take-all system, so that the candidate who finishes first gets all the state's electoral votes.

The system, which has changed through the years, reflected the Framers' attempt at compromise between directly electing presidents and leaving the choice up to Congress. Many see it as creaky anachronism, a last-minute deal that perversely endured and is ill-suited to modern politics.

"Every other office in the United States is elected on the basis of the person who gets the most votes," said Neal R. Peirce, co-author of "The Electoral College Primer 2000."

"But the Electoral College, for reasons no one can ever explain to you logically, values some votes over other votes," he said. "The result of this election, if it holds, would mean that a quarter-million-vote surplus for Mr. Gore nationally is worth less than a thousand or two thousand in Florida. Why?"

For all of that, nobody was predicting that abolishing the Electoral College would be easy. Daschle himself underscored the difficulties facing any would-be reformers, noting that he would worry about the impact of such a move on low-population states - like his own.

Defenders of the Electoral College argue that, like the Senate itself, it protects the franchise and identity of low-population states, a concern that was important to the Framers.