Electoral College has usually served nation well in choosing president
Those of us who voted for Hillary Clinton in the presidential election race last week can take some consolation in the fact that she will win the popular vote count, possibly by as much as a million votes. On Monday morning the Democrat Clinton had 48 percent of the 125 million-plus votes cast, and the Republican Donald J. Trump had 47 percent.
Nevertheless, Trump will be inaugurated as the 45th U.S. president, assuming the Electoral College behaves as expected on Dec. 19. That’s the institution created by a nation’s Founders in 1787 to select a president.
Article II, Section 1, of the Constitution says:
“Each state shall appoint, in such manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors, equal to the whole Number of Senators and Representatives to which the State may be entitled in the Congress; ...
“The Electors shall meet in their respective States, and vote by Ballot for two Persons. ... The Person having the greatest Number of Votes shall be the President, if such Number be a Majority of the whole Number of Electors appointed; ... and if no Person have a Majority, then from the five highest on the List the said House shall in like Manner choose the President.”
That rather odd system has served the nation fairly well. The device was, in fact, a compromise between those who favored a popular vote selection of the president and those who wanted no public input. Remember that the Founders’ notion of a democracy limited power to white male land owners, and they didn’t much trust the masses.
The southern states with slaves (who couldn’t vote) were concerned that northern states with larger voting populations would dominate the elections. They even managed to get a clause in the Constitution counting each slave as three-fifths of one person to calculate the population used in allocating both House seats and electoral votes.
One of the first elections under the system almost resulted in the second American revolution. That would be the election of 1800, when Vice President Thomas Jefferson challenged President John Adams, at least in part because of the Sedition Act, which made it unlawful to criticize the government.
Adams and Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton, leaders of the Federalist Party, wanted to save the country from, as Hamilton put it, “the fangs of Jefferson,” who headed the limited government Democratic-Republican Party. The Sedition Act was designed to guarantee Adams’ second term by keeping opposition newspapers quiet.
That didn’t work very well, and neither did the Electoral College. Electors were originally asked to list two names for president; the one with the most votes would be president and the one with the second most would be vice president.
Jefferson and Aaron Burr ran as a ticket against Adams and Thomas Pinckney, but with 16 states involved Jefferson and Burr tied with 73 electoral votes (Adams had 65). That threw the decision into the House of Representatives and resulted in much political maneuvering, most of it never recorded for history. Burr decided he wouldn’t mind being president, and some Federalists agreed.
At one point Jefferson allegedly told Adams, according to a Smithsonian magazine account, that any attempt “to defeat the presidential election” would “produce resistance by force, and incalculable consequences.”
Nevertheless, Jefferson reached an agreement with Delaware’s elector to abstain, allowing Jefferson to get a majority on the 36th ballot. The crisis was resolved, and the problem was fixed with the 12th Amendment, ratified in 1804.
The Electoral College failed again in 1824, when John Quincy Adams, son of John Adams, was chosen as the sixth president even though he received only 30.5 percent of the popular vote. Andrew Jackson led a 4-way race among Democratic-Republicans with 43 percent but failed to get a majority of electors.
That put the election in the House, where some leaders contended Jackson was unfit to be president and Adams prevailed. “Ol’ Hickory” avenged the affront, though, four years later with near-landslide proportions and went on to an easy second-term victory.
The Electoral College failed to endorse the popular-vote choice only two more times, in 1876 and 1888 — that is, until lately. In 2000 Democrat Al Gore outpolled Republican George W. Bush but lost the election — oh, those hanging chads. The election of 2016 means in two of the past five the popular-vote choice has lost.
That’s leading some to call for doing away with the Electoral College, which would require a constitutional amendment.
I’d agree if we’d had more examples like the election of 1824, which should have been a one-sided victory for Jackson. But the 2-party system doesn’t fracture the vote into small pieces, merely two big, most often nearly equal numbers.
Moreover, after the fact we can’t be sure that Clinton would have won the popular vote if that had been the determining factor. Both nominees would have followed different strategies. In search of electoral votes the so-called “battleground states” get the most attention from the candidates now. But if the popular vote prevailed, Trump might have, for example, spent more time and money in California and New York, trying to cut into Clinton’s margins there.
Certainly the big states would become more important. Smaller states like Arkansas would have even less influence on presidential elections than we do now.
Roy Ockert is a former editor of The Jonesboro Sun. He may be reached by e-mail at royo@suddenlink.net.