Centerblue.org

There is a bill sitting on California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger’s desk that if signed could fundamentally alter the way presidential elections are conducted in this country.

Currently the president is elected via the Electoral College, with electors drawn from each state. Each state’s electors pledge (though I believe are not required) to cast their votes in favor of the presidential candidate garnering a majority of votes in their respective states.

This system has led to problems, as the 2000 election demonstrated painfully–where the candidate who received a majority of the popular vote did not in fact win the presidency, because he managed to gain a majority of the electoral votes.

Now a new idea has emerged, based on the concept of interstate compacts akin to the ones that permit the Powerball lottery. In such compacts a state agrees with other states to respect the decisions of other states when it comes to doing something. In the case of the Powerball, each participating state agrees to honor a winning ticket as valid even though it was sold in another state.

With respect to the Electoral College, the idea (first advanced by inventor John R. Koza), the interstate compact would say that each participating state promises to cast its electoral votes for the candidate that wins the popular vote nationwide. If California enacts the legislation it would embolden many other states to do the same. The winner of the presidential contest would then truly be up to a majority of the people.

The justifications for the electoral college no longer apply. According to a paper written by a deputy director of the FEC Office of Election Administration, the primary reason for adopting the Electoral College as opposed to election by popular vote was the fear that the lack of readily available information about candidates from elsewhere would cause people to vote for “home grown” people from their own states, making a national vote unworkable and giving undue power to the most populated state. Instead, the founding fathers decided to put the presidential election in the hands of a small group of well-educated, well-informed electors that could cast their votes with full information and free of the influences of home states or political parties.

Clearly this rationale is greatly outdated. All information about all candidates are instantaneously available in a way not possible two centuries ago.

The author of the above-referenced paper makes some interesting arguments for keeping the Electoral College, such as the enhancement of power for minority groups (at least in theory, if a minority group is a majority in a state, it will have more power through the Electoral College than it would through popular vote alone). Another argument is that the College requires distributed popular support to win, rather than allowing a candidate to focus on a few populated areas at the expense of rural ones.

Ultimately I don’t think any of these arguments outweigh the value of a true popular vote. In practice I haven’t seen minority voting power enhanced in any state–and those states that have or someday may have majorities of non-white people (such as hispanics in southwest states) are not terribly influential in deciding presidential elections anyway. Additionally, as the 2004 presidential contest made clear it is possible to win by popular vote even if you do not garner a majority of votes in densely populated areas (Bush got several million more votes than Kerry even though Kerry carried most of the big cities on the coasts).

Eliminating the Electoral College would force candidates to campaign nationwide instead of just focusing on a few battleground states. There are many states that never see much of a candidate, because the state is guaranteed to go either “red” or “blue.” Today, my vote for a Democrat for President is about as valuable as spitting in the wind in reliably “red” Virginia; a popular vote count would make each vote matter as much as every other.

It will be interesting to see whether Schwarzenegger signs the bill, and how it will affect the 2008 election if he does.