Erasing the Blot, Slowly

Shuddering at the prospect of deadlocked elections being settled by Congress, Thomas Jefferson called the Electoral College system "the most dangerous blot on our Constitution." No fewer than 500 attempts have been made to reform the procedure, but none has ever got past Congress. Now it appears that electoral reform is an idea whose time has come.

Last week, by a surprisingly lopsided bipartisan vote of 28-6, the House Judiciary Committee approved a constitutional amendment to scrap the Electoral College. Citizens would vote directly for President, as they do for all other elected officials. If no candidate got at least 40% of the vote, a run-off between the top two aspirants would follow. Such a system would not have changed the outcome last year, but it would have eliminated the twin risks inherent in the present constitutional practice: that a candidate running second in the popular vote would get a majority of electoral votes, and that the failure of any candidate to get a majority would throw the selection of a winner into the House of Representatives. Both situations occurred in the 19th century.

George Wallace hoped that his presence in the 1968 elections would deny any candidate an Electoral College majority, leaving him with the decisive votes to name the next President. Before Election Day, according to the Gallup poll, 66% of the nation favored direct presidential elections. By December, the figure had jumped to 81%.

The State Factor. Congress' sudden sympathy for reform reflects that growing public desire for a change. What shape a proposed amendment will finally take is not yet clear, however. Besides the House Judiciary Committee's plan for a direct election, there are also schemes to retain electoral votes in some form. One such plan would divide each state's electoral votes among the candidates according to the popular-vote breakdown. Another would elect members of the Electoral College by local districts.

Witnesses before the committee argued that both the district and proportional approaches would perpetuate some of the worst abuses of the present system. Nonetheless, the direct method faces formidable obstacles. The heavy vote may crystalize opposition to the amendment among rural and traditional Congressmen in the House and Senate--and the amendment needs a two-thirds majority for passage in each body.

Any amendment would also need the approval of 38 state legislatures, and it is impossible to predict how they would react. Generally, there has been resistance within smaller states to major electoral change. By abandoning the present method of giving a candidate all of a state's votes, no matter how small his popular plurality, reformers also reduce the bargaining power and importance of state party organizations. The Senate, traditionally more sensitive to states' rights than the House, is likely to provide a tougher battleground than the lower chamber.

Direct election does have wide bipartisan support elsewhere, along with the backing of labor and business groups and the American Bar Association. "I think the experience last fall awakened people to the point that they may even be ahead of their Potomac advisers," said Ohio's William McCulloch, senior Republican on the House Judiciary Committee. Perhaps, but it is the men on the Potomac and in the state capitols who will have the decisive word. The construction of last week's resolution--even if it should somehow clear Congress swiftly--makes it almost impossible to effect reform by 1972. The prospect, then, is for at least one more presidential election under the old, imperfect system.

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