A Vote to Close Down the College

Thomas Jefferson called it "the most dangerous blot on our Constitution." In the past 200 years, more than 500 proposals have been made by Congress to reform it. Last week, for the first time in this century, a President put the weight of his office behind the notion that it should be abolished altogether. Jimmy Carter proposed that the arcane and archaic Electoral College be replaced with direct, popular-vote presidential elections. He called the change "an issue of overriding Government significance."

Since 1789, Americans have been electing their Presidents by a Constitutional procedure designed to help preserve the rights of the individual states, a sensitive political issue at the time. As everybody who has taken Civics I should know, when the voters mark their ballots, they are really endorsing a slate of electors picked by the candidate's party. The electors of the winning party are authorized to cast all of their state's votes (a total equal to the number of its Congressmen and Senators) for their candidate. But they are not legally bound to do so. In each of the past five elections, one "faithless elector" has cast his ballot for someone else.

That oddity is not the main problem with the Electoral College. The real and present danger is that a candidate could lose the nationwide popular vote and yet still end up in the White House. Precisely that has happened three times before--John Quincy Adams in 1824, Rutherford B. Hayes in 1876 and Benjamin Harrison in 1888. Indeed, in 22 of the nation's 48 presidential elections, the winner has had an uncomfortably close call. The latest, of course, was Carter, who had a 1.7 million vote plurality, but would have lost in the Electoral College if only 9,245 votes in Ohio and Hawaii had swung to Gerald Ford.

The proposal for direct voting that has the most support was devised by Indiana Senator Birch Bayh. He suggests that if no candidate received more than 40% of the popular vote, a runoff be held between the two top vote getters.

Those who want to retain the Electoral College fear that direct elections could weaken the two-party system by encouraging minor party candidates and independents. Opponents also argue that big cities--and their minority groups--would lose some of their present political power. The cities now often decide how large states cast their electoral votes. In a direct vote, the cities would still have clout, but their relative power would decline. Then, too, small states and the less populated regions of the country would no longer be guaranteed a role--however minor--in determining who would live in the White House.

Whatever the arguments, the next presidential election is unlikely to be a direct-vote contest. Any amendment must be passed by both houses of Congress by a two-thirds vote and ratified by three-quarters of the state legislatures. The founding fathers made sure that even the "blots" on the Constitution could be removed only by careful and wide-ranging deliberation.

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