"Pondering a Popular Vote" by Alexis Simendinger, James A. Barnes, and Carl M. Cannon, "As Maine and Nebraska Go..." by Michael Steel, "Can It Be Done?" by Richard E. Cohen and Louis Jacobson, and "What Were They Thinking?" by Burt Solomon, in National Journal (Nov. 18, 2000), 1501 M St., N.W., Washington, D.C. 20005.
In the eyes of many Americans, the Electoral College is like the vermiform appendix: a useless organ that can cause trouble on occasion. After the extraordinary presidential election last year, a majority of Americans indicated in polls that they favor doing away with it and electing presidents by direct popular vote. Senator-elect Hillary Rodham Clinton (D.-N.Y.), former Senator Bob Dole (R.-Kan.), and other political figures agreed. In the National Journal, various correspondents explore the implications.
To begin with, of course, abolition would require a constitutional amendment, and that would not be easy. After third-party candidate George Wallace won six states and 46 electoral votes in 1968, raising the specter of a presidential election being thrown into the House of Representatives, just such an amendment was proposed. With President Richard Nixon’s backing, the House of Representatives in 1969 overwhelmingly approved the amendment. A year later, however, the measure died in the Senate, in part because small states resisted. Senate passage would have required a two-thirds majority, and then legislatures in three-fourths of the states would have had to give their approval.
But suppose the Constitution were amended. What then?
Though many of the concerns that prompted the Founding Fathers to create the Electoral College are indeed outdated, observes Solomon, regional interests still compete. "The lightly populated locales still feel overwhelmed by the behemoths."
Without the Electoral College, states as such would no longer have a major role in presidential elections, and so their importance as political units would diminish, notes Paul Allen Beck, a political scientist at Ohio State University. Presidential politics would be nationalized, and the way campaigns were conducted would change. Wooing a national audience, candidates would spend less time shaking hands and more time on TV. No longer could candidates lavish attention on "battleground" states and ignore vote-rich states where a win or a loss was a foregone conclusion. Instead of courting independent "swing" voters in certain key states, note Simendinger, Barnes, and Cannon, candidates would be intent "on winning big in the states where loyal party supporters reside, and in generating a bigger turnout of those loyalists." Former GOP National Committee Chairman Haley Barbour thinks the incentive for vote fraud would increase: Under the current system, there’s little reason for partisans to "run up the
Largely rural, less populous states would lose voting power. Under the Electoral College system, there are now 538 electoral votes: The District of Columbia has three, and each state gets as many votes as it has senators and representatives. Since every state thus gets at least three electoral votes, the less populous states have more weight than they otherwise would.