WHY THE ELECTORAL COLLEGE IS STILL USED OVER THE POPULAR VOTE

 

                                  …The Late, former Indiana Senator, Birch Bayh

 

If given a chance today, the “Popular Vote” in the US will win out over the Electoral College

 

The idea to get rid of the Electoral College has risen once again.  But did you know that according the Congressional Research Department, there have been more than 700 efforts to reform or abolish the United States Electoral College.

The fight to reform or abolish the electoral college actually began almost as soon as it was created, and this was by those who created it.

In 1802, Alexander Hamilton, one of the original architects of the electoral college, was so displeased with how it was being executed, that he helped draft a constitutional amendment to fix it. Since then, the electoral college is once again confounding the country as the members prepare to meet to ratify the election of Joe Biden as the 46th president of the United States.

There is just one problem: President Trump refuses to concede to Biden, as he is making baseless claims of fraud.  This is while his surrogates are urging Michigan legislators to overturn the election by appointing their own Trump-like electors.  Since Nov. 4, President Trump has repeatedly and falsely claimed his election loss as a result of massive unverified fraud.

Unfortunately, the nation’s Founders did not plan for a president who refuses to step down.

In 1969, Congress almost approved a constitutional amendment to get rid of the Electoral College, which will still meet this Dec. 14 to ratify Joe Biden’s election.  This will occur despite President Trump’s refusal to concede.

Biden is expected to win the electoral college by the same margin Trump did in 2016.  You will remember that back then, Trump declared his victory “a landslide”, though he trailed in the popular vote by nearly 3 million votes. This time, Biden leads Trump in the popular vote by more than 7 million votes.

The closest the country has ever come to abolishing the electoral college was after the segregationist Governor, George Wallace’s presidential campaign nearly threw the 1968 election.

Wallace was a man accustomed to winning political power on technicalities. The state constitution in Alabama forbade governors from serving two consecutive terms. When his first term as governor was running out in 1966, his wife Lurleen ran to succeed him, promising to “continue, with my husband’s help, with the same type of government.”  She won in a landslide.

But when George decided to run for president in 1968 as a third-party candidate, he had a trick up his sleeve then again.  His goal wasn’t to beat the Democratic or Republican candidates for the White House; it was to deprive both men of the 270 electoral votes needed to win, thus kicking the decision to the House. Then, as his biographer Dan Carter put it in a 2001 documentary, Wallace would be “in a position to dictate to either candidate, ‘Alright, if you support me on the following issues, then I’ll deliver the presidency.’ ” And what were those issues?  An end to federal desegregation efforts, for starters.

By this time, Wallace had learned about the art of the “dog whistle” and he had stopped saying things like “segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever” out loud. But he still inflamed rally crowds with his talk of expecting rioters, and that he was against hippies and anarchists.  In all the chaos of 1968, many White voters did flock to him.  By October, polls showed him with 22% support nationally.  That would be more than enough for his electoral college plan to work.

But then Wallace dealt himself his own “October Surprise”. He announced his running mate, Curtis LeMay, a retired Air Force General, who promptly told a room full of reporters he wasn’t opposed to dropping a nuke on Vietnam.  In the end, Wallace only received 14% of the popular vote, and just 46 electoral votes, carrying most of the South.  But Republican Richard Nixon got 301 electoral votes which foiled Wallace’s plan.  Had Wallace gotten 50,000 more votes in Tennessee and had Democrat Hubert Humphrey gotten 91,000 more votes in Ohio, the plan would have been successful.

But the near miss was enough to spur Congress to action.

Enter Birch Bayh. In 1963, the young senator from Indiana had been assigned to chair a subcommittee on constitutional amendments.  This was usually a sleepy gig, but not so for this senator.  First, he wrote the 25^th Amendment, which outlines rules for presidential replacement due to incapacitation, resignation or death.

Later, he did the same with the 26th Amendment, lowering the voting age to 18. He also wrote the Equal Rights Amendment, which fell just short of ratification in the 1970s.

President Lyndon Johnson asked Bayh to work on reforming the electoral college, but after studying it, he decided it couldn’t be reformed and had to be abolished.  Bayh had first introduced legislation to replace it with a direct popular vote in 1966.  But other lawmakers didn’t pay much attention until Wallace’s wake-up call.  Suddenly it had bipartisan support, as well as popular sentiment.  Gallup polling at the time, showed public support for the direct vote of the president at 80%, up 22 points in two years.

American history showed that the American franchise was constantly expanding. It had gone to White men without property, then to women and African Americans.  It was also moving toward a direct vote, as it had for the Senate.  So it was natural that this pattern should continue, Bayh said. 

The Electoral College and the winner-take-all system made one person’s vote in a swing state matter more than other votes elsewhere; all votes counting with the popular vote would equally encourage more people to vote, Bayh said.  “We are at long last arriving at the place and time in our history where meaning has been brought to the preamble of our Constitution — ‘We, the People of the United States,’ ” he argued in a Senate speech.

In September 1969, the proposed amendment sailed through the House, passing 339 to 70. Nixon, as a Republican, threw his support behind Democrat Bayh’s proposal, and it appeared a majority of state legislatures would ratify it.  But the bill didn’t make it.

So what happened to the senator’s bill?

Southern senators led by South Carolina’s Strom Thurmond were perfectly happy with the system as it was.  As Wallace had demonstrated, the Electoral College increases the importance of the Southern White vote; and the winner-take-all system effectively canceled out the Black vote, so long as Southern Blacks remained the minority.  (And that minority roll is coming to an end for Black and brown voters.)

This Southern senate group had blocked the amendment from moving forward with a filibuster. (The filibuster is another old convention that should be abolished.) The amendment died on the Senate floor the next year.

Bayh tried throughout the 1970s to bring it to a vote, which finally happened in 1979 after President Jimmy Carter expressed support for a direct vote election.  It received a majority vote, but because of the Southern states, not the two-thirds majority needed to pass a constitutional amendment.

Bayh, who died in 2019, lived long enough to see his worst fears…. the loser of the popular vote and the Electoral College…. again being realized……twice.

Perhaps if it gets close enough to be voted on again, this time the popular vote would probably win because it has continued to out-vote the Electoral College by millions of votes.

But it will take an Amendment, and that is always a difficult task.

Copyright G. Ater 2020