Political probabilities

Many critics of the Electoral College admit that discarding the Electoral College could be extremely difficult. After the 2000 election, the National Commission on Federal Election Reform, headed by former presidents Carter and Ford, did not even consider abolition of the Electoral College. When asked why the Commission did not consider Electoral College reform, Carter, a past skeptic of the College replied "I think it is a waste of time to talk about changing the Electoral College. I would predict that 200 years from now, we will still have the Electoral College."^[1]

Despite such pessimism, it appears that large majorities of Americans favor a direct popular vote. In a 1968 Gallup survey, 81% of Americans favored a direct popular vote, 12% favored retention, and 7% had no opinion. In 1992, pollsters asked Americans this question, "If Perot runs, there is a chance that no presidential candidate will get enough electoral votes to win. If that happens, the Constitution gives the House of Representatives the power to decide who will be the next President. Do you think that is a fair way to choose the President, or should the Constitution be changed?" 31% said it was a fair way, and 61% said the Constitution should be changed.

But it is the difficulty of changing the Constitution which many see as the biggest obstacle to electoral reform. Amending the Constitution requires the votes of two-thirds of each House of Congress (which is itself difficult to obtain, especially in the Senate) plus ratification by three-fourths of the States. It is commonly thought that smaller states would be unlikely to ratify such an amendment, as their votes would count for less under direct popular vote than under the current electoral college system.

By some counts, there have been over seven hundred proposed amendments to the Constitution to change or abolish the Electoral College. In 1969, in the wake of an election where a third party candidate almost sent the election to the House of Representatives, an amendment to do away with the Electoral College passed the House of Representatives with 83% of the vote, 338-70. Richard Nixon favored the amendment, and so did three-quarters of state legislatures. Republican Senator Howard Baker denounced the Electoral College with "Any system which favors one citizen over another or one state over another is... inconsistent with the most fundamental concept of a democratic society." Predictably, the amendment failed in the Senate (though it did have a majority of Senate votes); however, it was not small states who blocked the reform but rather Southern states, who saw the Electoral College as part of states' rights.

But in the wake of the 2000 election, a novel new approach was put forward which circumvents the need for a constitutional amendment. The Amar Plan^[2] proposes that a group of states, through legislation, form a compact wherein they agree to give all of their electoral votes to the national popular vote winner, regardless of the balance of votes in their own state. These state laws would only trigger once the compact included enough states to control a majority of the electoral college (270 votes), thus guaranteeing that the national popular vote winner would also win the electoral college. In this way, the Amar Plan rests atop the existing system, and even takes advantage of the states' current constitutional right to pick electors by a method of their own choosing. The Amar Plan could be enacted by the passage of laws in as few as 11 states (as allocated after the 2000 census), and without the support of a supermajority of Congress.

The Amar Plan has been adopted by the advocacy group National Popular Vote, which in 2006 embarked on a nationwide campaign backed by a bipartisan group of respected former lawmakers, including John B. Anderson, Birch Bayh, and Jake Garn.

Some believe abolishing the Electoral College would strengthen third parties. However, this is unlikely. Under an electoral college system, third parties may thrive in noncompetitive states because voters do not have to worry that voting for a third party would cause the "least bad" major party candidate to lose. Under a strictly democratic system, every vote in every state might be the decisive one. A greater impediment to third parties is the plurality winner-take-all system.

Debate over the merit of the Electoral College came to a head after the 2000 Presidential election, with some politicians, such as Senator Hillary Clinton, calling for a Constitutional amendment abolishing the system. Clinton conceded that the chances of enacting such a change were slim, and the idea has not been vigorously pursued since the 2000 election.

Дата добавления: 2015-10-30