Presidential Lottery

by James A. Michener

  One aspect of the plan is problematic. When pointing out that as defined at present the plan would disfranchise the District of Columbia whenever the election went to the Congress, I said with a certain optimism that this defect could be easily rectified. Now I am not so sure. When one considers the conservative nature of the sponsors of this plan, one gains the suspicion that they might not want to give the District, which contains a preponderant Negro population, any concessions and that the plan could well be used to deny the District rights to which it is entitled.

  Finally, if it were imprudent to freeze into the Constitution the relatively mild provisions of the automatic plan, how much more so would be the continuance of constitutional authorization for the electors, which this plan would ensure?

  The long-time champion of this reform has been Senator Karl Mundt, of South Dakota, who has said, “The Electoral College, operating under the rule of ‘winner-take-all,’ is, in my estimation, the most unfair, inaccurate, uncertain, and undemocratic institution of all.” He has argued persuasively through many years that his district plan will bring democracy back to the College.

  The National Association of Manufacturers has supported this plan, as have the Daughters of the American Revolution, H. L. Hunt of Texas, and Senators Goldwater of Arizona, Thurmond of South Carolina, Tower of Texas, Hruska of Nebraska, Stennis and Eastland of Mississippi, Miller of Iowa, Williams of Delaware, Jordan of Idaho, and Hansen of Wyoming, among others.

  The proportional plan. The Electoral College would be abolished. The electoral system would be retained. Inconclusive elections would continue to be thrown into Congress, but with notable safeguards.

  Each state and the District of Columbia would continue to have its apportioned electoral votes. They would be allocated, however, not on the winner-take-all system as at present but according to the proportional vote gained by each candidate, carried to three decimal places and disregarding the fourth. If this plan had been in operation in 1968, the California vote would not have been Nixon 40, Humphrey 0, Wallace 0, others 0; but Nixon 19.127, Humphrey 17.895, Wallace 2.687, others 0.288. These results would have been transmitted automatically to the Congress. The virtue of this plan is that it permits minority votes to exercise leverage rather than to be submerged in a one-party victory. Even if a minority party knows it cannot win the entire state, it can work hard for its fair share of the electoral votes. The drawback to the plan, of course, is that the opportunity this provides encourages third parties and even nineteenth and twentieth parties, each trusting that it will be able to pick up a few electoral votes here and there. Obviously, if enough minority parties in the fifty states picked up enough stray votes, most Presidential elections would be thrown into the House. Our elections would prove inconclusive and America would face the problem of fragmentation which has stricken so many other democracies.

  To avoid this, proponents suggest that if the leading candidate wins as many as 40 per cent of the electoral votes, he will be declared the winner. If no candidate wins 40 per cent, the top two candidates—not three, as in the preceding plans—would be presented to a joint session of the House and Senate, voting as individual members, and they would elect the next President. Since the combined membership is 535, a vote of 268 would be required to elect. As in the case of the earlier plans, this one disfranchises the District of Columbia whenever the decision goes to Congress, an omission which could be rectified; and as before, elections in Congress would be open to sabotage by absenteeism or abstention.

  Proportionalism was formally proposed to Congress as early as 1848, and through the years, picked up the support of senators like Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts, who has long been the chief proponent of the plan, Sparkman of Alabama, Pell of Rhode Island, Smathers of Florida, Kuchel of California, Saltonstall of Massachusetts, and Dodd of Connecticut. In 1950 enough Senate support had been generated to pass the proposal, but in the House it was rejected, 134–210. Had it been approved by the latter body and then submitted to the states as an amendment, no one can now judge whether it would have been ratified or not, but it is the only one of the four plans that has had any serious chance of acceptance in recent decades.

  Arguments in favor of proportionalism range all the way from those enthusiastic ideas that used to populate high school debates to some of the gravest considerations voiced by political philosophers in recent years. The proportional plan provides the nearest practical approach to direct popular voting while at the same time retaining the historic principle of according each state its allotted electoral votes. It thus conserves the best traditions of the nation.

  Under this plan the electoral vote would conform somewhat more closely to the actual popular vote than it does at present, and after the election the voters would have before them a better approximation of the relative strengths of all the parties, since now the majority party receives a swollen bank statement and the smaller minority parties none at all. Also, this plan would diminish the effectiveness of swing minority groups in the largest states in that by swinging they would control not the entire vote of their states but only a just proportion of that vote.

  One claim has been made which I am not competent to appraise. It is said that this plan would diminish the effectiveness, and therefore the likelihood, of fraud, in that the contaminated votes would affect not the whole electoral vote of a state but only the relative proportion. If this proved to be true, it would be a valuable asset in our political life, for in recent elections the conduct in various states has been questionable, and anything that can be done to quarantine the impact of such fraud and keep it from infecting the whole system is to be commended. I consider this a much more serious problem than I used to and point out that the district plan would also provide a commendable quarantine safeguard.

  Since the principal objection to the proportional plan is its encouragement to minority parties, whose proliferation would corrupt our political system, the proponents have been at great pains to assuage fears in this respect. They claim that the safeguard against such proliferation is the provision that a candidate can win with only 40 per cent of the electoral vote, which would mean that the minority parties could not hope to throw very many inconclusive elections into the Congress.

  Senator Sparkman has summed up other assets of the plan which he has long championed: “Proportionate division of the electoral vote according to the popular vote in each state would require candidates to give attention to the issues of interest to citizens in all areas of the country. Likewise, it would broaden the eligibility of candidates who are not from the majority party of a large state, and would eliminate the neglect of smaller states that are inclined to favor one party consistently.” (At the 1969 session of Congress, Senator Sparkman appeared as a sponsor for Senator Mundt’s district plan.)

  Opponents of the plan have naturally focused on its invitation to splinter parties, and the reader will have to make up his own mind on this question, there being ample testimony on both sides. A charge which in the long run might prove more serious is that the introduction of proportionalism in Presidential elections would establish a precedent for its introduction throughout the rest of our political life, producing chaos in certain state, county, and municipal operations.

  Critics point to a serious technical impediment which would arise whenever there was a close election, and many recent ones have fallen into that category, with a likelihood that those ahead may do so too. Under our present system the total vote of a state need be only approximate in order to indicate which way that state’s electoral votes will go, and a conclusive result of the national vote can be known even though the specific vote of numerous states is still undetermined. Under the proportional plan the state count would have to be reasonably complete and accurate before the proper proportions could be calculated and distributed. Approximations could not be used, since the proportions must be carried to the third decimal place. (As we shall see shortly, if this plan had been in operation in 1960, victory
would have depended upon 0.452, or less than half, of a vote, and this result could not have been known accurately for weeks after the election in view of absentee ballots, delayed counts, and contested results.)

  Other critics argue that although proportionalism is a step toward direct popular voting, it fails because it continues to award the smallest states with their two automatic electoral votes corresponding to their two senators. At present those two votes are more than often offset by the winner-take-all tradition, as we shall see (this page); but if the winner-take-all formula is destroyed by proportionalism, the value of the two automatic votes accruing to small states becomes enormous. These critics insist that if one is willing to take a token step toward a direct popular vote, he ought to be willing to go the whole way. The merits of whatever plan one proposes must be weighed against the merits of a completely popular, direct vote. When this is done, argue the proponents of direct voting, the advantages lie all in favor of the direct vote, and proportionalism is seen as a pallid substitute.

  Defenders of proportionalism dismiss this reasoning by pointing out that in politics no argument reductio ad absurdum is impressive. The fact that a little concession to direct popular voting is good does not necessarily mean that a total move in that direction would be better. Perhaps the degree of popular voting provided by the proportional plan is the precise amount required.

  Direct popular vote. The Electoral College, the accidental electoral system, and the throwing of inconclusive elections into the House would all be abolished.

  The only factor that would be involved in electing a President would be the actual number of votes cast throughout the nation. Theoretically, a man’s vote in a remote Arizona village would count precisely as much as one cast on Park Avenue in New York, and no state would have an accidental advantage over any other.

  In an effort to reduce the likelihood of inconclusive elections, a candidate would be permitted to win with only 40 per cent of the total popular vote, and if no one gained that percentage, an immediate run-off election between the two leading candidates would be held, which would mean that no future elections could ever be thrown into the House, nor into a joint session of House and Senate.

  The merits of this plan have become increasingly attractive as a result of recent experiences. A principal advantage is that with one sweep of the broom the conglomeration of past accidents and errors would be swept away; electors, weighted voting, the power of minority blocs, the disparity between states, inconclusive elections, and the dread confusion of House elections would be abolished, once and for all. There would be a clean break with such impedimenta of the past as electors and House elections, but the essential values of historical procedures, such as a free vote and an independent President, would be respected and preserved. Above all, our citizens would then vote according to a system all of whose parts they understood, which yielded clear-cut results, and which enhanced the visible legitimacy of the succession to the Presidency.

  Especially persuasive is the argument that since the President is the leader of all the people of the nation, he should be elected by them without the interposition of either electors or devices which might frustrate the expressed will of the people. Since the electoral system has been in operation forty-six Presidential elections have been held, and in fifteen the man declared winner has received less than half the votes cast. In this century five such elections, four Democratic and one Republican, have occurred: Wilson 41.85; Wilson 49.26; Truman 49.51; Kennedy 49.71; Nixon 43.40.

  And three times the ultimate winner has not only won the Presidency with less than a majority; he has even got fewer votes than his opponent. In other words, the man with the highest vote was declared the loser. In 1824 Andrew Jackson won but John Quincy Adams was named President. In 1876 Samuel J. Tilden won by more than a quarter of a million votes, a substantial margin in those days, but lost the Presidency to Rutherford B. Hayes. And in 1888 Grover Cleveland won by 95,096 votes but lost to Benjamin Harrison.

  In each instance the stability of the nation was preserved because of the good sportsmanship of the loser, even though some might have sympathized if he had shouted “Foul!” and tried to rally his supporters to contest the results. In the Hayes-Tilden fracas, as we have seen, the winner was not designated until two days before the inauguration, and there were many who feared that the same kind of impasse might be repeated in 1969. The advocates of a direct vote argue, “In the past we have been lucky. We should not depend upon such luck indefinitely.”

  It is obvious that under each of the preceding three plans it would be possible, whenever an election was thrown into the Congress, for a candidate to lose even though he had clearly won the popular vote. Would it not be simpler, ask the advocates of this plan, to have a straightforward election in which the voters knew exactly what they were doing and in which the results stood forth clearly? This would avoid the national disgust that might arise if a popular winner were deprived by Congress of his victory.

  A final group of reasons for supporting direct popular voting is that it would permit the small states to play a more active role in electing a President. The small states have begun to suspect that the two electoral votes given them for their two senators, regardless of the size of the state, are an illusory advantage which actually works to their disadvantage, and as we shall see when we consider the data summarized in Appendix C, they are right. As a matter of fact, perhaps the strongest single argument in favor of direct popular voting is that it would redress the balance of power among the various states.

  Even so, opponents of direct popular voting still argue that it would rupture the historic compact made between the small and large states and would thus destroy the federal principle. A practical corollary is that since the small states would apparently be penalized, it is futile even to discuss the plan because an amendment requires the approval of three fourths of the states, and this would never be forthcoming. This argument, of course, is made in ignorance of the true relationship between the small and large states, a situation which I shall discuss in detail later.

  A curious technical objection is that direct popular voting would severely penalize those states in which it is not the custom for large numbers of eligible citizens to register, or to vote if they are registered. For example, if two states A and B each have a population of 10,000,000 and consequently the same 26 electoral votes, under our present system it does not really matter if 4,500,000 vote in state A and only 200,000 in state B, for regardless of how large the popular vote is, or how it differs between A and B, in the end both states will cast the same number of electoral votes. Under the direct plan, however, a state would contribute only those votes which were actually cast, and if the voters of State B failed to exercise their franchise, or were prevented from doing so, that state would penalize itself. Without being invidious, let me offer a few comparisons from the close election of 1960 and the reader can form his own conclusions as to the merits of this objection:

  Voting percentages

  in eight representative states

  1960 Presidential Election

  (figures rounded)

  It will be observed that in 1960 it took only 570,000 voters in Alabama to cast 11 electoral votes, whereas in Minnesota it required more than two and a half times that number to achieve the same result. The discrepancy between Mississippi and Connecticut, each with eight electoral votes, was even greater. Direct voting would end this injustice. If a state voted its people, it would exercise leverage; if it made voting difficult or impossible, it would lose thereby.

  The next objection can be extrapolated from the table just offered. If all that counted in an election were the direct popular vote, all states would be forced to adopt voting qualifications equal to the most liberal permitted in any one state. For example, if State A allowed its citizens to vote at age eighteen, and thus qualified a large number so as to influence the choice of President, the other fifty jurisdictions in self-defense would have to do likewise. A
t this point State B might come up with a clever innovation which the others would have to match. To stop this kind of basement bargaining, federal laws would pretty surely be required, and they would dictate such things as voting age, registration procedures, and polling practices. Opponents of federal control hold that this is too high a price to pay for the admitted advantages that otherwise flow from direct popular voting.

  Another objection is that this plan would favor the large cities and would force candidates to spend most of their time fighting for the cities as now they fight for the large states. Enhancing the importance of the cities would also increase the importance of minority groups, who would thus surrender their old leverage in the state for a new one in the city.

  As to the claim of the proponents that this plan would diminish the frequency of close or ambiguous elections, opponents cite the comment of President Truman, who pointed out, “There is something to be said for the narrow margin of victory in a Presidential election. It makes the new President realize … that there is more than one side to a question.” The voices and ideas of the millions who voted for the loser should be “just as important [to the President-elect] as those of the victorious millions.”