In defence of the Electoral College 1

It seems that no American political institution has fewer defenders than the Electoral College. Its critics charge that it is malapportioned in favour of small states, wastes the votes cast for losing candidates, allows ‘faithless electors’ to substitute their own judgement for the will of the people, depresses voter turnout, and threatens a chaotic contingent vote in the House if it can’t reach a majority. In the run-up to its quadrennial ‘meeting’ on December 17, the New York Times has editorialised that it “remains a deeply defective political mechanism” and was “born in appeasement to slave states”. To see why the College persists, it might be instructive to look at the ways in which some key elections were shaped by its imperatives, and why reformers sought to abolish it.

Part One: Electoral College Defeats Dewey

In the 1948 presidential election, Democrat Harry Truman and Republican Thomas Dewey both stood a chance of carrying the biggest electoral prize of the day – New York’s 47 electoral votes. Truman also had to defend his left flank against renegade former VP Henry Wallace, who threatened to act as a spoiler. Needing to counter Wallace’s and Dewey’s appeal to African-American and Jewish voters, Truman desegregated the military, created the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, and went against Britain by recognising Israel’s independence. Truman did lose the Empire State, but carried enough of the other large northern states to win the election handily.

The Electoral College shaped the election in a number of ways. The fact that most of the large northern states were also swing states meant that both parties had to nominate a candidate from the liberal wing of their parties – no Dixiecrat could challenge Truman, and a Dewey was preferable to a Taft or a Macarthur. The fact that those states cast their electoral votes en bloc meant that discrete minorities within them were lavished with attention – hence both candidates’ focus on African-Americans, Jews, and union members. Crucially, the fact that seven ex-Confederate states were safe for Truman (the other four supported Strom Thurmond, but their combined strength was less than New York’s) ensured that he could safely ignore southern pressure and forge ahead with civil rights initiatives. The concentration of African-Americans in electoral vote-rich northern states presented the candidates with too great a prize to ignore, and Truman, Dewey, and Wallace all courted their votes.

With minorities playing such a key role in re-electing Truman, it was no wonder that conservative interests blamed the Electoral College. In 1949, a proposal championed by liberal Republican Senator Henry Cabot Lodge (R-MA) for allocating states’ electoral votes proportionally was taken up in the House by race-baiting Congressman Ed Gossett (D-TX). The practice of states casting their votes en bloc, Gossett claimed, assisted African-Americans, “the radical wing of organized labor”, and those who “support the Zionist position on Palestine”. Another southern Congressman lamented in 1952 that presidential candidates chased after New York’s black- and communist-dominated 45 electoral votes (it had lost two seats after the 1950 census). The Lodge-Gossett Amendment would have made little difference to one-party states (Democratic fiefdoms in the South and GOP strongholds in the Midwest and Plains) while ensuring that New York’s votes would be split, making the state a much less enticing prize. The obvious consequence of this would be a shift in control within each party from metropolitan liberals to Dixiecrats and Taft Republicans, as presidential elections could be won by ignoring large, urbanised northern states.

Similar constitutional amendments were proposed in Congress during the 1950s, including some which provided for electoral votes to be awarded by congressional district (as is done today by Maine and Nebraska). (Note that prior to the early-1960s SCOTUS cases on malapportionment, rural congressional districts usually contained fewer people than urban ones.) Speaking against such changes in a 1956 speech, Senator John F. Kennedy (D-MA) noted that while congressional and state legislative districts were malapportioned in favour of the countryside, and the Senate was malapportioned in favour of small states, presidential elections gave the nation’s urban centres their moment in the sun due to the ability of city-dwellers to shift dozens of electoral votes to either party’s column. “It is not only the unit vote for the presidency we are talking about”, he explained, “but a whole solar system of governmental power. If it is proposed to change the balance of power of one of the elements of the solar system, it is necessary to consider the others”. Kennedy knew that the ‘district plan’ and the ‘proportional plan’ would dilute the influence of urban, non-white, and non-Protestant America.