Presidential Lottery: The Reckless Gamble in Our Electoral System
Direct popular voting is, therefore, my second choice, and I would not lament if circumstances made it my first. I would be willing to work very hard to attain an amendment for such a vote, for this plan holds far more promise than it does danger.
The proportional plan seems to me an attack on the historic rights of states and regions. It not only reverses the present discrepancies but also magnifies them without offering just compensation in the way of increased effectiveness. Most serious is the likelihood that this plan would encourage the growth of numerous minority parties, and to this I am strongly opposed, due to my long experience in foreign nations which suffer from such proliferation. If Israel ultimately collapses, it will not be because of Arab pressure from the outside, but because she fosters such a bewildering number of contending parties within. The delays that would be involved in determining who had won an election would be both dangerous and frustrating. Senator Mundt’s strictures against the delay inherent in the direct popular vote would apply with even more relevancy here. When the total machinery, because of its use of three decimal places, depends upon an absolutely accurate vote, how could we expect such a vote to be forthcoming quickly? I have not yet seen the proportional computations for the 1968 election, but they could not have been known with accuracy much before the second week in December, which was the earliest I was able to obtain final election figures from the fifty states. (The figures were released on December 13, 1968, but could, I suppose, have been speeded up had an election depended upon them. Also, I realize that by the time 90 per cent of the vote was in, clear patterns would have developed, but I also remember that in 1960 the proportional plan could not have produced a final result till well into December.)
I am afraid that proportionalism is an alluring concept for college sophomores, for it does speak to justice, equality, encouragement to minority groups, and many other laudable aims, but in a complex democracy like ours it does not seem to work, and the benefits which derive from it are more than offset by the disadvantages. I cannot imagine myself supporting an amendment which would introduce proportional voting, at least not until the many drawbacks which I see today had been eliminated. Having said this, I acknowledge that this plan would eliminate the Electoral College and the House election, two desirable accomplishments.
The district plan has much to commend it. It preserves many of the traditional balances of our nation and does not impose severe disadvantages on any type of state. The small swing in favor of the Republicans merely corrects an imbalance that has long operated in a contrary direction and does not alarm me. The switch from urban advantage to rural does. I am suspicious of any change like that at this time, for it seems to me to fly into the face of contemporary history and therefore to be a real step backward, not toward sensible conservatism but toward a panic flight from reality. The real drawback to this plan, however, is the list of sponsors; one might say that if these gentlemen are for a bill, the rest of us ought to be against it. I do not feel that way. It appears to me that these hard-shell conservatives realize that change is inevitable and prefer to see it move somewhat in their direction rather than toward a direct popular vote, which to them smacks of too much democracy. They may be right. At any rate, I would by no means dismiss their proposal and would indeed work for it if my first two preferences were proved impractical of attainment. However, before I supported the plan its sponsors would have to correct two errors that at present disqualify it. On this page I said that if any proposed plan fails to abolish both the College and the House election, “it should be discarded at once.” The present proposal keeps these two anachronisms but hedges them about with just enough safeguards so that many voters would be reassured. I would not. On this page I have explained why I could sponsor neither. Therefore, this proposal would have to jettison the Electoral College and House-Senate election before I could sponsor it. If John C. Calhoun were alive today, I suppose he would support this plan as it is, and there I would part company with him.
By elimination, then, I find myself supporting the automatic plan as revised. In essence this is the electoral plan we now have, minus the College, which is abolished, with election permitted at 40 per cent of the electoral vote, and with a run-off election if no candidate wins that percentage. Its unchanged features have been historically proven. It is about as close to a true democracy as we shall get, or ought to get, and it is just. I prefer having the states retain their electoral votes, even though imbalances occur among them, and in spite of Senator Smith’s ridicule, I like the fact that this electoral vote magnifies the margins of victory. It is good, I think, that the Presidential election, which might degenerate into a vast national brawl, is broken into segments of manageable size. I am by strong persuasion a Democrat, but I have never believed in a raw democracy of merely adding up total votes. I believe in a system whereby we elect officials, such as senators and representatives, to whom we delegate the responsibility of governing for us; by extension I favor a system of selecting our President whereby each state has its own leverage and in which the two major political parties play a significant role.
I have considered carefully two weaknesses in the automatic plan. First, election by only 40 per cent of the electoral vote is vastly different from election by 40 per cent of the popular vote and introduces factors which I am not able at this time to assess. Permitting a candidate to become President when he has won less than a majority of the popular vote has become so common in our political life that it is an established tradition, and an accepted one. I have already shown that five times in this century, from Wilson to Nixon, men have been so elected; in the preceding century the same thing happened ten times: J. Q. Adams, Polk, Taylor, Buchanan, Lincoln 1860, Hayes, Garfield, Cleveland, Harrison, Cleveland. I do not see how anyone could complain of a tradition which has worked so well.
But when we allow a man to win with only 40 per cent of the electoral vote we are establishing a procedure, considering the way in which the electoral vote magnifies slight differences in the popular vote, whereby a man could win the Presidency with a marked minority of the popular vote while his opponent was losing in spite of a conspicuous majority. (A brief study of the states, their population and their electoral votes, will show how this could be done.) I consider this innovation an error and would oppose it. A run-off election should be held whenever no candidate wins an outright majority of the electoral vote. If we are going to improve the system, let us abolish the possibility of having Presidents forced upon us who have not won at least 50 per cent of the electoral vote.
The second objection is that by amendment this plan would freeze into the Constitution the present winner-take-all tradition of allocating electoral votes, whereas now it stands as a tradition only and could be changed by action of the states without an amendment. I find this objection irrelevant, because the states are not going to change and because the tradition is so firmly rooted and has proved so workable that it is already, for practical purposes, as secure as if it were a part of the Constitution. Making it so alters nothing.
To summarize, I prefer the automatic plan and will work hard for its adoption. If it is found to have little chance in view of the groundswell of support for direct popular election, I would be able to work in good faith for that solution.
As to the two proposed general improvements, I am not in favor of a national primary because I believe it would diminish the power and vitality of our political parties, and that could not be constructive. I do wish we could choose our Vice-President in some better way, but I do not know how, and if no workable plan is forthcoming, I would find myself grudgingly accepting a national primary to attain that goal. I am repelled by the idea of having one man, in the heat of a convention victory, deciding for us who our next Vice-President and possibly President is to be. I realize that Section 2 of the Twenty-fifth Amendment empowers the President to nominate, by himself, a new Vice-President whenever there is a vacancy in that office, which seems to be a continuation into the Whit
e House of the bad old practice of the convention, but there is a significant difference. When the President-nominate at the convention hand-picks his man, his act requires only the confirmation of the convention, which is given automatically by the very men who have just nominated him. Under Amendment Twenty-five, when, as elected President, he does the same thing, his act must be confirmed by a majority vote of both houses of Congress. I judge this to be an excellent rule, for I cannot imagine in recent years a supine House and Senate accepting a second-class nominee; today, when at least one of the bodies is often in the hands of the opposition party, there would be little likelihood of confirmation unless the man chosen were of demonstrated merit. We must devise some system of similar probity for the selection of Vice-Presidents at our conventions.
Recently Roscoe Drummond has proposed that a nationwide primary be held, but that it be advisory only. I see much merit in this. Its advantages would be twofold, in that it would preserve the function of the party, whose responsibility would continue for actually nominating the candidate; and since the primaries we already have are merely advisory, Drummond’s plan would merely broaden the base so that instead of being unduly influenced by New Hampshire, with a population of only 702,000, we would be listening to the advice of the whole nation, with a population of more than 200,000,000. I would support this plan and would hope that we might establish a tradition whereby Vice-Presidents had to be chosen from among the men who stood well in the national primary.
When I state that I prefer the national convention to the national primary, I certainly do not refer to the two conventions held in 1968, for these were so disgraceful that they harmed politics and damaged our national self-respect. The Republican gaucheries at Miami were unbelievable in a year of war abroad, civil strife at home, problems engulfing our cities, and profound experiments under way in space. None of these vital issues were reflected in the convention; instead we had those awful balloons, those tedious nominating speeches for nobodies from Alaska and Hawaii, those repulsive spontaneous demonstrations, the scenes of calloused jockeying back and forth over trivialities, the accidental glimpse of discredited old men trying their best to dictate whom the Vice-Presidential nomination should go to. Only the even worse disgrace of the Democrats at Chicago erased the nineteenth-century sideshow the Republicans engineered. Most of the people I know under thirty dismissed the whole procedure as beneath their contempt. One clever chap confided to me, “You miss the whole point. It’s a very deft device of the Republicans. They’re making their show so bad that all young people will be infuriated and unable to tolerate more of the same at Chicago.”
As for what the Democrats accomplished in that city, I can speak only with awe. In four days they converted certain victory into defeat, with superannuated bosses from a bygone age cavorting on television, with police revoking every ideal being mouthed on the platform, and with insolence of office replacing exchange of ideas. It left me ashamed and prepared for defeat; in time my own sense of history erased the former, and my dedication to a good fight made me do what I could to avoid the defeat; but I can say that in spite of that dedication this convention nearly finished me in politics. Many young people quit entirely, but perhaps we can win them back with the kind of convention I am thinking about.
I know of no one who wants a repetition of either Miami or Chicago, but I do know many who look forward to Republicans and Democrats meeting, each in their own time, to fight the intellectual and tactical battles of national politics, and I am one.
As to the length of the campaign, I realize that common sense dictates a shorter one. If England and France can run successful national elections in a third of the time we take, it can obviously be done; but I find that I have no strong feelings of support for change in our system. When I ran for Congress, I campaigned from February to November, a murderous route, but I learned so much in the process that each day was worth the effort. I look with grave apprehension at a system which would eliminate face-to-face encounters and substitute campaigning by television; I do not want to be governed by men who have appeared only on television, in some insulated studio far from the milling crowds of living human beings, for I know that such men will have missed that vital contact with cantankerous human beings which knocks sense into the politician’s skull and humility into his arrogance. I would, therefore, speak neither for nor against shortened campaigns, trusting that whatever the majority decided would probably be right. This leads us then to the last two steps for immediate action:
Step IV. We must all start studying immediately the four proposed plans—automatic, district, proportional, direct—and decide the merits of each, giving our ardent support to that one which will permit us to elect our Presidents honestly, fairly, and simply.
Step V. If it becomes apparent that the plan we prefer is not attainable, then we must quickly throw our support to the one that is, unless it is totally objectionable. When it is decided what constitutional amendment will be offered the people, we must work diligently to see that it is adopted. Write to your congressmen now. Write to your state legislators now.
My own estimates as to timetable are as follows. We ought to be able to formulate, pass in Congress, submit to the states, and pass before 1972 a constitutional amendment abolishing the Electoral College. The chances for this are about 40 per cent in favor, 60 per cent against, but these could be improved by public pressure.
There is a smaller chance that we could produce and pass an amendment abolishing House elections. I would estimate the situation to be about 30 per cent in favor, 70 per cent against, but again, public pressure could improve this.
The likelihood of getting one of the major amendments through Congress within the immediate future is not good. However, if one did get through, I would judge that the states might ratify it rather promptly. In my own mind I am shooting for 1976 or 1980, which would be about the best I could foresee. However, if the groundswell of popular demand continues, and if the polls in 1970 sustain the enthusiasm evident in 1968, there would be a slim chance that something might be accomplished sooner.
Nothing, of course, will be accomplished in any of these areas unless an extraordinary public pressure is maintained, so the determination really rests with the citizens.
A FINAL FANTASY
I have saved till last an aspect of our present system which seems totally bizarre, for I want the reader to savor the stupidity of the system under which he governs himself. My previous arguments have been to reason; this one involves sheer folly.
In the period following the November election I was much amused at editorial writers who congratulated the nation on having escaped the formidable dangers that could have grown out of the Electoral College or a House election. Everyone wrote as if the nation were home safe after a perilous voyage, but I did not share this feeling of assurance.
I was especially apprehensive about those articles which found satisfaction in the collapse of Governor Wallace’s effort to steal the election. The authors wrote as if Wallace had been completely defeated and had no more power to do harm; whereas I thought the little judge now posed an even greater threat, though one less likely to materialize.
“Suppose,” I asked myself the morning after election as I listened to congratulations over our narrow escape, “that in the interval between now and December 16 Richard Nixon either dies or withdraws. What then?”
I am aware that in his final pre-election speech to the nation Nixon spoke harshly of people who speculate like ghouls on such matters, and I apologize for mentioning this one now; but I am concerned about the liberty of two hundred million people and the destiny of my nation, and it is my duty to contemplate such possibilities, especially since they exercised me much in that critical period.
I am not asking a hypothetical question, nor am I wasting the reader’s time with speculation on something that could not happen. Indeed, it has already happened, except that in this instance the man who died was not the winner but the loser. In 1872 Uly
sses S. Grant was the nominee for a second term on the Republican ticket and was opposed by Horace Greeley on the Democratic. Grant won a clear victory in the popular vote, a majority of 728,612 out of a total vote of 6,466,138, and this would have produced in the Electoral College a commanding majority of 286–83, except that Greeley’s vote was never counted, because on November 29, 1872, two weeks before the College met, Greeley died. Since his death could have no bearing on the Presidential succession, the Democrats did not bother to nominate a substitute. Of those votes which would have gone to Greeley, 63 were scattered arbitrarily, with 3 of the faithful electors still voting for the dead man out of respect and 17 not voting at all. In accurate histories the electoral vote in this election is recorded as 286–0 for a reason which will become apparent in the next paragraph.
When the Electoral College passed its results along to Congress, that body decided that it was preposterous for the electors to have voted for a man who had died before they convened, and Congress refused to record any votes cast on his behalf. And tradition is clear that Congress will not accept electoral votes cast for dead men; they are automatically nullified. I judged, therefore, during those anxious days when I was studying this eventuality, that this precedent would be honored, and that if Richard Nixon were to die in that gray interval, any electoral votes which might be cast for him would be disregarded.
This would mean that unless the Republican party could decide swiftly and securely upon someone to replace Nixon, the election would be inconclusive; it would fail to produce a President and would be thrown into the House. (It is clear that when the Electoral College elects a Vice-President they are doing just that, and only that; the man so designated is Vice-President and remains so until such time as the House indicates that it is unable to settle upon a President, in which contingency the Vice-President serves as President, holding the office only until such time as a President is agreed upon, however tardy the House might be in settling that issue. Upon retiring in favor of the newly designated President, he resumes the Vice-Presidency.)