Electoral College A Scapegoat For Nation Divided

It's often said that the Electoral College survives only because it is so hard to get rid of, like woodpeckers or the post-40 bulge. With Al Gore the apparent winner of the popular vote and the apparent loser of the electoral vote, though, many Democrats are getting serious at last about eliminating the College -- or at least are getting serious about denying the legitimacy of any president who wins in the College without winning the popular vote as well.

The Constitution is not a perfect document. But the Electoral College is not one of its mistakes.

The United States is hardly alone, after all, in accepting the risk that a chief executive might win fewer votes than his defeated opponent. Such outcomes occur all the time in the English-speaking parliamentary democracies: in Britain, as recently as 1974, when Conservative Party leader Edward Heath outpolled Labor's Jim Callaghan, but Callaghan won more seats in the House of Commons.

In some ways, it's strange that so much attention should be focused on the allegedly anti-democratic effects of the Electoral College. The Constitution is studded with anti-majoritarian features. It's easily possible, for instance, to win a majority of the seats in the House of Representatives with a minority of the votes cast in all House races nationwide. In the Senate, members representing only a small fraction of the population of the United States can defeat or delay bills demanded by large majorities. And in the most extreme case, five justices of the U.S. Supreme Court can thwart the wishes of hundreds of millions of their fellow citizens.

Compared with all these other offenses against the principle of majority rule, the Electoral College seems like awfully small potatoes -- especially since it comes with some important compensating advantages. Many of those are well known, but two in particular don't get mentioned enough.

First, the College promotes national unity by requiring candidates for the presidency to assemble very broad coalitions. French presidential elections, for instance, have a bad way of turning into tugs of war between those on the upward side and the downward side of the median income. The Electoral College complicates such struggles between have-mores and have-lesses by forcing each side also to consider regional and state-by-state concerns: the interests of farmers and fishermen, the values of the towns and countryside, as well as those of the big cities and suburbs.

Second, the Electoral College strengthens the president in his dealings with the Senate. The Senate is in many ways the most crucial house of Congress for a president: It confirms his Cabinet and holds over him the ultimate power of removal from office. A president opposed by the Senate can barely even function. The Electoral College ensures that the president is elected in a way at least partly analogous with the way that the Senate is elected, thus increasing the odds that the president and the Senate majority will belong to the same party.

This was a very nerve-racking election. It's wrong to assume that it would have been less nerve-racking without the Electoral College. Gore's popular-vote margin over Bush amounts to about 0.1 percent of the votes cast. Had there been no Electoral College, his presidency would have been as hampered by that poor showing as Bush would be by winning the Electoral College without the popular vote.

So if the next administration is weak, don't blame an 18th century voting system; blame the profound divisions in the country that split the vote for president almost exactly in half.