Thomas Neale, a specialist in American national government at Congressional Research Service, the Library of Congress, in this interaction with reporters at the Foreign Press Centre in Washington, speaks on the role of the Electoral College in deciding America’s president. Excerpts:
Why does America have the Electoral College? The first question that may come to your mind is: Why do we have an Electoral College? Remember, the United States Constitution is the oldest written constitution in the world. It was drafted in the 18th century. And as a result, it has perhaps fewer of the mass democratic features that you would expect from a constitution that derived, after – say, after the French Revolution or in the 20th century.
What our Constitutional Convention was trying to get was a system that guaranteed the separation of powers, and checks and balances that kept the presidency free from undue influence, particularly with respect to its elections, from Congress, and three, gave the states a role in the presidential election. To this day, Americans vote for president in two capacities: as U.S. citizens, and to a certain extent, as citizens of the states in which they reside, because that is how the electoral votes are put together, and that is how you win a majority in the Electoral College.
The Constitution – the Constitutional Convention decided this was the best compromise because it included these principles. It did not initially include any provision that the people would vote in a presidential election. The electors would vote, and it was left to the states how they would choose their electors. This power is retained by the states today, but all the states delegate that power to the citizens. So your – when Americans go to the polls on election day, they are voting for, actually, electors for president and vice president.
Who are these electors?
Well, they can be anybody, except a person who is a member of Congress or any person who is – holds an office of – in trust or profit under the United States. So Ms. Rider and I cannot serve as presidential electors, but almost anybody else could. In practice, they tend to be party officials, state governors, prominent party people holding – that do not hold positions in the federal government. How are they chosen? Each party in each state nominates a slate of electors. You never see their – in very few exceptions do you ever see their names on the ballot. When Americans go to the polls, it says, “Electors for Barack Obama and Joseph Biden,” or “Electors for George Romney and Paul Ryan.” But they are – so they are, in fact, voting for these electors.
How many electors and how are they allocated?
The formula is each state receives a total number of electoral votes equal to the combined total of its House and Senate delegations. Now, the reason we have the Senate delegations included is because one of those compromises from the Constitutional Convention to give the states – the less populous states a modest advantage compared to the more populous states. So today you have – the range runs from California, obviously our most populous state, which has 55 electoral votes because it has 53 representatives and two senators, to a number of states like Wyoming, Alaska, Delaware, Vermont, Montana, the Dakotas, that have three electoral votes. They have one because they have one member in the House of Representatives, and the additional two for Congress.
And these electoral votes are awarded in most states on what we call the winner-take-all or general ticket basis. That is, the voters vote for the whole slate of candidates. And this causes some distortions. For instance, in California in recent years, the Republicans can reliably take anywhere from 40 to 45 percent of the popular vote, but they get no electoral votes because the Democrats have a strong grip on California, and a number of other states, too. I picked California simply because it’s the most populous state.
There are two exceptions to that rule, and that is called the district system, which is practised in Maine and Nebraska. Now this harkens back to the fact that the states actually have a lot of independent authority about how they do – they delegate their electoral votes. It’s a little complicated, but in these states that have the district plan, the voters go to the polls, one vote for president and vice president, but the votes are counted in two different ways. They are counted statewide, and the statewide winner wins those two electoral votes that reflect their senators. And then the votes are counted in each congressional district, and the winner in each congressional district gets an electoral vote.
Why has this system endured as long as it has?
Well, first of all, it’s worked pretty well. More than 50 presidential elections that we’ve had, particularly since the ratification of the 12th Amendment in 1804, which I won’t go into unless you ask me to, we’ve had a pretty good record, 47 of 51. This should make it 48 of 52 if everything works out, which is not bad in the greater scheme of things. It’s not perfect. Secondly, and perhaps equally important, if not more important, the Constitution of the United States is not easily amended. In order to have an amendment, the most widely used of the two methods is that you must have an amendment proposed and approved by a two-thirds majority of the members of our two houses of Congress, and then – that is not sufficient in and of itself – then the amendment is sent forward to the states, and the states must – three-fourths of the states, and that’s 38 of the current number of states – I don’t think we’re going to be adding any anytime soon – must ratify it.
If the Electoral College is so important and the voters don’t know who are the electors, is it an obstacle to transparency in the electoral system?
From a very, very early time in this country, electors have been seen not to be independent agents, which is what the Founding Fathers thought they would be. You see, there was no political community in the United States in 1787. We had 13 colonies scattered up. It took two months to travel by land from Boston to Georgia. And they felt that – and there was no national press – they felt that the people themselves, the voters, would probably not have the sophistication to be able to discern national issues or national characters. So, they would vote for the electors, who would be the landholders, the best and the brightest, the merchants, the bankers, and these people would make a disinterested selection.
Well, it broke down almost immediately because even at that point in 1787 there was a drive towards democratisation, the frontier drive in America, as you will, and people said I don’t – and very early, in the early 19th century, one elector – can’t remember the name of the state or the elector or the person who said this, but an elector voted against instructions, and he said, “I don’t choose them to think; I choose them to act.” So it is our tradition and has been for two centuries that the electors are the agents of the people, and they do the people’s will.
