Daily Herald (IL)
By Burt Constable
October 26, 2000

If most American voters cast ballots for George W. Bush, but Al Gore still manages to end up in the White House, folks would suspect the election was fixed.

But that scenario is possible unless we fix our flawed Electoral College system. By barely beating Bush in 11 key states, Gore could capture the 270 Electoral College votes needed to lock up the presidency, even if the overwhelming majority of our nation's voters select Bush.

The last "loser president" was elected in 1888 when Benjamin Harrison lost the popular vote but won the Electoral College.

Just because "the dreaded specter of a clear popular loser becoming the Electoral College winner hasn't happened in this century," doesn't mean we should wait to fix the system, notes Akhil Amar, a prominent constitutional law professor at Yale Law School.

"A car with a defective airbag might seem to run quite well until there's a collision ...," Amar said during his 1997 testimony before a House subcommittee studying the issue of Electoral College reform. "If 'we the people' would want to amend the Constitution after the 'loser president' materializes -- and I tend to think we would -- why are we now just waiting for the inevitable accident to happen?"

Despite decades of public criticism and the logic of Amar and other Electoral College opponents, nothing has changed. While we are careful -- justifiably so -- about rewriting the Constitution, the Electoral College system is not one of those Founding Fathers' notions worth protecting.

"The biggest reason it was set up was to protect slavery," Amar tells me Wednesday, noting that for 32 of our first 36 years as a nation, the Electoral College elected "a slave-owning Virginian" to be president.

Without the Electoral College, Northern states that let free blacks vote would have had more votes and more power, and a state wanting to elect a particular candidate could have doubled its clout instantly simply by extending voting rights to women, Amar says.

Justification for the Electoral College is rooted "in racism and sexism," Amar says, noting no other political bodies (whether foreign nations or our own states and cities) think enough of the Electoral College system to use it for their elections.

The 15th Amendment in 1870 gave black men the right to vote. A half-century later, the federal government decided women, too, could be trusted with the vote. But the Electoral College survives into the 21st century.

The winner-take-all system (except in Maine and Nebraska where electors can split the state's votes) is unfair to third-party candidates such as Ross Perot, whose 18.9 percent of the 1996 vote was rewarded with 0.0 percent of the Electoral College vote. This year, it will be unfair to Ralph Nader, whose backers will be invisible to the Electoral College unless they turn their back on their candidate and vote for Gore as the candidate closest to Nader on the issues.

That's why Amar favors the instant-runoff election concept I praised in Tuesday's column. Call The Center for Voting and Democracy at (301) 270-4616 or see www.fairvote.org for details.

"People say it's too complicated. It's not at all," Amar says, explaining how the instant-runoff concept is much easier to understand than the convoluted Electoral College.

With instant-runoff, a voter select the candidate he wants to win, his second choice and so on. The candidate with the fewest first-place votes is eliminated and second choices on those ballots are counted.

We use the concept "all the time," Amar says, providing an example. "My wife tells me to go to the grocery store and pick up brand X, but if they don't have that, then get brand Y."

That precaution saves us from bringing home a "loser" brand of frozen peas. Let's use it to protect ourselves from electing a "loser" president.