A Bit o’ History: the Electoral College -- how whatever can go wrong, will…

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The Electoral College isn’t just archaic and dangerous. Its origins are offensive. We’ll look at all that here, and do it in just a few paragraphs. Guaranteed, you’ll learn something.
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Tonight, Monday, election eve, things are much quieter than normal in local music venues. Many artists are working the campaigns. BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN and STEVIE WONDER are opening for Barack Obama, and Mitt Romney is opening for KID ROCK, RAY STEVENS, and the MARSHALL TUCKER BAND.
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It’s all happening in a swing state near you, before tomorrow’s 50 separate elections (one per state). If you don’t know why we express it that way, that’s where the history comes in.
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It’s because of that cursed and archaic Electoral College, the sole survivor of slavery (yes, really). It was built-in to the Constitution when Southern states needed a mechanism to pump-up their influence in Congress and in Presidential elections.
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Y’see, the white male landowners, i.e., the voting population and early America’s 1%-ers, comprised a small number in the South. They were outnumbered by the black slaves they owned. So, a formula was devised to count every slave as three-fifths of a human being, for the purpose of inflating the South’s numbers of members in the House of Representatives.
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But that’s not all. The Electoral College is comprised of Electors from each state, and then , as is still the case now, it is those Electors who pick the president -- regardless of how the unwashed masses of people vote at the polls. Your state’s Electors, then as now, equal the number of your Congressional House members plus your two US senators. Lincoln freed the slaves and the 13th Amendment abolished slavery, but the Electoral College remained as an historical relic, and beyond that as we shall see, a ticking time bomb. Why?
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Small and sparsely-populated states aligned with the South to get disproportionately more members of Congress -- and Electors – and thus power disproportionate to their small populations -- for themselves. Women everywhere could not vote (except in Wyoming, once it became a state), but women were counted to determine the total population and pump-up the number of representatives and Electors. When women won the right to vote, it was still just white women. In the South, though they lost the Civil War, power and influence actually increased when freed slaves were counted as full human beings, not just three-fifths anymore. And that increased power was held by the same old power base that held it during slavery, because they used part of their power to repress the black vote for another century.
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Fast forward to now, when in theory everyone can vote. We still have 50 separate elections because all the small states want to preserve their artificially enlarged power. How’s that? If you live in sparsely-populated Iowa or Nevada or Wyoming, your vote is worth more than it is in California where there are 40 million people, because each state adds its two senators to its number of House members to get its full complement of Electors. So any small state’s ratio of population to Electors is much lower than in heavily-populated California, and any individual’s vote counts for more.
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Thus, we can still get an election like 1876, when Rutherford B. Hayes became president after he lost the popular vote -- and “won” because of the infamous “Corrupt Bargain” that made him president in return for removal of all Federal troops from the post-Civil War South; that ended the period known as “Reconstruction,” and allowed the repression of blacks to resume unchecked. And we get the election of 2000, when a 5-to-4 vote in the Supreme Court awarded Florida’s Electors, and with them the presidency, to W, after he lost the popular vote to Al Gore nationally -- and in Florida.
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After all that, the Electoral College remains. Power begets power. In the our post-Citizen’s United world where corporations are people who can anonymously spend unlimited amounts to determine the outcome of elections, the Electoral College remains because it is one more tier of separation from the will of the unwashed masses of the people -- one more place to exercise power in defiance of the popular vote, if all else fails.
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And that’s why 270 Electors of the 50-state total of 538 are needed to gain or retain the presidency every four years.
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And it’s why we are like the Titanic sailing through the unlit darkness toward the iceberg. Inevitably, the Electors will split 269 to 269 in some election, maybe this one. It can happen because the state totals break that way, or because some elector goes rogue in the Electoral College (which has happened, by never changed an outcome).
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An Electoral College tie means no winner, regardless of how the people voted. And the Electoral College is the only college in the world where no spirit of the university is welcome, and where no one is expected to learn anything by being there. In an Electoral College tie, we get Congress to “solve” the problem. The same do-nothing, obstructionist Congress that has all-time low approval ratings, but which will probably be re-elected, anyway, as usual. Specifically, the Congress would use the Constitution’s bizarre sudden-death-overtime provision and the House of Representatives would pick someone as President (not necessarily anyone who was a candidate in the election), and the US Senate picks a Vice President.
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If that isn’t strange enough, the whole formula that goes back to slavery and three-fifths of a human being that still disproportionately keeps some states more important? It gets thrown out. Each state, regardless of its population, casts just one-vote-per-state in the House to pick the President. We have a Republican House, but what’s more important here, is that a majority of the 50 states have a majority of Republicans in their delegations. The populous states are represented by a majority of Democrats. But that would mean noting. Nor would it mean anything in the Senate, when they picked the VP. Both would simply vote along party lines. Quite likely, we would get an Executive Branch headed by two people from different parties; partisanship would certainly make that the case in 2012.
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And you thought you already have enough to worry about.
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Even with that whole Electoral College thing, it usually does come out the way the people voted -- though it isn’t guaranteed, as you can see. But there are plenty of other important offices and ballot measures at stake. And your vote is your license to bitch. Think of all the years when non-landowners, and when people of color, and when women, and when Native American Indians, and when people old enough to die in wars as members of the military at age 18, were all denied the right to vote. Think of the voter suppression efforts evident in battleground states in this election. Think of the people who endured Hurricane Sandy who are busting their asses to get to a polling place surrounded by wreckage and powered by a generator. Most of all, as Rachel Maddow recently said, “Nobody can make you vote, but if you don’t, you are fulfilling someone else’s agenda.”
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Go spend some time decompressing with live music Monday night, and do more of that Tuesday night. But GO VOTE Tuesday. Nothing depends on that except the future OF the future: what it will look like; what the substance of it will be; how people will be treated and valued and what kind of opportunities they will have; what kind of world we will leave the next generation; and how history will judge the way we spent our time on this planet.
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Contents copyright © 2012,
Lawrence Wines & Tied to the Tracks.
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