HISTORY LESSION BY PROF KEYSAR
The winner-take-all system of allocating electoral votes
-- which we now accept as normal and which awards all of a
state's electoral votes to the candidate who wins a majority
of the popular vote in the state -- was itself the product of
partisan maneuvers, put into place by politicians of different
parties, including our revered founding father and democratic
hero, Thomas Jefferson.
The Constitution drafted in Philadelphia in 1787 said (and says)
nothing about how a state should choose its electors or apportion
electoral votes. It leaves that decision to the legislature of each
state. Not surprisingly, when political leaders were first trying to
erect the institutions that the founding fathers had sketched on
paper in Philadelphia, different states adopted different methods
of choosing presidential electors. In some, the legislatures
appointed electors by themselves (without holding any popular
election); others developed a winner-take-all system in which
they held "general ticket" elections, granting the winning
candidate all of the state's electoral votes; still others allocated
the electors by district. Numerous states changed systems
from one election to the next.
The most progressive political thinking of the era favored the
district plan -- because it would most closely link the preferences
of voters to the selection of electors. As Jefferson observed,
"All agree that an election by districts would be best, if it could
be general."
Yet Jefferson proved more than willing to let partisan advantage
trump what "would be best." As the 1800 election approached,
his Republican supporters in Virginia, mindful that their opponents
in the Federalist Party had won five of the state's electoral votes
in 1796, replaced the district system with "winner take all"
-- thereby guaranteeing Jefferson all of Virginia's electoral votes.
(Massachusetts, the home of Jefferson's rival, John Adams,
retaliated by entrusting the selection of electors to the Federalist-
dominated legislature.) A few years later, Jefferson, as president,
backed away from supporting a constitutional amendment
mandating a district system throughout the nation -- a strategy
that would have eliminated the potential unfairness of having a
district approach in some states and the winner-take-all system
in others -- because "winner take all" appeared to be benefiting
his party.
Indeed, "winner take all" became, and endured as, the primary
method of choosing electors precisely because of partisan
dynamics. Regardless of the broader democratic principles at
stake, dominant parties in nearly all individual states had
embraced the short-run advantages of "winner take all" by
1830; since then, few states have had an appetite for dividing
up their electoral votes while everyone else was using "winner
take all" -- in part because doing so would appear to lessen the
state's clout in national politics. (Democrats in Michigan made
the change in the 1890s and were severely punished for their
pains after Republicans regained control of the state legislature.)
National efforts to impose a district plan (or a similar system
that would allocate electoral votes in proportion to the
distribution of the popular vote within a state) have occasionally
garnered widespread support (several times winning passage
through one branch of Congress), but, so far, partisan opponents
of such a change have successfully prevented such a
constitutional amendment from receiving the necessary
two-thirds vote in both houses of Congress.
All of which has left us with a winner-take-all system that was
never voted on or designed as a matter of national policy and
has numerous intrinsic defects (such as transforming presidential
elections into nonevents in the many states where candidates
don't bother to campaign because the outcome is not in doubt).
We are also left with a constitutional framework that remains
vulnerable to partisan machinations. That framework, created
by men of the 18th century who could barely imagine mass
political parties, permits the rules of the game to be changed
in midstream by any one state or any collection of states.
The largest states, of course, would be particularly inviting
targets.
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Bush vs Kerry 2004
