Presidential Lottery (15 page)

The next objection can be extrapolated from the table just offered. If all that counted in an election were the direct popular vote, all states would be forced to adopt voting qualifications equal to the most liberal permitted in any one state. For example, if State A allowed its citizens to vote at age eighteen, and thus qualified a large number so as to influence
the choice of President, the other fifty jurisdictions in self-defense would have to do likewise. At this point State B might come up with a clever innovation which the others would have to match. To stop this kind of basement bargaining, federal laws would pretty surely be required, and they would dictate such things as voting age, registration procedures, and polling practices. Opponents of federal control hold that this is too high a price to pay for the admitted advantages that otherwise flow from direct popular voting.

Another objection is that this plan would favor the large cities and would force candidates to spend most of their time fighting for the cities as now they fight for the large states. Enhancing the importance of the cities would also increase the importance of minority groups, who would thus surrender their old leverage in the state for a new one in the city.

As to the claim of the proponents that this plan would diminish the frequency of close or ambiguous elections, opponents cite the comment of President Truman, who pointed out, “There is something to be said for the narrow margin of victory in a Presidential election. It makes the new President realize … that there is more than one side to a question.” The voices and ideas of the millions who voted for the loser should be “just as important [to the President-elect] as those of the victorious millions.”

Senator Spessard Holland of Florida, in a comment given in 1967, spelled out his good reasons for opposing direct popular voting. He pointed out that since the District of Columbia would under this plan gain more voting power than the eleven states cited before, the plan would be unfair in that
the District “does not have any of the duties or responsibilities of sovereign statehood.” One staunch defender of the District, and a proponent of direct voting, replied, “This would make the accident of residence or employment with the federal government a justification for depriving citizens of their right to vote according to the ancient principle that it is geographical areas that have the right to representation and not human beings. Since this doctrine was used for nearly two centuries to inhibit the rights of urban areas, and since its effect was deleterious to our states, it should hardly be used as a guiding principle for our federal union.”

The general public is strongly in favor of direct popular voting. Polls taken over the last few years have produced these striking results: 1966—63 per cent in favor; 1967—65 per cent; 1968, before the election—79 per cent; 1968, after the election—81 per cent.

Experts also favor this plan. In 1966 Senator Quentin N. Burdick of North Dakota polled more than 8,000 members of our fifty state legislatures, and those who responded voted as follows: keep the existing system, 9.7 per cent; adopt the district system, 10.2 per cent; adopt the proportional system, 21.2 per cent; abolish all parts of the electoral system and adopt instead a direct popular vote, 58.8 per cent.

Many American leaders have recommended the direct vote: the American Bar Association, the Federal Bar Association, former Governors Branigin of Indiana and Brown of California, and Senators Morse, Mansfield, Aiken, Keating, and Margaret Chase Smith, who has been a constant proponent: “From the long term aspect, the Electoral College is doomed
to be replaced by the direct popular election system. It is only a matter of time. For the American people will ultimately assert themselves and demand that the will of the majority prevail.”

Today the major champion is Senator Birch Bayh of Indiana, who has been conducting a vigorous campaign in favor of this plan. He summarizes his argument as follows: “For all practical purposes, the outcome of Presidential elections today is determined by a small group of marginal voters in eleven or twelve large, politically doubtful states. By inflating the value of these individual popular votes, our Presidential machinery effectively denies to millions of Americans an equal opportunity to affect the outcome of Presidential elections. Under any system of winner-take-all formula, we face the prospect of elevating to the Presidency a man who is not the popular choice of the American people.”

Shortly after the 1968 election I had an opportunity to discuss Presidential elections with Hubert H. Humphrey, and in the aftermath of defeat he made these observations: “I would have been perfectly willing to place my political destiny directly in the hands of the voters of this nation. Our President and our Vice-President are our only two truly national figures elected by all the people of the nation, and the process should be turned over to all the people.

“What is the Electoral College if you analyze it? An American House of Lords with even less function, except to do great damage. Why should we run the risk of having these irresponsible men and women engage in brokerage over our choice of President?

“Why not come clean? Why not do the right thing? Let us stop this playing for a few large states and throw the election of our principal officials open to the honest vote of the entire population.”

These conclusions surprised me somewhat, for Humphrey at one time favored a form of the proportional plan and defended it ably when he was in the Senate. Of this he said, “Sure I was for the plan then. It’s a good plan with admirable features, but the more I study the structure of our nation, and the complexities of our elections, the more strongly I incline toward a straight popular vote.”

In concluding, Humphrey said with great emphasis, “I wish to make one point especially clear. The federal system which we all prize has nothing to do with the electoral system. Its integrity does not depend upon our continuing to award each state two electoral votes for its two senators. That is a complete misconception. The heart of our federal system lies in the fact that the United States Senate is supposed to protect the interests of all the states, so that smaller ones cannot be ignored, while in the House of Representatives the large states have a voting power which protects their interests. That’s the federal system and not a bunch of electoral votes. As a matter of fact, the present electoral system damages the federal system because it permits the large states to exercise an undue leverage on our Presidential elections. If you want to preserve the basic functions of our federal system, go to a direct popular vote.”

Advocates of such a plan conclude with a line of reasoning which is impressive from the historical point of view: Consider
the nation both as a whole and as a sum of parts. The whole consists of all of us across the entire nation. We should operate as a whole and in a direct popular vote elect a President who stands for all of us. The part labeled state will be represented by the two senators elected from the entire state. And the part labeled district, with its cities and towns and villages, will be represented by the House of Representatives elected from those districts. The union of these three elements—nation, state, district, each represented in its own way—would form the most viable and balanced system of government that could be devised. Perhaps this is the new federalism, with accretions that had gathered about the old scraped away.

TWO GENERAL IMPROVEMENTS

Before trying to determine which of the four proposed reforms is best, we should look briefly at two other suggested improvements which would fit equally well with any of the proposals.

National primary
. Under this system qualified voters in all states would go to the polls on a given day in late spring or early summer, the Republicans taking one ballot, the Democrats another, and they would indicate the men they preferred to run for President and Vice-President on their respective tickets. The value of this plan would be that the people themselves would be nominating the men they wanted,
rather than leaving that task to conventions of the two parties, where popular preferences are often submerged by political leaders who dominate the conventions. The weakness is that this plan would diminish the importance of the two political parties, which in the long run are responsible for our political life and which generally have done a good job. Under the convention system, the toughest political minds of this nation scrutinize potential contenders for four years and isolate the strengths and weaknesses of these men. A nationwide primary would tend to degenerate into a popularity contest in which one flashy television speech, one quick reaction to an emergency might sway the nation, producing a result no one had intended or even anticipated. This, of course, is a danger in any direct popular vote, and it was to avoid this danger that the electoral system was introduced. Those favoring a national primary argue that our society is now sufficiently advanced and sophisticated to be immune to such temporary fervors.

There is one enormous virtue to the proposed national primary. Today one man alone, the President-nominate, decides by his own authority who the next Vice-President shall be, and frequently the man thus arbitrarily designated becomes President. He has reached the highest office in the land on the vote of one man, and this ought to be stopped.

Shorter election campaigns.
The Presidential campaign now runs a full twelve months, from November of one year to November of the next, and this is cruelly wasteful, particularly since the scattered primaries in which the candidates engage are inconclusive. Senator Eugene McCarthy won various
primaries but this did not ensure him even serious attention at the Chicago convention.

In a recent poll, voters across the nation indicated that they favored cutting the campaign time in half—60 per cent in favor, 13 per cent undecided—and said they thought we would not lose any conspicuous advantages if this were done.

Also there must be a general overhaul of the party conventions. The Democrats, at least, could not afford another debacle like the one they engineered at Chicago, for this transformed them overnight from leaders in the campaign to underdogs.

With the nation agitated by its narrow escape from chaos in the election of 1968, with polls showing 81 per cent of the population favoring remedial action, and with leaders throughout the nation warning that we must take steps now to avert disaster later on, one would naturally assume that reform would be easily attained. One would expect that Congress, having agreed that the Electoral College and House election must be abolished, would proceed to debate the merits of the four alternate plans, and each house would pass the agreed-upon improvement by the two-thirds vote that is required. The proposed amendment would then go to the states, and since popular support for reform has been shown to be really overwhelming, we could look forward to
a prompt roll call of states, and by 1971 or early 1972 the thirty-eighth state would have ratified the amendment, which would thereupon become law.

If that sequence were followed, in 1972 we could be choosing our next President by a more rational procedure than we have used in the past, but I am afraid this hope is a delusion.

Ted Lewis, the well-informed political columnist whose job it is to keep a jaundiced eye on Congress, concludes, from studies he has made in Washington, that there is little chance “that the antiquated Electoral College system will be done away with before the 1972 national campaign.” He reasons that “no Congress, whether controlled by Democrats or Republicans, is going to act on the revision issue” until some “horrendous foul-up has actually taken place.” The fact that we skinned by safely this time, reasons Lewis, will be adequate excuse for postponing action.

If we allow things to drift, if we take the pressure off Congress, and above all, if we as individuals slip back into apathy, the old sloppy ways will be continued. Left to its own schedule, Congress would hardly get around to a simple action like abolishing the Electoral College, while a radical improvement like terminating House elections, which would in a sense be diminishing its own powers, would not happen. As for choosing among the four alternatives, in the normal course Congress would defer the decision for another fifteen or twenty years, or until, as Mr. Lewis suggests, some horrendous foul-up has occurred.