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Electoral College
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[W]hether the losing candidate's popular vote victory is large or small, the fact that a win in the Electoral College is all that finally matters is not unfair. It's not unfair that little Rhode Island gets just as many senators as does big California. It's not unfair that 34-year-olds can't become president or that a simple majority in the Congress is insufficient to approve a treaty, convict an impeached president, or amend the Constitution. Nor is it unfair that the winner of the World Series is the team that wins four games, not necessarily the one that had the most hits. These are the rules of the game and in the case of the Electoral College, the rules were originally written for some very good reasons.
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No, the Electoral College isn't an actual institution of higher learning. It's the mechanism under the Constitution that actually chooses the president. Devised by the Founding Fathers, the system is comprised of 538 electors. Each state's number of electors equals its total of members in the House and Senate. (In addition, the District of Columbia has three electors.) When you pulled the lever on Election Day, you were really deciding which candidate's slate of electors cast your state's electoral votes.
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The original Electoral College plan worked successfully for the two times that George Washington was elected president. However, a major flaw became apparent after the election of 1796. According to the Constitution each elector cast only one ballot with two names on it. John Adams, a Federalist, received the largest number of votes. Thomas Jefferson, the Democratic Republican, lost to Adams by three votes and became vice-president. The framers were not in favor of political parties and had made no mention of them in the Constitution. Yet here were a president and vice-president from different parties, and Adams and Jefferson were strongly opposed on many major issues including states' rights, the power and size of the national government, and tariffs.
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Over the centuries the Electoral College seems to have gone with the opinions of the public, but there have been a few anomalies. In 1800 the electors gave Thomas Jefferson and Aaron Burr the same number of votes, the House of Representatives then settled the dispute as outlined in the Constitution. The relativity of this case is that it was the first to show a flaw of the Electoral College and prompted the creation of the 12th amendment. In the election of 1824 there were four strong contenders for the presidency. None of the candidates received the required majority of electoral votes in order to become president. Thus, once again, the decision was left to the House of Representatives who elected John Quincy Adams even though Andrew Jackson had the majority of the popular vote, this being the first time that a candidate who received the popular majority failed to be elected president.
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Opinions on the viability of the Electoral College system may be affected by attitudes toward third parties. Third parties have not fared well in the Electoral College system. Candidates with regional appeal such as Governor Thurmond in 1948 and Governor Wallace in 1968 won blocs of electoral votes in the South, which may have affected the outcome, but did not come close to seriously challenging the major party winner. The last third party or splinter party candidate to make a strong showing was Theodore Roosevelt in 1912 (Progressive... known as the Bull Moose Party). He finished a distant second in electoral and popular votes (taking 88 of the 266 electoral votes needed to win). Although Ross Perot won 19 percent of the popular vote nationwide in 1992, he did not win any electoral votes since he was not particularly strong in any one or several states.
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A result of the present functionality of the Electoral College is that the national popular vote bears no legal or factual significance. As the aggregate popular vote is irrelevant, both voters and candidates may base their campaign strategies around the existence of the Electoral College. Claims that the Electoral College suppresses the popular will are therefore legitimately open to debate. For example, in 2004, it was generally taken for granted that Massachusetts would vote Democratic while Texas would vote Republican; voters within those states whose preferred major-party candidate was unlikely to prevail thusly found themselves freer to vote for third party candidates—or not vote at all—since casting their ballot was extremely unlikely to affect the result. Conversely, a voter in Florida was more likely to vote Democratic or Republican, even if they favored a third-party candidate, because their vote was much more likely to make a difference. Consequently, in any close race, candidates campaign to maximize electoral votes, not to maximize national popular vote totals.
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