More Election Night Nail-Biting

Geez, I'm on something of a political kick lately. I gotta go read a book or take a walk or something. But first this interesting little-noted development in the real presidential election: the vote of the Electoral College.

As everybody who follows US elections knows (especially after the 2000 debacle), the Constitution set it up so that presidents are elected state by state, with the winner of each state taking all of that state's allotted votes. Everyone who "knows" that is mistaken.

There's nothing in the Constitution that says the votes have to be handed out winner-take-all. In fact, in recent years Maine and Nebraska have changed their rules to dole out the electoral votes according to Congressional district. For example, if Bush were to win the popular vote in Maine's 1st District, and Kerry won in the 2nd, they'd each get one vote. The other two votes (based on Maine's two Senate seats) would go to whoever won the popular vote in Maine, overall.

This development hasn't received much attention, because Maine could at most give only a single "split off" vote, and Nebraska's not that likely to give any of its votes to Democrats in any case. But Colorado has a proposal on the ballot to do the same thing, and it has as many electoral votes as Nebraska and Maine combined. As a bloc, it's probably going to go for Bush, but politics across the state are not uniform. For example, in contrast to the haven for right-wing activist wackos that is Colorado Springs, it has two districts that have elected Democrats to the House, which could mean a couple more electoral votes for Kerry. Or if Kerry manages to score a majority there (which is conceivable), it'd ensure that some of the votes would still go to Bush.

The kicker is that we won't know if this is what's going to happen until after the election. Because the Electoral College doesn't actually vote until December, this new process would go into effect for the 2004 election itself. So if the electoral-vote projections come down to a few votes, and the outcome of the Colorado amendment is at all close, the talking heads are going to have to do a lot of hemming and hawing about the number of votes Bush or Kerry gets from Colorado.

Personally, I think this amendment is a good idea, and not just because I think it would probably work against Bush this time around. The whole notion that the winner of a given state should get all the votes for that state is - and always has been - ridiculous. The existence of the Electoral College as a way to insulate elections from the popular vote is anti-democracy (read up on the 1876 election for an example of just how bad it can get), but it's there in the Constitution and would be nearly impossible to get rid of.

But the states are free to drop the winner-take-all tradition, and they should. It would encourage candidates to court voters in states that are otherwise "safe" for their opponents, and it would also allow smaller parties to get their foot in the door, by picking up electoral votes a Congressional district at a time, rather than having to scale the high sheer wall of winning an entire state to get on the election-night map.

Thanks to electoral-vote.com for pointing out this development.