"I have ever considered the constitutional mode of the election ultimately by the legislature voting by the states as the most dangerous blot on our Constitution, and one which by some unlikely chance will some day hit." Thomas Jefferson, 1823.
That condemnation of the Electoral College by one of our nation's Founding Fathers and great constitutional scholars was written 18 months before the House of Representatives underwent the wrenching process of choosing the president: the "corrupt bargain" election of 1824.I hope and pray that his fears will not again come to pass in January 1993. But with three viable candidates in the race this year, it is a very real possibility that no one will receive a majority of the electoral vote and the race will be decided by Congress.
No on wants the presidency decided by politicians, but there is a solution to that potential crisis. We need to close the doors on the Electoral College and pass a constitutional amendment to allow the people, the voters, to directly select the president and vice president.
Today, you and I do not actually vote for the president. We vote for slates of electors. Those 538 electors are the only Americans who directly vote for president and vice president.
If you were one of the 4,702,233 Californians who voted for Michael Dukakis in 1988, or one of the 3,081,871 New Yorkers who voted for Bush in 1988, your vote didn't count. All of the California electors cast their ballots for Bush and all of the New York electors voted for Dukakis.
The only way to make each and every vote count, and make each and every voice heard, is a direct election. It is simply a question of trust. The American people directly elect every other political office in America, from senator to country clerk; so why shouldn't we trust voters to directly choose our nation's two highest leaders?
The Electoral College arose out of a fear in the Constitutional Convention of 1787 - a fear of uneducated and uninformed masses deciding the occupants of the two highest offices of the land. I do not share that fear. The American electorate today is composed of the most well-informed and knowledgeable voters in the world.
Electoral College supporters say the system protects the interests of the small and medium states by making the candidates campaign nationwide and address the issues that interest small and large states.
That claim is simply untrue. Currently, simple math tells candidates to focus their campaigns in the eight to 12 largest states; that is where the big electoral prizes are.
If you are a presidential candidate, why waste your time campaigning in Little Rock, Ark. (population 176,000), or Salt Lake City (160,000)?
Voters in those two states can only affect six and five electoral votes respectively. Instead, the candidate campaigns in Peoria, Ill., (114,000) or Bakersfield, Calif., (175,000), because those voters affect 22 and 54 electoral votes respect-ively.
Under a direct election, candidates would have an incentive to campaign everywhere, because every vote would count equally, and every voter would matter.
The father of our Constitution, James Madison, stated the case for a direct election on the floor of the Constitutional Convention: "The president is to act for the people, not the states."
A direct election would be an election for the people, not the states.
(Sen. David Pryor is an Arkansas Democrat.)