Changing Electoral College not likely
(Agencies)
Updated: 2004-09-06 15:04

The prospect of another close U.S. presidential election has focused new attention on the Electoral College, which actually chooses the winner, but the renewed calls for change are likely to fail as they have hundreds of times in the past.

The 2000 election, in which U.S. Democrat Al Gore won the popular vote by more than half a million votes but George W. Bush won in the Electoral College by 271 to 267, showed again that presidential elections are not always won by the candidate who gains the most votes, although such outcomes are rare.

Republican Bush was the first winning candidate since 1888 to lose the popular vote. As Gore joked, "You win some, you lose some. And then there's that little-known third category."

Bush is facing a tight re-election battle this year with Democratic presidential nominee, Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts.

The Electoral College goes back to the birth of the United States, when small states threatened to stay out of a union dominated by the more populous states. So the Constitutional Convention in 1787 proposed a compromise that gave greater weight in the election of president to smaller states.

"When you vote for president ... you are not in fact voting directly for a candidate. You are indicating who you wish the votes of your state to be cast for in the Electoral College," said Steve Easton, a political scientist from the University of Missouri.

The Electoral College has 538 members -- one for each of the 435 members of the U.S. House of Representatives and the 100 members of the U.S. Senate and three for the District of Columbia, which has no voting representation in the U.S. Congress.

All but two states award votes on a winner-take-all basis. In Maine and Nebraska, two electors are chosen by statewide popular vote and the remainder by the popular vote within each congressional district.

If there were a tie, the House would select the president with each state casting one vote and an absolute majority of the states being required to elect.

Though the controversial 2000 election prompted some renewed calls for reform of the system, political scientists say it would be virtually impossible to change.

"The simple reason the Electoral College will not be reformed is that three quarters of the states have a greater weight under the present system than they would have if every vote was equal," said Dutch Leonard, a political scientist at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.

Approval of three-quarters of the states would be required to change the U.S. Constitution -- and that only after two-thirds of both the Senate and the House had approved it.

One influential voice urging change of the system recently was The New York Times, which said in an editorial that the Electoral College should be abolished because it "thwarts the will of the majority, distorts presidential campaigning and has the potential to produce a true constitutional crisis."

700 FAILED BILLS

In the past 200 years, there have been more than 700 attempts to abolish the Electoral College in Congress, 100 of them advocating election of the president by popular vote. All have been rejected.

Short of wholesale change, some propose allocating Electoral College votes within states proportionally rather than awarding them all to the winner. An effort is under way in Colorado to make such a change although that too has aroused fervent opposition.

Easton argues getting rid of the Electoral College would be more dangerous than the present system in close elections because the votes in every single precinct would need to be recounted -- a formula for bitterness and chaos.

Leonard said most of the furor would dissipate if the winner of the Nov. 2 presidential election also won the popular vote, which he regarded as highly likely.

"That will take the wind out of the sails of the reformers," he said.

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