The United States presidential election is often described as 50 state elections. The right of states to make their own rules for the way they want to run elections — from ballot design and voting machines to the requirements for registering as a voter — are honoured in this federal system, as long as state rules are not completely outrageous.
So it is that voters in the US state of Colorado will not only vote for president and vice-president on November 2; they will also decide how their votes should be counted.
On the Colorado ballot is a proposal to award “electoral votes” in proportion to votes cast. A no vote will keep the winner-take-all rule, which is in force in all except two of the 50 states and the District of Columbia.
The rule stating that whichever candidate wins the most votes in each state reaps all that state’s votes is one of the most controversial aspects of the US presidential election.
But it pales beside the wildly unpopular electoral college system.
Polls show that more than half the US population wants to get rid of the electoral college. More than 700 Bills have been introduced in the US Congress in the past two centuries to reform or eliminate it. The system is seen by its critics to be unfair and undemocratic
Here’s how it works: When voters go to the polls to elect a president and vice-president, the candidates’ names appear on the ballots. But voters are technically voting only for electors in their state, pledged to the candidates. A few weeks after the election, the electors meet in their state capitals and cast their votes — and a president and vice-president are duly elected.
Three times in the past 150 years, a candidate for president has won the popular vote and lost the electoral vote — most recently in 2000, which is how George W Bush got to the White House. It is surprising that this has not happened more often, because the electoral college heavily favours small, sparsely populated states.
Each state is allotted as many electors as it has congressmen (up for re-election every two years) in the House of Representatives. That number is based on its population.
However, each state is also allotted two extra electors, to match the number of senators (who serve six-year terms) it may send to the Senate. So basically small states have an edge.
After the 2000 election debacle, Harvard Law School professor Lani Guinier pointed out that an elector in Wyoming — a cattle-raising state in the far west with a very small population — represented 71 000 votes, but an elector in the highly-populated state of Florida represented 238 000 votes. “It’s not just whether your vote counts,” she said, “but whether your vote counts equally.”
The US Constitution provides for electors to be chosen by state legislatures; voters are not even mentioned in this regard, so the situation could be worse. Constitutional scholars have cited the intention of the men who wrote the Constitution to remove the right from ordinary voters — all white males two centuries ago, and largely illiterate — to choose the most important federal officials. Even senators were chosen by state legislatures until the early 20th century.
Americans vote for all sorts of officials — judges, state governors, sheriffs, congressmen, even members of school boards — and they vote by direct ballot. Only in presidential elections is the creaky electoral college wheeled out.
It would take a constitutional amendment to change the electoral college system. That would require a two-thirds majority in both houses of Congress and the agreement of three-quarters of the states. And it is unlikely that legislatures in small states like Wyoming — and Montana, Alaska, South and North Dakota, all western, all traditionally Republican — would be interested in abolishing a system that gives them extra weight.
Key battleground states
State
Florida:
Electoral Votes: 27
Result: Bush
Iowa:
Electoral votes:7
Result:Gore
Minnesota:
Electoral votes: 10
Result: Gore
Missouri:
Electoral votes: 11
Result: Bush
Nevada:
Electoral votes: 5
Result: Bush
New Hampshire:
Electoral votes: 4
Result: Bush
New Mexico:
Electoral votes: 5
Result: Gore
Ohio:
Electoral votes: 20
Result: Bush
Pennsylvania:
Electoral votes: 21
Result: Gore
West Virginia:
Electoral votes: 5
Result: Bush
Wisconsin:
Electoral votes: 10
Result: Gore