- Unlike other democracies, voting for an American
President
is governed, not by a majority of the people but of regional states -
something
they call the electoral college.
-
- It is 217 years old, was originally intended to evade
the people's vote, and worst of all is a direct legacy of slavery.
-
- It diverts campaigns from large, often liberal,
populations
towards a few swing states. This year California and New York are
politically
irrelevant.
-
- The origins of this distortion go back to the 1787
constitutional
convention in Philadelphia, when disagreement arose over how the states
would be electorally represented in proportion to their populations.
Southern
delegates worried about threats to slavery from the more populous
North.
-
- Eventually the South forced through significant additions
to its population count via a shameful clause inserted in the constitution,
by which each slave counted as three-fifths of a white person.
-
- Then, it was decided, each state would elect the
President
by casting a fixed number of winner-take-all electoral college votes
equivalent
to its total of representatives in the House. This in turn would be
proportional
to the state's population - artifically boosted in the South by
three-fifths.
-
- So, although denied a vote, blacks added political power
to their Southern white oppressors.
-
- Then, small states like Connecticut or Delaware, backed
by the South, gained further electoral college strength because the
convention
also agreed to apportion only two senators in the upper house for each
state, no matter its size.
-
- Today it means that Vice-President Dick Cheney's state
of Wyoming, with a population under one million, has the same number of
senators - and therefore adds two to its electoral college basic vote total
of one - as California, population 32 million. California's two senators
are added to its electoral vote of 52, but its impressive total still
doesn't
matter in the campaign for swing states.
-
- After the Civil War (1861- 65), the three-fifths clause
was abolished, but the damage was done. The electoral college remains;
how its votes are apportioned perpetuates the imbalance first dictated
by slavery.
-
- This bias enabled the South to disproportionately
influence
US politics for decades when slave states held a third more congressional
seats than their free populations warranted. Before 1850 slaveholders
controlled
the presidency for 50 years, the Speakership for 41 years, and provided
18 out of 31 Supreme Court justices.
-
- It prolonged slavery, and, as the Senate is the final
arbiter of new laws, Southerners were disproportionately able to kill
reforms
of any kind. They still can, and do.
-
- It was quickly recognised that the electoral college
was a mistake, not just because a presidential candidate could win the
popular vote but lose the White House, as its winner-take-all tally
severely
complicated presidential elections when third or fourth candidates figured
prominently.
-
- Scores of attempts to abolish the college have failed,
the first in 1816. But as Harvard history professor Alexander Keyssar,
whose 2002 book on the US ballot, The Right to Vote , is definitive, told
The Observer : 'For most of our history such proposals were doomed by a
stark political reality: the South would never accept them. The issue was
not small states versus big states but slavery and racial
discrimination.'
-
- The US came nearest to democratic reform in 1969 when
the House of Representatives voted 338-70 to abolish the college and
substitute
a people's vote. President Nixon endorsed it, and opinion polls suggested
that the required three-quarters of the states needed for constitutional
amendment would agree.
-
- Then it hit the Senate. The debate there began in 1970,
and racist segregationist senators, led by the late Strom Thurmond,
launched
a filibuster. Finally, a vote to stop the tactic lost by five. The
proportion
of senators who successfully killed the proposal numbered 60 per cent
Southerners.
-
- Keyssar calls it a successful 'resistance to change from
a region whose politics had long been shaped by racial exclusion'.
-
- On Tuesday the electoral college could, for the second
time in four years, deny the presidency to the winner of the mass vote.
But what if this time that loser is George W Bush? It could happen.
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- Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited
2004
-
- http://www.guardian.co.uk/uselections2004
- /comment/story/0,14259,1340318,00.html
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