Throughout my literary sojourn through the 20-volume Annals of America I have been constantly amazed at the veracity of the phrases “There is nothing new under the sun” and “Those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.” Folks, we are definitely doomed. Our illiterate and, now, illegitimate politicians have no inkling of history and are therefore repeating the same mistakes with disastrous consequences of exponential magnitude.
On January 10, 1976, Theodore H. White, author of The Making of the President, wrote the article below arguing against abolishing the Electoral College (the “Federal System”). His article is as cogent today as when it was published in 1972.
The one phase of election reform that has proved to be the hardiest perennial for a century and a half is what to do about the electoral college. It is an issue that has perpetually failed of resolution, probably because it would take a constitutional amendment to effect any basic change. An amendment to abolish the electoral college was introduced into the Senate in 1949 but did not pass. In recent years, after the unusually close elections of 1960 and 1968, there has been a revival of agitation to change the Constitution so that presidents would be elected by popular vote. – Annals of America, Vol. 19. p. 102
“Last September, in a triumph of noble purpose over common sense, the House passed and has sent to the Senate a proposal to abolish the Federal System. It is not called that, of course. Put forth as an amendment to the Constitution, the new scheme offers a supposedly “better” way of electing Presidents. Advanced with the delusive rhetoric of vox populi, vox Dei, it not only wipes out the “obsolete” Electoral College but abolishes the sovereign states as voting units. In the name of The People, it proposes that a giant plebiscite pour all 70,000,000 [333,000,000 now – not counting the dead and fraudulent] American votes into a single pool whose winner – whether by 5,000 or 500,000 [like Moscow’s predetermined margins of victory] – is hailed as National Chief.
American elections are a naked transaction in power – a cruel, brawling [cheating, fraudulent] year-long adventure swept by profound passion and prejudice. Quite naturally, therefore, Constitution and tradition have tried to limit the sweep of passions, packaging the raw votes within each state, weighting each state’s electoral vote proportionately to population, letting each make its own rules and police its own polls.
The new theory holds that an instantaneous direct cascade of votes offers citizens a more responsible choice of leadership – and it is only when one tests high-minded theory against reality that it becomes nightmare.
Since the essence of the proposal is a change in the way votes are counted, the first test must be a hard look at vote-counting as it actually operates. Over most of the United States votes are cast and counted honestly. No one anymore can steal an election that is not close to begin with, and in the past generation vote fraud has diminished dramatically. Still, anyone who trusts the precise count in Gary, Ind; Cook County, Ill; Duval County, Texas; Suffolk County, Mass; or in half a dozen border and Southern states is out of touch with political reality. Under the present electoral system, however, crooks in such areas are limited to toying with the electoral vote of one state only; and then only when margins are exceptionally tight. Even then, when the dial riggers, ballot stuffers, late counters and recounters are stimulated to play election-night poker with the results, their art is balanced by crooks of the other party playing the same game.
John F. Kennedy won in 1960 by the tissue-thin margin of 118,550 – less than 1/5 of one percent of the national total- in an election stained with outright fraud in at least three states. No one challenged his victory, however, because the big national decision had been made by electoral votes of honest-count states, sealed off from contamination by fraud elsewhere – and because scandal could as well be charged to Republicans as to Democrats. But if, henceforth, all the raw votes from Hawaii to Maine are funneled into one vast pool, and popular results are as close as 1960 and 1968, the pressure to cheat or call recounts must penetrate everywhere – for any vote stolen anywhere in the Union pressures politicians thousands of miles away to balance or protest it. Twice in the past decade, the new proposal would have brought America to chaos.
To enforce honest vote-counting in all the nation’s 170,000 precincts, national policing becomes necessary. So, too, do uniform federal laws on voter qualifications. New laws, for example, will have to forbid any state from increasing its share of the total by enfranchising youngsters of 18 (as Kentucky and Georgia do now) while most others limit voting to those over 21. Residence requirements, too, must be made uniform in all states. The centralization required breaches all American tradition.
Reality forces candidates today to plan campaigns on many levels, choosing groups and regions to which they must appeal, importantly educating themselves on local issues in states they seek to carry. But if states are abolished as voting units, TV becomes absolutely dominant. Campaign strategy changes from delicately assembling a winning coalition of states and becomes a media effort to capture the largest of the national “vote market.” Instead of courting regional party leaders by compromise, candidates will rely on media masters. Issues will be shaped in national TV studios and the heaviest swat will go to the candidate who raises the most money to buy the best time and most “creative” TV talent.
The most ominous domestic reality today is race confrontations. Black votes count today because blacks vote chiefly in big-city states where they make the margin of difference. No candidate seeking New York’s 43 electoral votes, Pennsylvania’s 29, Illinois’ 26 can avoid courting the black vote that may swing those states. If states are abolished as voting units, the chief political leverage of Negroes is also abolished. Whenever a race issue has been settled by plebescite – from California’s Proposition 14 (on Open Housing) in 1964 to New York’s Police Review Board in 1966 – the plebescite vote has put the blacks down. Yet a paradox of the new rhetoric is that Southern conservatives, who have most to gain by the new proposal, oppose it, while Northern liberals, who have most to lose, support it because it is hallowed in the name of The People.
What is wrong in the old system is not state-by-state voting. What is wrong is the anachronistic Electoral College and the mischief anonymous “electors” can perpetrate in the wake of a close election. Even more dangerous is the provision that lets the House, if no candidate has an electoral majority, choose the President by the undemocratic unit rule – one state, one vote. These dangers can be eliminated simply by an amendment which abolishes the Electoral College but retains the electoral vote by each state and which, next, provides that in an election where there is no electoral majority, senators and congressmen, individually voting in joint session and hearing the voices of the people in their districts, will elect a President.
What is right about the old system is the sense of identity it gives Americans. As they march to the polls, Bay Staters should feel Massachusetts is speaking, Hoosiers should feel Indiana is speaking; blacks and other minorities should feel their votes count; so, too, Southerners from Tidewater to the Gulf. The Federal System has worked superbly for almost two centuries. It can and should be speedily improved. But to reduce Americans to faceless digits on an enormous tote board, in a plebiscite swept by demagogeury, manipulated by TV, at the mercy of crooked counters – this is an absurdity for which goodwill and noble theory are no justification.”
See also: “The Parties versus The People: How to Turn Republicans and Democrats Into Americans” by Mickey Edwards
Editor’s Note: There are several problems with the article and Edwards’ book. White’s recommendation to “speedily improve” the Electoral College ignores the fact that politicians don’t change anything that keeps them in power – much less “speedily”. Edwards point is that both Parties are corrupt and working against the will of the American people.
Both have never been more obvious than during the 2020 Presidential election.
