| Vol.
I, No. 2 | Thanksgiving | Nov.
17th, 2000 |
Puzzling
Evidence Puzzling
Evidence: Election Side-Bars
This year's presidential election
is still going on. And it's raised both some of the more fundamental and
some of the more curious bits of news in its continuing wake. ... He
may have been more popular, but that's no excuse ... It
seems to be a 'no question about it' fact. All Gore won the popular
vote. But he may not win the election. For those of
us old enough, we all knew there was such a thing as the Electoral College,
though how much we knew probably varied considerably from one person to the
next. Now, however, it seems the whole country is in for an education. Some
time next month {actually, by an act of Congress, its' the first Monday
after the second Wednesday in December}, the Electoral College is scheduled
to meet to elect the next president. After that, the vote is counted
before both houses of Congress on January 6th. The interesting thing
is that the members of the Electoral College are not required to vote
for the candidate with the majority of votes in their respective states.
First
you say you do, and then you don't ...
One of the trademarks of
the Bush campaign over all these months has been the insistence on less
federal government, more power to the people and the states. It's a
fairly standard plank in the Republican platform, even if, like so many
planks in so many campaigns, more rhetoric than substance.
Historically, the states have had an almost unquestioned authority to govern
their own electoral processes.
Early on in the open question of
Florida, the Bush campaign urged the Gore team not to push the election into
court. However, when the outcome in Florida became the open question
that it still, as of this writing, remains, the Bush team apparently thought
better of their own agenda.
Not only was the Bush team first through
the door into the courts, but the court they chose was federal, and not
state, the usual arena for questions about elections.
History
lesson anyone? The Electoral College is
comprised of members in equal number to the number of congressmen and
Senators from each state. Vermont, therefore, has three electoral
votes. It's Article II, Section 1 of the
Constitution that provides that the state legislatures shall determine
the method for selecting members of the Electoral College. Originally,
electoral votes were cast for the candidates, with the one receving the
most votes becoming president, and the one with the next highest number
of votes becoming vice president. Also in the beginning, the
electoral votes of a state did not have to be cast in winner-take-all
fashion. In the election of 1800, an equal
number of votes were cast for Jefferson and Aaron Burr, along strict
party lines. The election was then referred to the House where
only after 36 ballots was Jefferson finally elected. Four
years later, Congress ratified the 12th amendment, requiring separate
electoral votes for president and vice president. In
1876, in the race between Rutherford B. Hayes and Democrat Samuel J.
Tilden, the validity of electoral votes from four states were
disputed. Somewhat like this election, the outcome would determine
the winner. Tilden needed just 1 of the 22 votes being disputed,
while Hayes needed all 22. As required by law, the dispute went to
Congress, but the Congress became deadlocked. This gave birth to
the Electoral Commission of 1887, which elected Hayes along strictly
party lines, 8 to 7. Later in 1887, Congress
enacted a law that made it mandatory that Congress accept all
certificates of election duly made by the states ... except in those
cases where voters voted "irregularly." {What the right
hand giveth, the left taketh away.} It also gave the states almost
exclusive power to resolve all controversies regarding the selection of
presidential electors, but reserved to Congress the right to intervene
to settle disputes when a state was unable to do so. Eventually,
in the second half of the 19th century, the winner-take-all method of
casting electoral votes became mandatory in the majority of
states. The practice was challenged all the way up to the Supreme
Court in 1969; but the Court up-held a lower court ruling defending the
practice. Finally, within days of her election
to the Senate in New York, Hillary Rodham Clinton pledged to sponsor
legislation to do away with the Electoral College system.
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