Clearly there is something amiss in our beloved democratic electoral system. If the past week has told us nothing else, it has at least demonstrated that. The problem is so substantial that I, for one, am more frightened each day by the recognition that there is not a single person in the entire country who knows what the proper resolution to this debacle is. More significantly, there is not a single person in this country who has either the power or the authority to call a halt to the bickering and declare a winner. As the infighting over the election continues to gather steam, the absence of such an authority becomes increasingly scary.
Many claim this problem is simply the inevitable consequence of an outdated Electoral College system. But that is not the case. This election is close, period — Electoral College or not. Even if the outcome of the current election had been based from the beginning on popular vote alone, there would be just as much tension over the 250,000 popular votes separating Gore and Bush as there is over the ever-indeterminate number of electoral votes separating the two. Granted, the Electoral College system is far from perfect. On a per capita basis, it over-represents smaller states. The number of electoral votes in each state is the sum of that state's Senators and Representatives, and as a result each vote in North Dakota — which has more Senators per voter than California — counts more in the Electoral College system than each vote in California.
Advocates of Electoral College reform seek to base the election as much as possible on the nationwide popular vote. This system would have its own set of problems and would be no better than the one our forefathers put in place. A strict popular vote would deter candidates from straying from the most populated urban areas. If one imagines that each hour spent in a given area wins a candidate, say, 2 percent of the votes in that area, candidates' time would be much better spent in a city of one million people than in a town of 10,000. In a purely popular election, rather than the urban-rural split between Democrats and Republicans that exists now, both parties would vie for the support of the cities, leaving the rest of the country entirely out of the picture. The result would be an urban-focused election, only exacerbating the regional bias that already exists.
In short, reforming the Electoral College itself is not a way of preventing the current problem — an election that is by any measure simply too close to be decisive — from happening in the future. Instead, we need a rule that, regardless of the electoral system employed, will resolve elections as improbably close as this one. The country was almost perfectly split in this election — except for the 2 percent of people who voted for that pesky (and now, incidentally, politically dead) Nader guy. In reality, then, Ralph Nader '55 holds what are effectively the decisive votes — votes that are almost all liberal rather than conservative.
In future elections that are as close as this one — by some yet to be determined objective standard of closeness — the highest finishing third party candidate should be able to transfer his or her votes to one of the two leading candidates. This would have the twofold effect of both resolving close elections and, more importantly, of forcing the two main parties to respect and incorporate the platforms of third parties. To prevent graft and political dealing, those third-party candidates could even announce which candidate they would support ahead of time.
In any case, the details would clearly have to be ironed out. But on the whole, such a policy would loosen our strictly two-party system, and many more Americans could have their voices heard and their concerns addressed in an election. Until then, this particular election is not a time for either Bush or Gore to play progressive hero — though it certainly would expedite things if either of them tried to. Rather it is a time to prevent this problem from ever occurring again, and reforming the Electoral College is not a viable way to do that. Alex Rawson is a history major from Shaker Heights, Ohio. He can be reached at ahrawson@princeton.edu.
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