National Affairs: College

Quadrennially, on the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November, the U. S. people perform what they call “electing a President.” That is the effect of their performance, but not the form. What they do formally is to elect an Electoral College, which casts the actual vote for a President and Vice President. This vote is cast on the second Monday in January. It is not counted and tabulated until the second Wednesday in February, more than three months after the result has passed into history.

Than the Electoral College there is no more paradoxical body. It never meets as a whole. Its members are not legally bound to carry out the voters’ will. Its members are not paid for their important services, and since their names are noticed or remembered by very few voters, they are scarcely honored. Moreover, the electors of any State may be chosen by a minority of the voters of the State, yet the Presidential votes represent the entire State. Only a student of government or a thoroughly professional politician can explain what the Electoral College actually is and does, the reason being that it has been transformed from an important bit of governmental machinery to an inconspicuous, though still essential, instrument of party politics.

Article II of the Constitution provided that the electors should be chosen as prescribed by the State Legislatures. Some Legislatures used to choose the electors themselves. Elsewhere the people elected them—a small group of known, trusted, respected men who were sent to the State capitals, where each man voted for two national candidates without indicating which candidate he wanted for President, which for Vice President. The election of 1800 was thrown into the House of Representatives because no candidate had a majority of electoral votes. Aaron Burr managed to delay the election of Thomas Jefferson to the Presidency, in the House, because, though it had been agreed that Burr was the Vice Presidential candidate, no distinction was provided for in the balloting. The 12th Amendment, passed in 1803, ratified in 1804, required the members of the Electoral College (or of the House if the election went there) to distinguish their choices for President and Vice President.

The Constitution assigns to each State the same number of electors as the State has Congressmen. When electors were first chosen by popular vote, many a Legislature provided that people should vote for two electors at large—corresponding to their Senators—and one elector from their Congressional district, corresponding to their Representative. But as party politics developed, it was discovered that a State’s importance in national politics was emphasized if all its electors could be won by one party or another. Thus came the final transformation and the practice that is universal today. In each State, each party names its ticket of electors. The names of the national nominees for whom they are pledged to vote are usually printed in big type at the top of the ballot. That ticket of electors is the winner which receives a popular plurality, and to their Nominees goes the entire electoral vote of that State. In case there are three or more tickets of electors and the winning ticket gets less than half of all the votes cast, the majority has no redress. Neither would there be redress if all or part of the winning ticket of electors should, before the second Monday in January, “bolt” the party which elected it and shift or split the State’s electoral vote. Such an event is almost unthinkable, party politics being what they are. No elector has dared or chosen to break his pledge since 1796 when Samuel Miles, a Federalist elector in Pennsylvania, voted for Thomas Jefferson instead of John Adams. Faithless Elector Miles is unique.

Other circumstances under which a state’s electoral vote can be but seldom is split are: 1) when two weak parties join forces and present a fusion ticket sharing the electoral votes according to a predetermined arrangement, 2) When enough voters go out of their way to “scratch” the names of individual electors.