Popular vote doesn't decide US election

IN the 2000 US presidential election, Democratic candidate Al Gore garnered 540,000 more votes nationwide than Republican George W. Bush.

Yet Bush was the ultimate winner because, in the end, he was awarded the most electoral votes.

Though the US is considered the world's preeminent democracy, the American "people" do not directly elect their president. Instead, the US constitution calls for states to choose "electors" who do the actual electing. It's known as the Electoral College.

Each state is allotted electors equal to their congressional delegations - meaning there are 538 electors in total (435 representatives and 100 senators, plus three for the District of Columbia). A candidate needs at least 270 electoral votes to win.

In 48 US states, the candidate with the most popular votes - by even the slimmest margin - wins all the state's electoral votes.

Maine and Nebraska allot electoral votes by who won particular congressional districts.

Harvard University political science Professor Alex Keyssar, a critic of the Electoral College system, says the framers of the US constitution did not have a model for how to choose a president. They also had a "traditional aristocratic fear of the people" and were hesitant to enfranchise them. They didn't think the citizenry was informed enough to make important political choices, so an "elite" would do it for them.

In the nation's 56 presidential elections to date, including in 2000, there have been four in which a candidate lost the popular vote, but still became president.

In 1824, John Quincy Adams became president even though Andrew Jackson won nearly 40,000 more popular votes. The House of Representatives made the decision after none of the four presidential contenders had enough electoral votes to win.

In 1876, Samuel Tilden won nearly two million more popular votes than Rutherford Hayes, but a congressional commission, deciding along party lines, gave the election to Hayes in the wake of an inquiry into voting irregularities.

In 1888, Benjamin Harrison garnered 93,000 more popular votes than Grover Cleveland, but the Electoral College nevertheless voted in favour in of Cleveland.

And, in 2000, the US Supreme Court ruled 5-4 to end the Florida recount and give all of Florida's 25 electoral votes to George W. Bush, thus delivering him the presidency.

Many regard the Electoral College to be an anachronism and would replace it with a national popular vote.

Keyssar says that the Electoral College makes a mockery of the "one person, one vote" system the country extols. Furthermore, it causes candidates to concentrate primarily on swing states, turning the majority of states into bystanders. (The current swing states are Colorado, Iowa, Florida, North Carolina, Ohio, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Wisconsin and New Hampshire.)

Keyssar acknowledges that in the case of voter irregularities, a nationwide recount would be a much larger undertaking than in a single state.

But the professor says the current system arguably offers a much larger "inducement to fraud" because altering a few thousand votes in a certain state could change the entire outcome of the election.

For example, had John Kerry won Ohio in the 2004 election, which he nearly did, the Electoral College would have delivered him the presidency, even though incumbent George W. Bush had 3 million more popular votes nationwide.

The Electoral College also has its strong backers in the US, including Tara Ross, a conservative lawyer and author of Enlightened Democracy: The Case for the Electoral College.

Ross says the Electoral College diminishes the potential impact of voter fraud or complications of razor-close outcomes by isolating the problem to smaller geographic units.

Anyone trying to manipulate an election has to "steal the right vote at the right place at the right time", she says, whereas with a national public vote, every stolen vote would count.

Ross also refutes the argument that the current system forces candidates to focus only on swing states.

"There is no such thing as a permanently safe district," Ross says, pointing to Virginia and New Hampshire, once Republican strongholds that are up for grabs in the 2012 presidential race between incumbent Barack Obama, a Democrat, and his Republican rival Mitt Romney.

What's more, she says, the current system forces candidates to appeal to a wider variety of voter because there is "not one kind of swing state". Candidates will tailor their campaigns to fit the rules of the game, Ross says, but it's unrealistic to think they would canvas every single corner of the country.

While the idea of "one person, one vote" may "feel good", Ross expects that in a national popular vote system, the candidates would go directly to the large population centres, bypassing even more of the electorate than they do now.

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