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This being a presidential election year, we will hear the usual cries for reform of the Electoral College, that 18th-century mechanism which has on several occasions, most recently in 2000, put a president in the White House even though he lost the popular vote. And in Colorado, we will hear that we can help reform this system by passing Amendment 36.
As it is, our electoral votes, like those in 47 other states, are apportioned on a winner-take-all basis. If a candidate won this year with 921,341 votes to his opponent's 921,340 votes, he'd get all nine electoral votes. We get nine because each state gets as many electoral votes as it has senators (two) and representatives (seven, since the 2000 census).
The winner-take-all system seems unfair and unreasonable, and two states, Nebraska and Maine, do it differently. The candidate gets an electoral vote for each congressional district that he carries, and the statewide winner gets two more electoral votes.
This method seems more in keeping with the spirit of the Founding Fathers, although we should keep in mind that they were suspicious of direct democracy. Of the three branches of government -- executive, judicial, legislative -- only one half of the legislative branch, the House of Representatives, was directly elected by the people under the original federal constitution.
Senators were selected by state legislatures, judges were appointed by the president and confirmed by the senate, and the president and vice-president were chosen by the Electoral College, which was in turn chosen by state legislatures.
There are frequent reform proposals to replace the Electoral College with a direct popular vote, but that won't happen, since it would take a constitutional amendment.
The Electoral College favors states with small populations. For instance, each Wyoming elector represents 166,200 people, whereas each California elector represents 638,500. Thus a Wyoming voter is nearly four times as influential as a California voter. A constitutional amendment requires ratification by 38 states, and there are at least 13 small states which would not ratify a provision to reduce their power and influence.
So Colorado's reformers are trying a different course.
Amendment 36 on our ballot (I was tempted to write our
November ballot,
but we now have an election
season
instead of an election day
) would divide
Colorado's electoral votes in proportion to the popular
vote.
That sounds good in theory, but how would it work in practice? In other words, would it make presidential campaigns pay more attention to us and promise more pork to worthy Colorado projects?
No, because the most a candidate could get here would be a couple of electoral votes, and the campaigns would put their energy in more promising locations.
This would be true even in landslide years. The two biggest in my memory are Democrat Lyndon Johnson in 1964 and Republican Ronald Reagan in 1984.
Colorado had six electoral votes in 1964, and LBJ got 61.3 percent of the popular vote. He would have received four electoral votes instead of six. We had eight electoral votes in 1984, and Reagan, with 63.4 percent of the popular vote, would have received five. It's hard to imagine any campaigning by Johnson or Reagan which would have increased their electoral votes from Colorado, and so the Centennial State wouldn't have been worth their trouble.
The polls predict a close race this year. So if Amendment 36 were in effect, there would be five votes for John F. Kerry and four for George W. Bush, or vice versa.
Bush could return and promise to pave every wilderness area, require high-school graduates to recite Leviticus, ban mass transportation, invade Iran and Syria simultaneously, and otherwise please certain Coloradans -- and he'd be unlikely to pick up another electoral vote. Just about any way you cut it, Colorado's electoral vote would be split 5-4, and all the campaigning would be about that vote.
One vote is not going to be worth a candidate's attention. Amendment 36 might make sense if other states chose electors that way. But they don't, and so it's just a way to make Colorado even more irrelevant in national politics. We have little-enough clout with nine votes in play; we would be insignificant with only one up for grabs, and that's what Amendment 36 would give us.
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