George Will: Dumping the Electoral College Would Be a Mistake

George F. Will, in Newsweek (Aug. 30, 2004):

November's most portentous vote is not for president. It is Colorado's vote on abandoning, beginning this year, the winner-take-all allocation of the state's electoral votes. Instead, they would be divided according to each candidate's percentage of the popular vote.

This is a pernicious proposal, and not merely because one of its aims is partisan: if Colorado had had this system in 2000, its eight (now nine) electoral votes would have gone to Bush 5-3 instead of 8-0 and the six-vote swing would have elected Gore. The Colorado proposal, which may be a precursor of a nationwide drive to scrap the electoral-vote system, ignores how that system nurtures crucial political virtues.

Winner-take-all allocation is a state choice, not a constitutional mandate, but 48 states have made it. Maine and Nebraska allocate one electoral vote to the winner of each congressional district and award the two votes for the state's senators to the candidate who wins the statewide popular vote.

America's constitutional system aims not merely for majority rule but for rule by certain kinds of majorities. It aims for majorities suited to moderate, consensual governance of a heterogeneous, continental nation with myriad regional and other diversities. All 537 persons elected to national offices—the president, vice president, 100 senators and 435 representatives—are chosen by majorities that reflect the nation's federal nature. They are elected by majorities within states or within states' congressional districts.

American majorities are not spontaneous; they are built. A two-party system builds moderate majorities by assembling them from coalitions of minorities. In multiparty systems, parties proliferate, each representing intense minorities. Then a group of parties strives to govern through (often unstable) coalitions improvised after the election.

A two-party system is buttressed by an electoral system that handicaps minor parties by electing a single person from each jurisdiction, chosen by majority or plurality. In presidential elections, states are the jurisdictions. So in 1992 Ross Perot won 18.9 percent of the popular vote but carried no state and won no electoral votes. Bill Clinton's 43 percent of the popular vote won him 68.8 percent of the electoral votes. In 1912 Woodrow Wilson's 41.8 percent of the popular vote produced a strong presidency based on 81.9 percent of the electoral votes.

If the proposed Colorado system had been used everywhere in 1992, Clinton would have led with just 236 electoral votes and the House would have selected the president. The House also would have selected in 1948 and 1968. Political scientist Judith Best notes that the electoral-vote system, combined with winner-take-all allocation, creates a "distribution condition." Candidates cannot just pile up popular votes in the most populous states. They must win many states, because legitimacy, and the capacity to govern this extensive republic, involves more than crude arithmetic....