This is the second installment of the series entitled "Race for the Presidency." Please take time to read the first entry before reading this one if you have not already as this entry will pick up right were yesterday's left off. In the first installment Connie White, our guest author for this series, discussed the role of the Electoral College in political elections. Today, she further reveals the "winner-take-all" system as it relates to American presidential elections and what that system means for our democracy (or lack thereof).
The "winner-take-all" system re elector votes for any given state makes it possible that a candidate could be elected president even though he or she polls fewer popular votes than the opponent. Under this "winner-take-all" system, if a candidate receives a minority of the popular votes nationally but carries a sufficient number of states to ensure a majority of the electoral votes, the candidate would be elected president, and the "will of the majority" would be frustrated through the legal and normal operation of the Electoral College. Critics point to the dispute caused by the election of 1876 and also to the election of 1888, in which Grover Cleveland, the defeated candidate, polled 5,540,050 popular votes to 5,444,337 for Benjamin Harrison. The "president"
according to popular votes should have been Cleveland. However, Cleveland received only 168 electoral votes to Harrison's 233. ("Electoral College," Microsoft Encarta Online Encyclopedia 2000)
Since the Electoral College was established in the Constitution by the "founding fathers," we must understand that the "founding fathers" had no intention of allowing the "will of the majority" to prevail as it relates to electing the president of the United States. Understanding the economic interests and political loyalties of electors in the Electoral College is not separate from understanding the political history of the U.S. Constitution, and the constitutional convention of the "founding fathers."
The "original intent" of the framers of the Constitution of the United States was to present limited, but largely symbolic, political power in the House of Representatives, while investing actual political power, and ultimate authority, in the Senate. The intentions of the "founding fathers" in framing the U.S. Constitution could easily be summed up in understanding that "the delegates to the federal Convention were selected in the same fashion as were United States Senators under the present Constitution.... This fact in itself removed the choice of delegates one degree from the electorate. ***** A further safeguard against the injection of too much popular feeling into the choice of delegates to the Convention was afforded by the property qualifications generally placed on voters and members of the legislatures by the state constitutions and laws in force in 1787." (Charles Beard, "An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States," MacMillan Publishing Co., Inc. 1913) The "founding fathers" did not "trust" the country to be determined by "mob-rule" -— that is, by direct, participatory democratic procedure. Slavery, the lack of enfranchisement of property-less men and all women of the populace, was written into the original Constitution. The question to be asked, and answered, is: what people are represented by the U.S. Constitution and what people are proposed to be governed by it?
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