WASHINGTON, DC-- The split result in the 2000 general election for president has renewed calls to scrap the Electoral College, the 18th century system that enables state party cronies, rather than the nation's voters, to elect the president of the United States. Senator Richard J. Durbin, (D-IL) said that the Electoral College is a "dinosaur that should be retired to a museum." (Of course, the republic itself should be retired to a museum, and the Electoral College is just the strongest evidence that such a course of action is the only reasonable way out of this presidential mess).

Senator Durbin has proposed amending the Constitution and providing for the direct election of the president. And his proposal is likely to get serious attention in the years ahead, now that a modern-day candidate stands to lose the presidency despite winning the most votes. When the Electoral College meets December 18th, it appears that George W. Bush will have the necessary 270 electoral votes to be elected to the presidency, even though Gore won the popular vote by a margin of about 336,000 votes. Nonetheless, the vice president and his top aides have said that they will abide by the Electoral College outcome. "It is the winner of the Electoral College who will be our next president," Gore said in Nashville. "Our constitution ... must be followed faithfully." This only highlights the anti-democratic nature of the Constitution of 1787, and calls for its amendment to abolish the Electoral College are like calls for patching a road full of potholes, instead of merely resurfacing it completely: The outcome will still be a bumpy ride for advocates of a democratic, pluralistic America.

The popular vote is virtually an exercise in futility. It is up to the 538 electors of the Electoral College to elect the president, and every last elector is chosen by the officials of the state parties, generally based upon their hardcore loyalty to their party, regardless of the national interest. Of course, the real beginning of this current trend towards polarization between the Democrats and the Republicans started when President Clinton was impeached and put on trial in the Senate for lying. (For those who think that the President's impeachment was based on his personal misconduct, they should look closer at the record, because it was quite clear that his impeachment was not being based on his affair with the intern, but on the fact that he lied about it under oath.)

On December 18th the electors will assemble in the state capitals, where the cronies of the two fixed political parties will vote along a strict partisan line for the president, regardless of the popular vote. It is the partisan extremism of the Electoral College that led to the coining of the term "faithless elector," for electors who refuse to vote with their party, but instead vote according to their conscience. The ballots cast by the College, in turn, are forwarded to the president of the U.S. Senate, who happens to be Vice President Gore, who will certify them January 6th, 2001.

Since 1948 there have been seven electors who refused to be strong-armed by their parties, and chose instead to cast votes that they intended to make a political statement. Most of these seven individuals were afterwards shunned by their party comrades, exhibiting the real fanaticism of party loyalty when it comes to the way the political parties operate. The only exception was Margarette Leach, who in 1988 cast her Electoral College vote for the Vice Presidential nominee instead of the Presidential nominee, Michael Dukakis. Leach was elected in November, 2000, to a fourth term in the West Virginia House of Delegates. She said that she wanted to demonstrate the potential dangers inherent in the institution of the Electoral College, in which most of the members are not legally bound to vote for the candidate who won the popular vote. "I don't think many people are aware what a dangerous way this is to elect a president," Leach, 73, said in a telephone interview from her home. (Actually, most Americans had never even HEARD of the Electoral College until the general election of 2000, believing instead that they actually elected the president of the United States when they entered the voting booth. The next four years will be full of disillusionment, as the American people come to terms with the fact that their country is not a democracy.)

Legal experts, of course, disagree on the issue of an elector's legal obligation to vote for their party's nominee. Half the states, including California, have laws requiring electors to vote for the state's popular vote winner. However, no so-called "faithless elector" has ever been prosecuted under any of these laws, which probably would be ruled unconstitutional if any of them ever reached the Supreme Court of the United States. The Constitution of the republic has no such requirement, that electors cast their ballots for the winner of the popular vote. Indeed, some legal experts said that it was understood that electors are free to make their own decisions.

"The Constitution did not intend them to be potted plants," said Yale University law professor Akhil Amar, referring to the members of the Electoral College. "It is permissible for them to decide they will follow the nation's will rather than their state's majority. It is possible to imagine three of 271 electors deciding this is not quite right and switching their votes. But that is also unlikely. They are chosen for their political loyalty." One Republican Bush elector even went so far as to declare that even if they lit him on fire, he would vote for Bush.

American University professor James Thurber said "theoretically, it could happen" that one or more Republican electors could vote for Gore. "There is no absolute [Constitutional] requirement to vote with your party." But there is strong tradition, as well as individual loyalty, and powerful suggestions of punitive retribution the party may exact on "faithless" electors, all of which tends to influence electors to vote with their states and their political parties.

Many academic critics have openly said that the Electoral College is archaic, and constitutes a peril to democracy in the United States, which should be abolished. In 1787, the framers of the Constitution were unwilling to let ordinary people choose the president. "They didn't trust the people," said Vanderbilt University law professor Suzanna Sherry. "They want a filtered 'democracy.' The people would elect prominent citizens who would actually deliberate and choose the president."

Amar, the Yale law professor, said that the Electoral College has a more sordid history. "It was intended to prop up the slavery system. In a direct election, the North (New York, Pennsylvania, etc.) would overwhelm the South." (The northern states being more populated. However, it is important to remember that slavery was a legal institution in the North until it was abolished in 1864, and even at the time of the Civil War there were over a thousand slaves in the North.)

By counting slaves as three-fifths of a person (without granting them any rights to vote), the Southern states, notably Virginia, (home to such luminaries as Thomas Jefferson and George Washington, persons with substantial investments in slaves), dominated the presidency. Today defenders of the Electoral College declare that its real value is that it gives small states a voice in elections, by forcing candidates to campaign in remote corners of the country, but when considering the fact that the origins of the Electoral College were fixed for the purpose of rigging the presidency to support legal slavery in America, it throws an entirely new light on the whole Constitution of 1787 itself, as a device not designed to give Americans freedom, but to guarantee the control of the new government to the elite of the upper classes.

SOURCE: This article was written exclusively by the CNS for the World FREE Internet. Information for this article was obtained from a 9 November, 2000, article in the Los Angeles Times, Orange County Edition, entitled, "Electoral College's Critics Have Exhibit A," by David G. Savage, a Times Staff Writer.