Measured by the age of its constitution, the oldest nation on the face of the Earth is The Most Serene Repubic of San Marino.
San Marino, a tiny, landlocked enclave, completely surrounded by Italy, has an area of 23.5 sq. mi. and a population of about 30,000. Its constitution has been continually in effect since 1600.
The capital city of San Marino is surrounded by medieval mountaintop castles. It's the stuff of legends and princesses and fairy tales.
What is the second oldest nation on Earth? Which is the oldest major country? And what does any of this have to do with abolishing the U.S. Electoral College and replacing it with direct election of the President and Vice President?
The answer below the fold.....
With all due deference to San Marino, arguably the oldest major country on the planet is The United States of America, with our current constitution effective 1797. (For curiosity's sake, the U.S. is followed by Norway: 1814, then The Netherlands, Belguim, and Luxumburg, according to The CIA World Factbook.) Anglophiles may point to the fact that the United Kingdom has no constitution, or has, as scholars say, an unwritten constitution dating back to the last major constitutional upheaval, the Glorious Revolution of 1688-89, as possibly affecting the ordering of these rankings.
The seniority of the U.S. constitution is an important point to bear in mind for those who may desire to eliminate the Electoral College. And, should you be one of those, you will find yourself in good company among vocal advocates for the system's abolishment, including the late Washington Post editorial cartoonist, Herblock, who mounted a multi-decade campaign from his bully pulpit on the Op-Ed pages of the Post, as well as the New York Times and the American Bar Association.
And the reason that the seniority of the U.S. Constitution is so critical here, is that: As long as the U.S. Constitution remains in effect, the electoral college system will persist, essentially in its current form. The only way to eliminate the electoral college is to overturn the Constitution.
Note to Federal Law Enforcement Officials and other interested parties: The diarist is, in no way, advocating the overturning of the U.S. Constitution nor the overthrow of the Government by any means, peaceful or otherwise, by any parties, domestic or foreign. He is simply attempting to build an academic case that it is impossible to abolish or materially change the Electoral College system by constitutional means, and that any efforts or arguments in favor of doing so merely represent a waste of time and energy.
Bottom line? Love it or hate it, the Electoral College is here to stay.
Electoral College Background
We have a federal democracy in the U.S. This means, essentially, that democracy is implemented at the state level. In one of the more thoughtful and comprehensive modern-day defenses of the Electoral College system, Martin Diamond states that:
In fact, presidential elections are already just about as democratic as they can be. We already have one-man, one-vote -- but in the states. Elections are as freely and democratically contested as elections can be -- but in the states. Victory always goes democratically to the winner of the raw popular vote -- but in the states. The label given to the proposed reform, "direct popular election," is a misnomer; the elections have already become as directly popular as they can be -- but in the states. Despite all their democratic rhetoric, the reformers do not propose to make our presidential elections more directly democratic, they only propose to make them more directly national, by entirely removing the states from the electoral process. Democracy thus is not the question regarding the Electoral College, federalism is: should our presidential elections remain in part federally democratic, or should we make them completely nationally democratic?
The federalist system was implemented by the Founders primarily to protect the interests of the smaller states, and in turn to empower those smaller states to ratify the constitution and join the Union. It was a compromise reached in order to guarantee that the larger states would not dominate the new country's polical agenda, rendering the smaller states subordinate, powerless and irrelevant. Balance is ensured by giving the smaller states a proportionately greater voice in the government.
Built-in Imbalance
Today, California is the largest state by population and Wyoming is the smallest. California has 616K residents per each of its fifty-five electoral votes, while individual Wyoming voters yield considerably more electoral muscle at a ratio of only 165K:1.
The Electoral College is not the only manifestation of Federalist Democracy causing an imbalance of electoral power among the states. The membership of the Senate, where California and Wyoming each have two votes, is an even more egregious example. Wyoming has one senator per 247K residents; California has one per 16,936K. Why is there not an uprising of the citizenry against this apparently blatant affront to democracy? It is an interesting question.
Consider a hypothetical, simple model of the United States, where Party A represents the interests of the twenty-five largest states and Party B represents the twenty-five smallest. In this scenario, the Senate is split 50/50, with Party A's senators representing 235 million Americans while Party B's senators represent only 46 million.
The system is obviously unfair when viewed from a national perspective, but where is the outcry? It could be that the Senate composition is so ingrained into our conscousness, representing a day-to-day fact of life, that we have just come to assume and accept its existence, whereas the Electoral College seems to lie dormant for four years, and then burst upon our collective attention like an emergence of a massive brood of periodical cicada, causing pandemonium that dies out quickly after the presidential election.
Constitutional Amendment
Article V of the Constitution spells out the process to amend it. Simply put, two-thirds of the both houses of Congress must vote to propose an amendment, then three-fourths of the state legislatures must vote to ratify it. Today, as in the late 1700s, the Electoral College benefits the smaller states to the detriment of the larger states. Since state legislatures can be expected to vote in the self-interest of their respective states, California is a sure vote for amendement and Wyoming a certain vote against. What about the states in between? Is it possible to garner the thirty-eight states needed? In an attempt to answer that question, the following table assigns to each state an Electoral Muscle Index (EMI) value representing the state's relative influence under the Electoral College. An EMI above 1.00 represents more power under the Electoral College system than in direct national election, whereas EMIs under 1.00 represent less than median electoral power under the current system, with an EMI of 1.10 suggesting a 10% advantage under the electoral college system as compared with direct national election, etc. EMI is calculated as national average residents per electoral vote (443K), divided by state residents per electoral vote.
The model predicts only thirty-three votes for the amendment, with thirty-eight needed to ratify. However, the real number of Yes votes is thirty-two, because, despite the table, Utah is a certain vote against. The (purely self-serving) reason is that Utah is likely to gain an additional house seat and, thus, an electoral vote in a proposed deal to grant voting representation in Congress to the District of Columbia. Completion of this compromise would change Utah's EMI from a virtual wash of 0.993 to a decided advantage under the Electoral College of 1.190.
So it is apparent that it would be practically impossible to ratify a constitutional amdendment to change the Electoral College system.
Is it possible to convince states to exhibit altruism and vote against their own interests? In the extreme examples of the smallest states, changing to direct election would be tantamount to political suicide. It is very difficult to envision states taking that route. What about the fence sitters, the six states voting Yes with the lowest EMIs? These states are Iowa, Nevada, New Mexico, West Virginia, Nebraska and Idaho.
Nebraska is a possibility, since it has already shown propensity towards a more distributed distribution of votes. However, no such motivation is apparent in the other cases. It stretches the imagination to project Idaho, with an EMI advantage of more than 37%, ever voting to ratify. In fact, these five or six state legislatures (and even some who might gain a slight comparative advantage in direct elecion (the 1.000 to 0.950 group) would be more likely to fail to ratify based on general constitutional conservatism and appeals from smaller states to eschew tyranny of the majority. Prospects for amendment appear remote to hopeless.
Note: Article V is yet another example of election-by-state Federalism. The same philosophy that bore the imbalanced Electoral College system stands guard over it for eternity with an imbalanced constitutional amendment procedure.
Other Approaches to Change
For those who insist on pursuing change in the system, the greatest hope probably lies in changing state law.
Article II, Section 1 of the Constitution states:
Each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors, equal to the whole Number of Senators and Representatives to which the State may be entitled in the Congress:
This is interpreted as allowing each state legislature to determine how their electoral votes are to be allocated. Currently, each state employs a winner of the popular vote within the state takes all, except for Nebraska and Maine, which both allocate the votes by congressional district.
Even more revolutionary allocations have been proposed, most notably the effort described in the book Every Vote Equal, 2006, by John R. Koza et al., which proposes an interstate compact through which each state pledges to assign its electoral votes to the winner of the national popular vote, regardless of whether or not that state's popular vote corresponded to the national winner. The compact would be passed by individual state legislatures, but would not become effective until adopted into law by a number of states representing a majority of electoral votes. The effort effectively represents an "end run" around having to amend the Constitution in order to implement national direct election.
According to the web site tracking the progress of implementing the book's premise, NationalPopularVote.com, Hawaii, Illinois, Maryland and New Jersey, together representing 50 electoral votes, or 19% of the 270 needed to enact the law, have passed the measure so far. That site also claims wide support among the public at large and within other state legislatures, with the measure having passed at least one house in nine additional states. It is interesting to note that the above model predicts that, among the four adopting states, Hawaii should have been opposed to direct election.
Looking at this effort mathematically, it would only need to be passed by the eleven largest states, California through North Carolina, in order to ensure the 270 electoral votes needed to carry any presidential election. Indeed, this is a much lower hurdle to clear than the thirty-eight states required for amendment. Note that passage would not mean that these eleven states' will would be imposed -- only that the President would be elected by national popular vote, without having had to amend the Constitution (assuming that the change passed all inevitable legal challenges).
To Change, or Not To Change?
As any cynic would expect, whether a person or group supports or opposes the Electoral College is often in direct correlation to their perceived, short-term political advantage from said position. Conservative blogger Doug Payton nabbed our own Kos in a seemingly embarrassing, He was for it before he was against it flip-flop. Concerning Colorado's June 2004 proposal to allocate EVs by congressional district, Kos posted:
The move is brilliant. For one, every state should allocate EVs in this manner.
In 2007, when California legislators considered the same move, he accused Republicans of forking out the
big bucks to try and game the system to their advantage.
Certainly, the argument that every American should have an equal voice is inherently appealing to our sense of fairness. And the great boogeyman that change proponents forebode for centuries -- that the winner of the popular vote by a non-insignificant margin would lose the electoral vote -- manifested itself in 2000 when Al Gore won the popular vote by a margin of 0.49% over George W. Bush, although the just enumeration of the electoral vote outcome is far from universally acknowledged. This was, by far, the greatest percentage win in U.S. history that resulted in an electoral college loss. In fact, Diamond used the projected microscopic chance of this ever happening as an argument against changing the system in his 1978 thesis:
Not only has the discrepency not occured for nearly a century, but no one even suggests that it is ever likely to occur save by a very small margin. The margin in the last actual occurrence, in 1888, was of minute proportions; and the imaginary "near misses" -- those horrendous hypotheticals -- are always in the range of zero to one-tenth of 1 percent.
Furthermore, there is general agreement that other perceived original reasons for the Electoral College -- namely the slow and unreliable communications of the eighteenth century and the need to place state legislatures and independent electors between an uneducated public and the nation's highest offices, have largely been overcome by events.
Still, to the extent that one values Federalism (or not -- as this diarist has long suspected that the States themselves, as political entities have outlasted their usefulness -- but that is a subject for another diary), the stance that small states' rights merit protection from being trampled by the overwhelming scale of the larger states is as valid today as it was at the Constitution Convention of 1787.
A New Twenty-First Century Relevance
But let me introduce an even, I believe, more important rationale for keeping the system as it is. This reason has not been extensively discussed in the literature and is an argument that is even more applicable to today's environment than it was at the founding. That is, that we need the Electoral College today to prevent the domination of the large metropolitan areas over the smaller cities, towns and rural areas. Today's U.S. population is much more urbanized than that of centuries past. The biggest ten metropolitan areas in the U.S., together, have a population of over 79 million, or more than 35% of the total population of the country.
The Electoral College forces the presidential campaigns to go to the hinterlands. It was thrilling to see Obama build campaign organizations, state-by-state, all across the nation. He personally visited almost every state (including during the primary season). The Electoral College turns the country into a giant chessboard with kings, queens, knights and bishops (or, presidential candidates, vice presidential candidates, spouses and surrogates) spreading out in a mad dash across the continent. A direct election would likely be a battle for the big 10 metropolitan areas, possibly leaving on the sidelines, nearly forgotten, such cities as Detroit, San Francisco, Phoenix and Seattle -- and to the nearly certain and complete exclusion of American heartland locales like Milwaukee, Portland (yes and yes), Flagstaff, Cedar Rapids, and Birmingham.
The map, below, shows the campaign appearances by John McCain and Barack Obama between September 1, 2008 and November 4, 2008.
Compare that to how a campaign centering on the top 10 metropolitan areas might look (below):
I remember, many decades ago as a youngster, viewing a Herblock cartoon that depicted an elephant and donkey together, in nightclothes, in a big bed staring up with grave concern at rain pouring through their damaged ceiling, labeled The Electoral College -- above the caption:
Tomorrow we have to get that leaky roof fixed.
I recall nodding in sage agreement with his obviously logical position that something was broken and in desparate need of repair. Now, I am far less certain that anything is broken, or that we now know more than the Founders or are justified in considering their thinking obsolete. I have come full circle to the view that we are better off with the devil we know.
From the New York Packet
Friday, March 14, 1788
To the People of the State of New York
...
The process of election affords a moral certainty, that the office of President will never fall to the lot of any man who is not in an eminent degree endowed with the requisite qualifications. Talents for low intrigue, and the little arts of popularity, may alone suffice to elevate a man to the first honors in a single State; but it will require other talents, and a different kind of merit, to establish him in the esteem and confidence of the whole Union, or of so considerable a portion of it as would be necessary to make him a successful candidate for the distinguished office of President of the United States. It will not be too strong to say, that there will be a constant probability of seeing the station filled by characters pre-eminent for ability and virtue.
The Federalist Papers #68
by Publius (later revealed to be Alexander Hamilton)