Mimsy Were the Borogoves

Nobody Likes the Electoral System

Jerry Stratton
Wednesday, November 8, 2000

I just biked into the office after staying up to 1:30 in the morning watching Peter Jennings mangle the election returns. When I went to sleep, Nobody was the winner, and as I write this Nobody is still in control of the 2000 U.S. elections. Damn, it’s cold in San Diego this morning!

When it looked like Gore was going to win the electoral count but lose the popular vote, talk was about how the “archaic” electoral system ought to be scrapped. Then, it looked as though Bush was going to win both. When it looked like Gore was going to lose the electoral count but win the popular vote, up came the talk about how the electoral system is archaic again.

My dream election result right now would be for Bush to win, because if Gore loses this election as the electoral count currently stands, Gore loses to Nobody. I heard a lot of reasons for Gore’s loss back when it looked certain that he would lose: the electoral count, not enough distance from Clinton, his personal appearance, his manner of speech. All trying desperately to ignore that if Gore loses this election, he loses on the issues. He loses because he thought that he could ignore one of his core constituencies. He thought that he could turn his back on environmentalism; when that looked certain to fail, instead of appealing to Green voters on issues, he tried to scare them into voting for him.

It almost worked--and it may work yet, which is why I hope Bush wins Florida. If Gore wins, it is politics as usual. You can ignore your core constituency because they have nowhere to go. If Gore loses, the challenge to Democrats is to go back to their core and win those votes back--hopefully through positive action rather than through the boogeyman scare tactics that Gore tried in the last days of the election.

When it became clear that Nader and the Green party were not going to pull the 5% tally they needed to gain federal dollars, news announcers quickly began writing them off as anything but a temporary spoiler in this election. This ignores that this is the third election in a row where the winner (whether it be Gore or Bush) wins with less than 50% of the popular vote cast. A majority of the voters wanted someone other than the winner as their president.

Because it is so difficult for the major parties to focus on issues, the worst result of this election might end up being the scrapping of the electoral system. A straight popular vote would have completely marginalized the Green effect on this election, and while that helped the Republicans this time around, I’m sure they’d love to marginalize the Libertarian effect on their own close races.

The electoral system is not archaic. This election shows exactly what the electoral system was meant to accomplish: it ensures that regional issues cannot be ignored wholesale. Candidates with regional significance can still make a difference in national elections. If Gore had not assumed that his core constituency would come through based on politics of fear, New Hampshire would have gone his way. Oregon is still in flux, but with Bush slightly ahead, Gore’s politics of fear may cost him those electoral votes as well. And with good old Florida and its 25 electoral votes currently sitting at 1,805 votes in favor of Bush, those 96,698 Green votes must be especially galling to Gore and his politics of fear.

The challenge for the Democrats is to face up to why they lost this election (or almost lost it, depending). If they recognize that they have to appeal to their voters through actions rather than fear, then Nobody wins with a capital ‘N’. But if they simply use this as an excuse to drop the electoral system and continue politics as usual then nobody really wins and everybody loses.

The only vote that counts is a swing vote, whether it is a vote for Nobody, or his Bokonist brother Ralph Nader. We’ll see whether the Democrats take the environment into account in Oregon and Florida in the next four years.

The whole point was to give the electoral college the final say. In this case, the stupid custom of “winner take all” is blocking democracy.

That was neither the whole point nor even a tiny part of it. The point of the electoral college was to give less populous states a greater say in presidential elections. Our current presidential elections are actually far closer to direct democracy than the founders intended, for two reasons. First, the electors were not required to be chosen by direct vote of the people. Second, and more important, is that as population has increased House representation has also increased, which in turn increased the effect of populous states in the elections. (The electoral count of a state is their House representation plus their Senate representation. Their Senate representation is always 2, no matter how large or small the state.) The +2 to the electoral count was a much greater “damper” on the population count in earlier times than it is today.

And I’d like to add that the winner-take-all electoral count is very important to us “Nobody” voters. If it weren’t for the electoral system as it currently stands, the Green party would have had no effect whatsoever on this election. Gore would not even have had to pretend to take environmental and other Green issues into account in the last days of the election.

The electoral winner-take-all system is a brilliant means of making regional issues count in the presidential election. It means that candidates of merely regional significance can still have an effect on the national vote. It means that candidates like Nader can turn important issues such as the environment into “swing” issues.

The winner-take-all system brings politics closer to the individual by making local issues count. It protects the rights of minority voters far better than a direct vote could ever hope to do. If anything, we as supporters of “Nobody for President” should support strengthening the electoral system, not weakening it. The +2 electoral addition to each state should be increased across the board to offset the effect of greater population on the number of House seats.

In a directly-elected president, “Nobody for President” will be much less effective than it is now under our winner-take-all electoral system.

Anyone who supports any of the third parties should be thankful for the winner-take-all electoral system. Without it, they’d be even less effective than they are today. Perot had a strong effect in 1992 and 1996, and Nader had a strong effect this week. In 1992, Clinton moved to the right to court Perot voters. In a direct election, he would not have cared as much. Hopefully today, the Democrats will move back to actually taking their core constituencies (such as environmentalists) into account.

If Gore loses this election, he did not lose this election because of the winner-take-all system. Gore lost because he tried to use scare tactics on Green voters instead of taking their issues to heart. Florida would not be an issue at all if Green voters had felt that Gore was a good candidate for them. Nader’s 90,000 votes dwarf the currently 2,000-vote ‘lead’ by Bush.