Policy point-counterpoint: electoral college reform.

• Author: Wheeler, Sarah M.

Although most Americans learned about the Electoral College in high school and it was not the first time a candidate with fewer popular votes had won the presidency--John Quincy Adams vs. Andrew Jackson (1824), Rutherford B. Hayes vs. Samuel Tilden (1876), and Benjamin Harrison vs. Grover Cleveland (1888) (1)--it took the 2000 presidential election for many to encounter first-hand the potentially explosive situation posed by this unique system of selecting White House occupants. Although Vice President Al Gore, the Democratic nominee for president, won the popular vote with over a half million more votes than his Republican rival, a number of narrow victories in states with many electoral votes, particularly in hotly contested Florida, meant victory for George W. Bush. This occurred because in all but two states (Maine and Nebraska) the victor receives all of the state's electoral votes, regardless of the margin of victory.

To further complicate matters, the U.S. Supreme Court decided the outcome of the election in Florida, an intervention peculiarly at odds with the Court's previous decisions that the equal protection clause in the Fourteenth Amendment could only be applied to cases concerning racial discrimination. The Court held that the recount by hand in some regions of Florida was not valid because there was no uniformity in how the ballots were being determined; in some areas a hanging or bulging chad may be counted for any presidential candidate on the ballot but in others it may not count. This was ruled a violation of the equal protection clause in the Fourteenth Amendment. (2) The Court thus upheld the earlier decision by Florida's secretary of state declaring Bush the winner in that state in order to allow Florida to meet its obligation to announce its electors and their corresponding votes for Bush. This decision received much criticism for its lack of concordance with precedence. In his dissent, Associate Justice John Paul Stevens declared the "loser" in the election to be "the nation's confidence in the judge as an impartial guardian of the rule of law." (3) Predictably, this produced much debate over the merits of the Electoral College. Not surprisingly, the Court's 5-4 decision was seen by Gore supporters to reek of partisanship. In the heated aftermath of the contested 2000 presidential contest, Gallup Polls showed a decided lack of support for the Electoral College. In fact, such sentiment reached its highest level since Richard M. Nixon's narrow victory over Hubert H. Humphrey...