Presidential Lottery (19 page)

Then, to prove that he was a politician, he asked quietly, “Would it help you with the commanding officer if I told him that … except for the signs … you had done a splendid job on this island?” I said it would.

As election officer for Espiritu Santo, I posted no more exhortations, made no more speeches, but on our election day, which came in mid-October, I think that every man on the island who really wanted to vote for either Roosevelt or Dewey did so. We made it difficult for them to find the voting booths, but they found them.

With this background I have reached certain conclusions about what we should do after we have abolished the Electoral College and House elections. I am not in favor of a direct popular vote for President. I fear that such a vote would be vulnerable to demagoguery, to wild fluctuations of public reaction, to hysteria generated by television, and to the tearing down of the old safeguards which have protected the various regions of our nation. A direct vote would hand too much leverage to the cities, and in spite of claims that it would be easy to administer, I judge that it would be rather difficult because of absentee ballots, the temptation to trickery, and
the tremendous pressures that would be placed upon certifying officials. Today, if the officials of State X run a crooked election, it affects the electoral vote of that state but can be otherwise quarantined. If State X’s corrupt votes were tossed into the general balloting, they might corrupt the entire procedure and bring our whole election system into discredit. Far from enhancing the legitimacy of the outcome, this would cast shadows upon it.

I am opposed to direct voting for another reason. I think there is much good in the electoral system. I prefer voting by states and allowing regions to exercise advantages which mere numbers would not give them. I hold this to be a part of the American genius, an invention which has helped hold us together when others have flown apart in sectionalism. The fact that direct voting would abolish this old tradition lessens the attractiveness of the new plan for me. Nor would it be as efficient as some claim. Senator Mundt is exaggerating, but not much, when he claims, “If the direct popular vote had been in operation in the 1968 election, we would not have known until late November who was going to be our next President, because of absentee ballots and the slowness of counting. The trading and pulling and uncertainty might have been with us until mid-December.”

Having made these objections, I must now confess that even though direct popular voting is not my first choice, I see much merit in the plan; and since it seems to be the choice of the vast majority of the American public, if the polls are to be believed, and since its sponsors are among the finest political minds of this nation, I am conceding no principle when I say
that if I cannot get the plan I want, I will want the one I can get. And certainly, if we had the option of either keeping our present plan with all its defects or adopting the new plan of direct voting, I would not hesitate a moment to opt for the latter. The technical imperfections of direct popular voting could be cleared up in time, I suppose, and as for the philosophical objection that the people might run wild at moments of hysteria, I would rather risk that inevitable concomitant of democracy than to surrender democracy itself.

Direct popular voting is, therefore, my second choice, and I would not lament if circumstances made it my first. I would be willing to work very hard to attain an amendment for such a vote, for this plan holds far more promise than it does danger.

The proportional plan seems to me an attack on the historic rights of states and regions. It not only reverses the present discrepancies but also magnifies them without offering just compensation in the way of increased effectiveness. Most serious is the likelihood that this plan would encourage the growth of numerous minority parties, and to this I am strongly opposed, due to my long experience in foreign nations which suffer from such proliferation. If Israel ultimately collapses, it will not be because of Arab pressure from the outside, but because she fosters such a bewildering number of contending parties within. The delays that would be involved in determining who had won an election would be both dangerous and frustrating. Senator Mundt’s strictures against the delay inherent in the direct popular vote would apply with even more relevancy here. When the total machinery, because
of its use of three decimal places, depends upon an absolutely accurate vote, how could we expect such a vote to be forthcoming quickly? I have not yet seen the proportional computations for the 1968 election, but they could not have been known with accuracy much before the second week in December, which was the earliest I was able to obtain final election figures from the fifty states. (The figures were released on December 13, 1968, but could, I suppose, have been speeded up had an election depended upon them. Also, I realize that by the time 90 per cent of the vote was in, clear patterns would have developed, but I also remember that in 1960 the proportional plan could not have produced a final result till well into December.)

I am afraid that proportionalism is an alluring concept for college sophomores, for it does speak to justice, equality, encouragement to minority groups, and many other laudable aims, but in a complex democracy like ours it does not seem to work, and the benefits which derive from it are more than offset by the disadvantages. I cannot imagine myself supporting an amendment which would introduce proportional voting, at least not until the many drawbacks which I see today had been eliminated. Having said this, I acknowledge that this plan would eliminate the Electoral College and the House election, two desirable accomplishments.

The district plan has much to commend it. It preserves many of the traditional balances of our nation and does not impose severe disadvantages on any type of state. The small swing in favor of the Republicans merely corrects an imbalance that has long operated in a contrary direction and does
not alarm me. The switch from urban advantage to rural does. I am suspicious of any change like that at this time, for it seems to me to fly into the face of contemporary history and therefore to be a real step backward, not toward sensible conservatism but toward a panic flight from reality. The real drawback to this plan, however, is the list of sponsors; one might say that if these gentlemen are for a bill, the rest of us ought to be against it. I do not feel that way. It appears to me that these hard-shell conservatives realize that change is inevitable and prefer to see it move somewhat in their direction rather than toward a direct popular vote, which to them smacks of too much democracy. They may be right. At any rate, I would by no means dismiss their proposal and would indeed work for it if my first two preferences were proved impractical of attainment. However, before I supported the plan its sponsors would have to correct two errors that at present disqualify it. On
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I said that if any proposed plan fails to abolish both the College and the House election, “it should be discarded at once.” The present proposal keeps these two anachronisms but hedges them about with just enough safeguards so that many voters would be reassured. I would not. On
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I have explained why I could sponsor neither. Therefore, this proposal would have to jettison the Electoral College and House-Senate election before I could sponsor it. If John C. Calhoun were alive today, I suppose he would support this plan as it is, and there I would part company with him.

By elimination, then, I find myself supporting the automatic plan as revised. In essence this is the electoral plan we now
have, minus the College, which is abolished, with election permitted at 40 per cent of the electoral vote, and with a run-off election if no candidate wins that percentage. Its unchanged features have been historically proven. It is about as close to a true democracy as we shall get, or ought to get, and it is just. I prefer having the states retain their electoral votes, even though imbalances occur among them, and in spite of Senator Smith’s ridicule, I like the fact that this electoral vote magnifies the margins of victory. It is good, I think, that the Presidential election, which might degenerate into a vast national brawl, is broken into segments of manageable size. I am by strong persuasion a Democrat, but I have never believed in a raw democracy of merely adding up total votes. I believe in a system whereby we elect officials, such as senators and representatives, to whom we delegate the responsibility of governing for us; by extension I favor a system of selecting our President whereby each state has its own leverage and in which the two major political parties play a significant role.

I have considered carefully two weaknesses in the automatic plan. First, election by only 40 per cent of the electoral vote is vastly different from election by 40 per cent of the popular vote and introduces factors which I am not able at this time to assess. Permitting a candidate to become President when he has won less than a majority of the popular vote has become so common in our political life that it is an established tradition, and an accepted one. I have already shown that five times in this century, from Wilson to Nixon, men have been so elected; in the preceding century the same
thing happened ten times: J. Q. Adams, Polk, Taylor, Buchanan, Lincoln 1860, Hayes, Garfield, Cleveland, Harrison, Cleveland. I do not see how anyone could complain of a tradition which has worked so well.

But when we allow a man to win with only 40 per cent of the electoral vote we are establishing a procedure, considering the way in which the electoral vote magnifies slight differences in the popular vote, whereby a man could win the Presidency with a marked minority of the popular vote while his opponent was losing in spite of a conspicuous majority. (A brief study of the states, their population and their electoral votes, will show how this could be done.) I consider this innovation an error and would oppose it. A run-off election should be held whenever no candidate wins an outright majority of the electoral vote. If we are going to improve the system, let us abolish the possibility of having Presidents forced upon us who have not won at least 50 per cent of the electoral vote.

The second objection is that by amendment this plan would freeze into the Constitution the present winner-take-all tradition of allocating electoral votes, whereas now it stands as a tradition only and could be changed by action of the states without an amendment. I find this objection irrelevant, because the states are not going to change and because the tradition is so firmly rooted and has proved so workable that it is already, for practical purposes, as secure as if it were a part of the Constitution. Making it so alters nothing.

To summarize, I prefer the automatic plan and will work
hard for its adoption. If it is found to have little chance in view of the groundswell of support for direct popular election, I would be able to work in good faith for that solution.

As to the two proposed general improvements, I am not in favor of a national primary because I believe it would diminish the power and vitality of our political parties, and that could not be constructive. I do wish we could choose our Vice-President in some better way, but I do not know how, and if no workable plan is forthcoming, I would find myself grudgingly accepting a national primary to attain that goal. I am repelled by the idea of having one man, in the heat of a convention victory, deciding for us who our next Vice-President and possibly President is to be. I realize that Section 2 of the Twenty-fifth Amendment empowers the President to nominate, by himself, a new Vice-President whenever there is a vacancy in that office, which seems to be a continuation into the White House of the bad old practice of the convention, but there is a significant difference. When the President-nominate at the convention hand-picks his man, his act requires only the confirmation of the convention, which is given automatically by the very men who have just nominated him. Under Amendment Twenty-five, when, as elected President, he does the same thing, his act must be confirmed by a majority vote of both houses of Congress. I judge this to be an excellent rule, for I cannot imagine in recent years a supine House and Senate accepting a second-class nominee; today, when at least one of the bodies is often in the hands of the opposition party, there would be little likelihood of confirmation
unless the man chosen were of demonstrated merit. We must devise some system of similar probity for the selection of Vice-Presidents at our conventions.

Recently Roscoe Drummond has proposed that a nationwide primary be held, but that it be advisory only. I see much merit in this. Its advantages would be twofold, in that it would preserve the function of the party, whose responsibility would continue for actually nominating the candidate; and since the primaries we already have are merely advisory, Drummond’s plan would merely broaden the base so that instead of being unduly influenced by New Hampshire, with a population of only 702,000, we would be listening to the advice of the whole nation, with a population of more than 200,000,000. I would support this plan and would hope that we might establish a tradition whereby Vice-Presidents had to be chosen from among the men who stood well in the national primary.

When I state that I prefer the national convention to the national primary, I certainly do not refer to the two conventions held in 1968, for these were so disgraceful that they harmed politics and damaged our national self-respect. The Republican gaucheries at Miami were unbelievable in a year of war abroad, civil strife at home, problems engulfing our cities, and profound experiments under way in space. None of these vital issues were reflected in the convention; instead we had those awful balloons, those tedious nominating speeches for nobodies from Alaska and Hawaii, those repulsive spontaneous demonstrations, the scenes of calloused jockeying back and forth over trivialities, the accidental glimpse of discredited
old men trying their best to dictate whom the Vice-Presidential nomination should go to. Only the even worse disgrace of the Democrats at Chicago erased the nineteenth-century sideshow the Republicans engineered. Most of the people I know under thirty dismissed the whole procedure as beneath their contempt. One clever chap confided to me, “You miss the whole point. It’s a very deft device of the Republicans. They’re making their show so bad that all young people will be infuriated and unable to tolerate more of the same at Chicago.”