CQ TODAY ONLINE NEWS
Dec. 15, 2008 – 4:36 a.m.
Monday Balloting Begins Electoral Vote Ritual to Certify Obama’s Win
By Greg Giroux, CQ Staff
The outcome of the 2008 presidential contest was determined late on Election Day Nov. 4, when Democrat Barack Obama claimed victory and Republican John McCain conceded. The vigorous efforts since by Obama and his transition team to fill Cabinet posts and staff the White House for his administration have kept Obama in the news on almost a daily basis, even though he won’t be sworn in to succeed outgoing Republican George W. Bush until Jan. 20.
But in a strictly technical sense, Obama hasn’t won anything yet — though the ritual casting of electoral votes in each of the 50 state capitals and the District of Columbia, scheduled to take place Monday, will begin the two-step process to certify the former Illinois senator’s election as the 44th president of the United States.
Obama won a clear-cut victory in the nation’s popular vote, with 53 percent to 46 percent for McCain. But presidential elections are decided by winning a majority of the 538 electoral votes, with each of the 50 states allotted a number equal to both its U.S. Senate seats plus all of its House seats. The District of Columbia, which has only a non-voting House delegate, is allotted three electoral votes under the 23rd Amendment to the Constitution.
There is no dispute that Obama also will win a firm majority of the 538 electoral votes. He should receive 365 to 173 for McCain, according to state-by-state tallies of the popular vote. The electors in each of these places — many of them Democratic and Republican activists, and nearly all selected by the candidates’ campaigns because of their loyalty — will convene to cast the votes that will make Obama’s election official.
These electoral votes will then be counted in a joint session of Congress on Jan. 8, two days after the 111th Congress convenes and 12 days before Obama will take the oath of office.
Monday’s Electoral College meetings will be pro forma sessions, devoid of much suspense. The electors are expected to simply rubber-stamp the will of the voters in their states.
Under the provisions that set the rules for the Electoral College, the individual electors actually could decide the election all on their own. The Constitution entitles each elector to cast a ballot for whomever he or she chooses, even for someone who was not a candidate for president, or to not cast a ballot at all. But such instances of so-called “faithless electors” are exceeding rare: In the 10 previous elections dating to 1968, only six of the 5,380 electors did not vote for the candidates on whose slates they were elected.
In 2000, a Democratic elector from the District of Columbia withheld her vote from party nominee Al Gore to protest the District’s lack of full congressional representation. In 2004, a Democratic elector in Minnesota voted, apparently inadvertently, for vice presidential nominee John Edwards instead of presidential nominee John Kerry , which explains why the sum of Bush’s 286 electoral votes and Kerry’s 251 is 537 instead of 538.
About half of the states have laws on the books that allow sanctions against electors who don’t vote in accordance with their states’ popular vote.
But there will be an unusual twist to this year’s Electoral College process. For the first time in more than a century, one state — Nebraska — will purposely divide its electoral votes among the two major presidential candidates.
McCain defeated Obama in Nebraska’s statewide vote, 57 percent to 42 percent. But unlike every other state except Maine, Nebraska does not deliver all five of its electoral votes to the statewide winner, instead giving that candidate two votes and then allotting the remainder based on the results in each of the state’s congressional districts. While McCain did win two more votes by winning in the Lincoln-based 1st and western 3rd Districts, Obama won the state’s one other electoral vote by outrunning McCain in the Omaha-based 2nd, the state’s most urban district and its least Republican-leaning.
McCain led in Nebraska’s 2nd after the initial Election Day tally, but provisional ballots that were counted later boosted Obama to a 50.0 percent to 48.8 percent edge and a margin of about 3,300 votes out of 278,000 cast.
That single Nebraska electoral vote for Obama is the first for a Democratic nominee since incumbent Lyndon B. Johnson, whose statewide presidential victory in his 1964 national landslide was the last for a Democrat. The vote will be cast by William Forsee, a high school biology teacher in Omaha who is relishing his role.
Maine uses a similar “district system” of allocating electoral votes. But Obama won all four electoral votes in that state, where he took a total of 58 percent of the vote. He ran away with 61 percent in the compact, Portland-based 1st District, and won comfortably with 55 percent in the predominantly rural 2nd District.
Detractors of the Electoral College see it as a flawed and anachronistic system, one that the framers envisioned two centuries ago as a compromise between having the Congress choose the president and having the popular vote elect the chief executive. Every four years there are plenty of calls to amend or scrap the Electoral College and have the national popular vote decide the outcome.
But amending or abolishing the Electoral College is a debate that mainly engrosses academics and newspaper editorialists, and doesn’t stir much interest among a voting public that cares much less about questions of political process than about policy on issues that affect their daily lives.
Not even the controversial 2000 presidential election — which Bush won 271 electoral votes despite losing the national popular vote to Gore — produced a serious groundswell to abolish or even amend the Electoral College system, and Obama’s landslide victory won’t arouse a revival of the issue. It has been three decades since Congress even voted on a constitutional amendment to abolish the Electoral College.
In some states, members of the minority political party have advocated switching to a Nebraska-style system that they say better reflects voters’ leanings than a winner-take-all system.
For example, some Republicans in California — a state with a huge bloc of 55 electoral votes where Democrats have become dominant in presidential politics — have pushed for eliminating the winner-take-all system and replacing it with the Nebraska-style system of disbursing electoral votes based on the congressional district outcomes.
Obama this year clinched those 55 votes easily by trouncing McCain by 61 percent to 37 percent. Yet if California instead used a district system, McCain would have won 11 electoral votes in California, one for each of the congressional districts in which he outpolled Obama, instead of being completely shut out. That number, while just one-fifth of California’s total electoral vote allocation, matches or exceeds the electoral vote totals for 37 states and the District of Columbia.
That also helps explain why the Democratic Party in California has fought forcefully, and so far successfully, to deflect the Republicans’ challenges to the winner-take-all system.
Comments
The major shortcoming of the current system of electing the President is that presidential candidates concentrate their attention on a handful of closely divided "battleground" states. In 2004 two-thirds of the visits and money were focused in just six states; 88% on 9 states, and 99% of the money went to just 16 states. Two-thirds of the states and people were merely spectators to the presidential election. Candidates have no reason to poll, visit, advertise, organize, campaign, or worry about the voter concerns in states where they are safely ahead or hopelessly behind. The reason for this is the winner-take-all rule enacted by 48 states, under which all of a state's electoral votes are awarded to the candidate who gets the most votes in each separate state. Another shortcoming of the current system is that a candidate can win the Presidency without winning the most popular votes nationwide. This has occurred in one of every 14 presidential elections. In the past six decades, there have been six presidential elections in which a shift of a relatively small number of votes in one or two states would have elected (and, of course, in 2000, did elect) a presidential candidate who lost the popular vote nationwide. The National Popular Vote bill would guarantee the Presidency to the candidate who receives the most popular votes in all 50 states (and DC). Every vote would be politically relevant and equal in presidential elections. The bill would take effect only when enacted, in identical form, by states possessing a majority of the electoral votes--that is, enough electoral votes to elect a President (270 of 538). When the bill comes into effect, all the electoral votes from those states would be awarded to the presidential candidate who receives the most popular votes in all 50 states (and DC). The bill is currently endorsed by 1,181 state legislators -- 439 sponsors (in 47 states) and an additional 742 legislators who have cast recorded votes in favor of the bill. The National Popular Vote bill has passed 22 state legislative chambers, including one house in Arkansas, Colorado, Maine, Michigan, North Carolina, and Washington, and both houses in California, Hawaii, Illinois, New Jersey, Maryland, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Vermont. The bill has been enacted by Hawaii, Illinois, New Jersey, and Maryland. These four states possess 50 electoral votes -- 19% of the 270 necessary to bring the law into effect. See http://www.NationalPopularVote.com
In Gallup polls since 1944, only about 20% of the public has supported the current system of awarding all of a state's electoral votes to the presidential candidate who receives the most votes in each separate state (with about 70% opposed and about 10% undecided). The recent Washington Post, Kaiser Family Foundation, and Harvard University poll shows 72% support for direct nationwide election of the President. This national result is similar to recent polls in Vermont (75%), Maine (71%), Arkansas (74%), California (69%), Connecticut (73%), Massachusetts (73%), Michigan (70%), Missouri (70%), North Carolina (62%), and Rhode Island (74%). In short, the public believes that the candidate that receives the most votes should get elected.
You seem to have forgotten the fact that a sizable number of electors are waiting for Obama to produce the proof he doesn't have, that he is eligible to run for President. As a non-citizen, he cannot run for President.
Some reasons for keeping the Electoral College: 1. It allows the campaigns to focus on a few battleground states, thereby not spending vast sums of money unnecessarily in areas where the election is essentially already determined. The issues in those states are generally the same as the issues everywhere, so states that are not visited don't really miss much. At the same time, the battleground system obliges the candidates to pay attention to issues in small states that might otherwise be overlooked. 2. The American democracy has many safeguards built in to give voice to minority populations and to prevent tyranny by the majority. For the most part, majority rules, but the majority must give at least a nod to minority concerns. The EC ensures that small states have a voice. 3. Elections in which the candidate with the most popular votes loses the EC are extremely rare. (Evidently only once in every 14 elections, according to the fellow above. This is a problem? How often has it happened in our history. Three times? In my lifetime? (I'm 56) Once. In my mother's lifetime? (She's 84) Once.) 4. Don't forget the Florida recount mess. That extremely narrow national election was reduced to an extremely narrow state election and recounts were held in extremely narrow voting areas (should have been statewide, but that's another issue). Imagine a close national election in which every voting precinct in the country would be subject to a recount. What a mess. It would open the door to election fraud and corruption like we've never seen before. 5. Be wary of unintended consequences.
So Dave, Obama will not be elected? If so, I will jump for joy!
If the electoral college were tossed out, you might end up with a system where a California Republican vote would be considered on an equal standing with an Alabama Democratic vote. Just imagine what chaos would ensue if all votes were counted equally. But the myth that the smaller states get some advantage from the current system endures.
To Dave & John: The Mainstream Press (aka Bureau of Democrat Party Propaganda) has TOTALLY ignored this issue. Even the so-called alternative media (Fox, most of talk-radio) hasn't touched this story with a ten-foot pole. If a tree falls in the forest and no one hears it, did it really fall?
Myth? How is it a myth? A Wyoming Republican vote carries more weight than a California Democrat's vote, no? Throw out the EC, and Wyoming and Alabama become lost citizens. The campaigning and the campaign money will go to the cities, where the most votes are found. This might be good, because now rural areas get disproportionate attention while needs of the cities (transit, infrastructure, poverty, health care) get short shrift. But that's not the point. The point is to empower people who otherwise would be ignored.
http://i305.photobucket.com/albums/nn227/Polarik/BO_Birth_Certificate.jpg http://www.snopes.com/politics/obama/citizen.asp Are there really people out there who question Obama's citizenship? Sounds like the lunatic fringe to me. Snopes has a good article on this (above), including a link to Obama's Hawaii birth certificate. Obama is a natural-born U.S. citizen, fully eligible to be president. Any suggestion otherwise is silliness.
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