Proposed Constitutional Election Amendment

[Ann Althouse]

> 4.      If no ticket for President and Vice-President, or candidate
>> for Senator or Representative, receives a majority of all votes cast for
>> any such office at the general election, a run-off election for such office
>> or offices, between the two tickets or candidates receiving the greatest
>> number of votes, shall be held on a single uniform day, as the Congress
>> shall by law provide, which shall be not less than one nor more than two
>> weeks after the general election, and which shall be a Sunday or other
>> national holiday.

>> Professor Bryan H. Wildenthal


Two weeks is a very small window for the counting and recounting that might
need to be done to determine who gets to be in the run-off. Not much time
for whatever new sort of campaigning and debating that ought to take place
once the race is limited to two--two who would have previously been occupied
fighting off the other candidates. What if during that two weeks we don't
even know who the second candidate is? Could the second and third candidates
strike a deal of some kind? (By the way, the provision for a run off is what
killed off the hard-fought proposed amendment to abolish the EC around
1969-1970, when people were very fired up about the role George Wallace had
played in the 1968 election. The alternative of giving the election to the
plurality winner is worse though.)

Note that in your system candidates would have a new, heretofore untested,
motive to jockey for second place. People might vote strategically, or just
go for the ideologically pure candidate in the first election, producing a
runoff between the extreme right and left candidates, depriving us of the
moderate, who might come in third at first but have been the second choice
of a large majority. Also, you should consider the problem of the different
incentives for candidates to enter the race. A McCain next time might say,
who needs the primary? I'll stay in for the main election. In fact, the
incentives relating to who runs and how they run will be so different, that
risk averse folks are unlikely to bite. Over time, perhaps candidates might
proliferate, the role of the party nomination might lose meaning, the state
party structure could decline, the two party system could break down, etc.
etc.

What if there are so many candidates that the run-off is between candidates
who got only 10 percent of the vote? Where is the safeguard against that?

In addition, I think the Republicans ought to be especially adverse to this
change. The Democrats can hit the big cities where their strength lies and
rack up huge numbers of votes, while campaigning very efficiently. Imagine a
President elected by only the big cities, or only the big coastal states,
especially after a campaign designed to appeal to these voters and ignoring
the rest. It could be very disunifying to the country, just the opposite of
what you might hope to achieve. So I don't think the Democrats should want
to win this way.

The Republican candidates meanwhile have a more geographically spread out
base, and are disadvantaged needing to appeal to the sparsely populated
areas, a disadvantage perhaps appropriately offset by those extra electoral
votes the small states get.

It's a very complex system, and though abolishing the EC has abstract
appeal, once you start thinking through the complexities, it just doesn't
seem worth the risk. Whatever the problems of the EC, at least we have a
long history of seeing what they are and how bad they are, and they aren't
that bad really. The alternative is only an idea and it would remain to be
seen exactly what that would do in practice.

I know I've said before on this list that I was against the EC--on the
ground that the President, being only one person cannot really channel the
interests of the states, and so it is different from the other federalism
mechanisms like the Senate--but I now view that as another interesting
abstraction, part of a number of abstractions that just don't offset the
many real complexities.

Ann