The Middlemen

It was a 60-mile drive from Boonville, Mo. to Jefferson City. After he got to town, tall, grey-haired Attorney John Windsor decided to put off his tryst with history as long as possible. For a while he lounged in the lobby of the Governor Hotel. Then he went over to the Missouri and dropped in on the Rotary luncheon. Finally, with the air of a man who has been drafted for a patriotic pageant, he went off to the state capitol to help elect the President of the United States.

In theory this was a relatively simple task. As one of Missouri's 15 Democratic presidential electors, he had only to write Harry Truman's name on a piece of paper. In practice, however, the electoral ceremony was not only interminable, but as involved as making an application for a driver's license.

Six Copies. As the electors gathered around a table in the governor's reception room, they discovered that only 13 had come to the meeting. This meant that two substitutes had to be rounded up. That done, all 15 had to be sworn in. After that, they elected a chairman, and jostled into a group to be photographed.

At last, with expressions of relief, they sat down before blank pieces of bond paper and wrote down the names of Harry Truman and Alben Barkley. But as they rose quietly, to escape, the chairman called: "Now, we're not through yet. We all have to sign six copies." A handful of disappointed spectators began drifting away. When John Windsor departed, after three hours and 40 minutes, he grunted: "I don't think I've accomplished anything today but spend some of the state's money." (A fee of $8.32 plus $12 travel expenses.)

Meanwhile, in the capitals of every state, similar groups of electors gathered for similar ceremonies. In New York--as in other states which the G.O.P. carried--they were Republicans. New York's electors, who also posed for an official photograph, got a free lunch, free fountain pens and a chance to meet Governor Thomas E. Dewey.* In Democratic Tennessee there was a mild flurry of excitement. An elector named Preston Parks carried out a vow--and exercised his constitutional right--to vote for the Dixiecrats' J. Strom Thurmond instead of Harry Truman.

Elector Parks's action changed the expected results by one vote--303 for Truman, 189 for Dewey, 39 for Thurmond. In each state the votes were bundled up and mailed off to Congress. There, on Jan. 6, they would be opened and counted. After that--and not before--Harry Truman would have been legally elected President.

Imperfect Echo. To most citizens (and to many of the electors themselves) the whole archaic process seemed as absurd and awkward as starting a jet engine with an 18th Century flint and steel.

The electoral college had originally been conceived as a brake on democracy: to prevent the average citizen, whose wisdom many a founding father questioned, from directly electing a President. Practice and precedent had long since deprived the electors of the actual right to name a President of their own choice; they now simply echoed the decisions of the political conventions and the people. But they echoed those decisions imperfectly--as many a voter had long been aware.

The practice of unit voting (i.e., of giving a state's entire block of electoral votes to the candidate with a plurality in that state) always raised the possibility that.a candidate might get a plurality of the popular vote and still lose the election. It had happened three times in the past. Unit voting also canceled the effectiveness of minority voters, encouraged the one-party system in the South, and gave big states undue power at political conventions.

Since the election of Presidents is the privilege of the states, it seemed unlikely that the system of electoral votes would ever be abolished. But a constitutional amendment proposed by Massachusetts' Senator Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. and Texas' Congressman Ed Gossett would eliminate block voting. Under its terms, electoral votes of each state would be divided in proportion to the popular vote, and a mere plurality in the electoral college would be sufficient for election.

Under the Lodge-Gossett system, the electoral vote for 1948 would have been divided thus: Truman, 258.098; Dewey, 221.464; Thurmond, 38.769; and Wallace (who received no electoral vote under the present system), 9.987./- To most citizens, it seemed that some such accurate reflection of the popular vote was long overdue.

* Columnist Leonard Lyons reported that on the way back from Albany, Elector Samuel Lepler said to Elector David Rockefeller (grandson of John D.): "Now I can say that you and I went to the same college together." Replied Rockefeller: "Oh, did you go to Harvard?"

/- In 1944, Franklin Roosevelt received 432 electoral votes and Thomas E. Dewey 99. Under the Lodge-Gossett system, Roosevelt would have gotten 300,726, Dewey 223,529.

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