The People's Choice

Three times in U.S. history a presidential candidate has won a plurality of the popular vote only to lose the election.* Reason: the archaic electoral-college system, an unhappy late-hour compromise device adopted when the Constitution was written and the subject of steady fire ever since. Last week, by a bipartisan majority of 64 to 27, the Senate approved a proposed constitutional amendment which would change all that. It would divide the electoral votes of each state according to the popular vote each candidate polled.

Who Gains? The debate put Senators into a history-conscious mood. Massachusetts' able Republican Henry Cabot Lodge skillfully argued with Senators who were naturally concerned not only with the merits of the amendment but with what it would do to their own party's fortunes. In the 1948 campaign, Lodge pointed out, Harry Truman carried Ohio by only 7,107 votes, but walked off with all 25 electoral votes. Under the new system the electoral votes would have divided 12.4 to 12.3, with .3 to Henry Wallace's Progressive Party.

By abolishing the all-or-nothing electoral system in each state and making it instead a proportional reflection of the popular vote, many Republicans thought that they could for the first time expect supporters and the beginning of a real two-party system in the Solid South. Similarly, Democrats could count on picking up an electoral vote or two in rock-ribbed Vermont and Maine. But Southern Democrats had something else in mind: such minority groups as the Negroes--often the Democratic margin of victory in Northern states--would be less important in party councils. The amendment would sharply reduce the tremendous influence of such big pivotal states as New York, Pennsylvania and Ohio, and the tendency for both parties to look to them for presidential candidates.

Who Loses? Not everyone agreed with Lodge's reading of the future. Ohio's Robert Taft feared that Republicans stood to lose more in the North than they could gain in the South. To that, Lodge & Co. had a telling answer. Figuring the 1948 election on the Lodge formula, Democrat Harry Truman would still have won with a total of 258 electoral votes, but Republican Tom Dewey would have picked up an extra 32 electoral votes.

There was still one final worry: would the proportional system encourage splinter parties? Majority Leader Scott Lucas suggested a change which would require the winner to poll at least 40% of the electoral vote. If no candidate gets 40% of the vote, the winner would be picked from the two highest by a majority vote of both Houses of Congress. With that change, the Lodge amendment sailed through.

The amendment was still a long way from law: the House, and 36 state legislatures must also approve it within seven years.

* Andrew Jackson, defeated by John Quincy Adams in 1824; Samuel J. Tilden by Rutherford Hayes in 1876; Grover Cleveland by Benjamin Harrison in 1888.

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