BUSINESSWEEK ONLINE : NOVEMBER 27, 2000 ISSUE
COVER STORY Commentary: The Pitfalls of One Person, One Vote Hillary Rodham Clinton is for it. Bill is not so sure. But in the wake of the Great Florida Standoff, support for scrapping the Electoral College is growing. Senator-elect Clinton says she'll start the legislative ball rolling next year. And according to new polls, she'll have company: 65% of Americans back a constitutional amendment providing for direct election of the President. But before lawmakers rewrite the Constitution, they should remember the law of unintended consequences. Consider this fanciful but not totally far-fetched scenario: It's Nov. 8, 2004, and Democratic nominee Hillary has just won 40% of the Presidential popular vote by pursuing a ''tri-coastal'' strategy concentrated on harvesting votes in the megastates of California, Florida, and New York. Clinton remains slightly ahead of her nearest opponent, GOP Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison of Texas, who has won 35% of the vote with her ''magnolia method.'' She focused on her home state, the Carolinas, and a half-dozen other Southern states. But Hutchison refuses to concede because no candidate has won 50% of the vote, and the constitutional amendment that deep-sixed the Electoral College also gives her the right to demand run-off elections until someone gets a majority of the popular vote. The good news for Hutchison is that 37 minor parties will be stricken from the new ballot, as will the mayor of Toledo and Teamsters President James P. Hoffa, both of whom have pledged to back Hutchison in exchange for prominent jobs in her Administration. No matter who ultimately prevails, the inauguration will be delayed by at least two months. The result: Presidentus interruptus. Sound unlikely? Perhaps. The Electoral College system has been around since 1787, and changing it would require an all-but-impossible two-thirds vote in Congress--plus ratification by three-fourths of the states. And the Electoral College has generally fulfilled its original purpose: Ensuring that smaller states don't get cut out of the selection process, holding down the number of minor-party and favorite-son candidates, and providing winners with big, mandate-building victories. But this year's election has thrown the Electoral College into disrepute and led to calls for reform. Trouble is, such ideas often have unintended consequences. Among them: -- Megastates Rule. Under a direct-election system, campaigns would no longer have the remotest interest in respecting state boundaries. Instead, they would concentrate on densely populated urban areas where candidates could get the most bang for their buck. According to many political experts, candidates might divide the country into 10 major media and cultural markets (table). The largest of these clusters would be the population centers surrounding the Great Lakes, where direct appeals could be made to some 26 million residents. The second-largest region would center on New York City and include the western half of Connecticut and northern New Jersey. Other strongholds would include Northern and Southern California, the Pacific Northwest, the I-85 corridor connecting North and South Carolina and Georgia, the Mid-Atlantic states, southern Texas, New England, and the most populous counties of Florida. Those nodes would encompass some 135 million people, or about half the U.S. population. But they would cover no more than 10% of the land mass. The vast interior would be excluded, from the western half of Virginia down to the Gulf Coast and across the Midwest into the Mountain States. That means farmers and ranchers in the Nowhere Zone would get short shrift for their concerns--and rarely see a Presidential prospect. Candidates ''wouldn't need to worry about putting nuclear waste in Nevada,'' says Steve Frank, president of the National Federation of Republican Assemblies, a conservative grass-roots group. Adds Scott Reed, who managed Bob Dole's 1996 bid for the White House: ''You'd be hunting ducks where the ducks are, and leaving large swaths of the country essentially untouched.'' -- Interest-Group Politics on Steroids. Since turnout is everything in the new era, candidates would be even more obliged than they are today to corral voting blocs and interest groups whose partisans go to the polls in higher-than-average numbers. Anti-abortion protesters, religious conservatives, gun owners, civil-rights organizers, and environmentalists would all be courted in the name of turnout. The pricetag: special-interest groups with more power than they have today because of the ability to reach across state lines and mobilize members to vote en masse; further balkanization and division in the country; and a plethora of side-deals not necessarily good for the electorate at large. -- Dems Get an Edge. The redrawn map would favor Democratic candidates, whose strength is in and around big urban cores with heavy concentrations of racial, ethnic, and religious minorities, such as Jewish voters, and unreconstructed liberals. ''Rally the base'' would be the battle cry, says Bill Carrick, a Democratic strategist. ''You'd be a lot more concerned with turning out voters who are predisposed toward you, without respect to state lines.'' Paul Begala, a Clinton adviser, agrees that candidates would no longer have to try to be all things to all people. ''Both parties would just try to run up the score,'' he says. -- Home-State Heroes. Because it would be so important to start a Presidential quest with a big bloc of assured votes, the bias in the nominating system would be toward big-state candidates. Forget Arkansas and Tennessee. Candidates from California, New York, and Texas would dominate. University of Akron political science professor John C. Green says he can even see prominent business leaders, such as Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates, emerging as candidates because of their home-state popularity. -- Fragmentation. Minor-party candidacies would also proliferate, since the prospect of each candidate getting an assured slice of the vote--which they could parlay into a voice in a future coalition Cabinet--would be a magnet to fringe parties. ''There would be a party for every cause,'' says Green. Adds Walter Berns, author of a book on the Electoral College: ''The current system discourages minor-party candidates by telling people not to 'waste' their vote in a winner-take-all system.'' Thus, Green Party nominee Ralph Nader might have fared much better under a popular-vote scenario. -- The Thermo-Nuclear Ad Strategy. As campaigns refocus on a relative handful of core states, ad strategies would change as well. While today's campaigns eschew buying national ads on network or even cable television in favor of targeted media buys, the candidate chasing popular votes would have to concoct expensive regional campaigns that cut across multiple media markets. Says former Gore campaign manager Tony Coelho: ''You'd go for the big kill with a big media budget.'' -- Endless Recounts. Forget about this year, which was an exception. The Electoral College setup, by counting each state's vote separately, discourages recounts because margins of victory are seldom narrow enough for a new tally to make a difference. But in a popular election, every vote would be equal, and losers in a close race would demand a nationwide recount. ''What's playing out in Florida now would happen in every county in America,'' says E. Joshua Rosenkranz of the Brennan Center for Justice, a nonpartisan think tank at the New York University Law School. In the end, electoral reformers aren't likely to risk these consequences in the name of democracy and the hallowed principle of ''one person, one vote.'' As the chaos in Florida shows, democracy can be a messy business. But it could get a lot messier if Hillary and those other constitutional second-guessers start tinkering. By Paula Dwyer and Paul Magnusson Washington bureau News Editor Dwyer and Correspondent Magnusson write about Presidential politics. _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ BACK TO TOP					RELATED ITEMS The Economy: Passing a Dimmer Torch COVER IMAGE: The New President's Economy CHART: Growth Slows...As Tech Demand Weakens...Manufacturing Dips... CHART: ...The Stock Market Declines...The Trade Gap Explodes...And Corporate Debt Surges TABLE: Turbulence Ahead The Alan Greenspan of OPEC? CHART: Fill 'Er Up Can the Market Regain Its Balance? CHART: Scaling Back Expectations CHART: Losing the Investor Vote TABLE: The View from Four Wall Street Gurus Commentary: The Pitfalls of One Person, One Vote TABLE: Where the Votes Are TABLE: No Electoral College Sleight of Hand at the Polls TABLE: Tricks of the Trade Is There Any Help for the ``Hanging Chad''? Commentary: The Young and the (Still) Listless INTERACT E-Mail to Business Week Online

Copyright 2000-2008, by The McGraw-Hill Companies Inc. All rights reserved. Terms of Use   Privacy Notice