Congress, the Electoral College and Representation
This week, political scientists in faculty lounges around the nation are hopping up and down in self-satisfied glee as they cackle, "I was right! It finally happened!"
What's finally happened is that in the contest for the Presidency of the United States of America, the winner of the popular vote and the winner of the electoral competition seem to be different people, with Al Gore winning the former and George W. Bush winning the latter. How did this happen? How is the U.S. Congress related to all this mess? And what kind of representative will our new President be?
The Electoral College and the U.S. Congress
Key to understanding the mess that we're in is the relationship between the Electoral College and the U.S. Congress. To make that relationship clear, let's read the U.S. Constitution. Article II, Section 1, Clause 2 states:
"Each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors, equal to the whole Number of Senators and Representatives to which the State may be entitled in the Congress: but no Senator or Representative, or Person holding an Office of Trust or Profit under the United States, shall be appointed an Elector."
The Constitution continues by saying that these Electors (not, as some people believe, the citizenry themselves) proceed to cast their votes for the President of the United States.
This innocuous-sounding clause is the reason that Al Gore, while winning the most votes of Americans, has not (as of this article's writing) won the Presidency. Remember high school civics class? While a state's number of Representatives to the House is tied to the number of people living in that state, each and every state also has two Senators, regardless of the state's population.
Because the number of Electors for a state is not strictly tied to the population of a state, some states get more Electors per person than others. For example, Montana, which got 1 Representative for its 799,600 residents in the 1990 Census, also got 2 Senators because it is a state. That makes for 3 Electors, or 1 Elector for every 266,533 people. New York, on the other hand, got 31 Representatives for the 17,990,800 residents of that state counted in the 1990 Census. It also has 2 Senators because it is a state. That makes 33 Electors, or 1 Elector for every 545,176 people. Check my math, folks, and make a comparison. Because of the way the Electoral College is made up, a resident of Montana gets twice as much electing power as a resident of New York.
Latest Articles