Presidential Lottery: The Reckless Gamble in Our Electoral System by James A. Michener
Had Nixon died, it would have been obligatory for the Republican National Committee to designate some individual to stand for the Presidency and to hope that their nomination would be acceptable to the Republican members of the Electoral College. The nation would then have held its breath to see how the 302 Republican electors who had been pledged to Nixon would react to the new man. If they accepted him, he would be the next President. If they wavered, and if thirty-three defected, the Republicans would not have won and the election would have been thrown into the House, where because of their control of the state delegations, the Democrats would possibly have been able to elect Humphrey.
What are the chances that the Republicans would have been able to nominate a candidate quickly and impose him upon the electors? I trust that the reader will follow my reasoning carefully so as to appreciate what might have happened between November 5 and December 16, 1968.
To begin with, at the moment Nixon’s death was announced, the 302 Republican electors pledged to him would have become the most important citizens in the United States, for they alone would have held the fate of the Presidency in their hands, and all decisions made as to a substitute nominee would have had to be made with one question in mind: “Will the electors agree?” It would not have mattered what the Republican National Committee or the general public thought of the new man, but only what this handful of 302 men and women, arbitrarily and capriciously chosen, thought.
Again the forty-five electors pledged to Wallace would have become of crucial importance, because if any of the Republican electors did waver, unable to accept the nominee which the national committee proposed to ram down their throats, the Wallace men could have rushed in to arrange a deal which would either grant or deny victory to the Republicans. Remember that the Republicans would have had to settle this matter in the Electoral College; their prospects would not have been bright in the House, and if to win in the College they required the Wallace votes, the temptation would have been great to arrange a deal for them. Governor Wallace would have been in a better position to exercise leverage than before; and his offer of a covenant, more attractive.
And finally, the 191 Democrats would have found themselves in a position to dictate to the Republicans whom the Republicans should nominate to the vacancy, for these electors were free to swing one way or the other, depending upon what tactical situation developed.
If Nixon’s removal had occurred early in this period, there would have been time for the Republican National Committee to reconvene its members in emergency session and to hold, in effect, another complete convention with the same procedures as had operated in Miami earlier in the summer. This convention, by a careful display of honesty and fair play, might have come up with a candidate who would satisfy the electors and enlist their undivided loyalty.
But at the very beginning of the convention the party would have faced a crucial decision. In the normal course of events it would be natural for any party so faced with crisis to elevate the Vice-Presidential candidate to the Presidency and then to select a new Vice-President. But I doubt that in 1968 the Republicans could have promoted their Vice-President to President with any hope of keeping their electors pledged to vote for him when the College convened. The great newspapers of the country, the television commentators, the news magazines, and the general public would all have protested in the name of patriotism and reason and would have applied such tremendous pressure on the Republican electors that some would surely have defected, enough I think to have put Wallace and the Democrats back into a bargaining position. This possibility the Republican leadership would not have risked.
Let us suppose, therefore, that the Republicans would have had to choose between candidates who had come before the summer convention and that the final choice had been between two men, say Ronald Reagan of California and Nelson Rockefeller of New York—two men even farther apart in ideology than in geography—and let us suppose further that the Rockefeller forces had been able to blast out a victory. Would the 302 electors have stood firm behind this choice? I doubt it. Fantastic pressures would have been applied to every Republican elector, and those whose hearts inclined toward Reagan, or whose egos had been scarred in the fight, would have been susceptible to that pressure. I doubt that the Republicans could have maintained discipline; I doubt that Rockefeller would have been able to collect the 270 votes required.
At this point the Wallace people would have had every right to try to put together a coalition behind Reagan or some other attractive conservative in hopes of drawing to their candidate the support of Democratic conservatives.
The Democrats, meanwhile, would have been undergoing their own agony. At first they would have judged rather smugly—and incorrectly, I think—that if they stood firm they would wind up with a good chance of throwing the election into the House, where they could elect Humphrey. But they would soon have awakened to the fact that it was George Wallace who really held the balance of power, and whereas he did not like Rockefeller and had spoken disrespectfully of him, he liked Humphrey even less and was determined to deprive him of the Presidency. The Democrats would thus have found themselves in a position in which the Electoral College vote was going to be decided without their participation.
In the early days of December rumors would have flooded this nation; intricate calculations would have been made each hour, and the threat of what Wallace might do, or the extent to which the Republicans might be indebted to him in case he threw the victory to them, would so have haunted the Democrats that they would probably have concluded, “It is better for us to make a deal with Nelson Rockefeller,” and I suppose that this would have been proposed by the party leaders.
I can say this. As I stood on that rostrum on December 16 waiting for the last elector to sign, I could not state with certainty how even I would have voted had Nixon died, and I felt fairly certain that few of the electors before me could have predicted their votes either. There would have been an insane scramble for votes, and no man can say in retrospect how his character would have reacted to the pressures to which he would have been exposed.
A worse situation could have developed. Had Nixon died late in the interval, the Republicans would not have had time to assemble in formal convention. Hectic telephone and telegraph consultations would have had to suffice. At best the decision would have been peremptory and little calculated to enlist popular or electoral support; at worst it would have appeared as an unwarranted dictatorship which would have repelled certain of the electors. Each tendency which I have noted as potentially disruptive to the 302 electors in case a convention selected the substitute would have been magnified if the candidate had been dictated, and I seriously doubt that the Republicans could have held their electors in line.
In either case, the uncertainty of the last two weeks prior to the convening of the Electoral College would have been extraordinary and the outcome would have been a lottery, predictable by no one.
The point I wish to make is not that the system is complex and open to error; many excellent systems have those defects. The peculiar weakness of this system, and one which totally disqualifies it, is that the vital decisions are made by members of the Electoral College bound by no law, no tradition, no restraint, and little common sense. We place our destiny in the hands of men and women who are not even nominated or elected seriously. It is unfair to both the nation and the electors to impose upon them such obligations and temptations.
In what follows, I have attempted to codify the curious mélange of law and custom that governs the contingencies that might arise during a national election. I think these ought to be kept in mind when one tries to decide what changes we should make in our election system, and I shall divide the summer, fall, and winter of an election year into the four crucial periods which comprise it.
Nominating convention in July or August to election day in November. No law states what would happen if either a President-nominate or a Vice-President-nominate were to die or withdr
The rules of the two parties are different. The Republican party authorizes its national committee to fill the vacancy, with each state or territory’s delegates empowered to cast the same number of votes it had at that year’s nominating convention. Alternatively, the national committee may choose to summon a new convention, should such a step seem preferable, and if the vacancy has occurred early enough in this period to permit the reconvening of the convention. The mood and temper of the political situation within the party and nation would also be taken into account in choosing between these two alternatives.
The Democratic party provides only the first option, that the national committee shall have the power to fill the vacancy, with each state or territory having its allotted votes.
Both national committees retain the right to fill a vacancy in the Presidential spot by the simple device of moving up the Vice-President-nominate and designating a new candidate for the Vice-Presidency. For example, had the Democrats won in 1968 and had Humphrey died, they could have elevated Edmund S. Muskie to the Presidential spot and then chosen a new Vice-President, and I suppose the Democratic electors would have accepted this.
This group of arrangements seems simple, workable, and just. Should death or vacancy occur a few days before the election, there would of course be chaos, but I do not see how this could be avoided in any system; that party on whom the blow fell would have to adjust to it as best it could. Incidentally, in 1860, when Senator Fitzpatrick threw the Democratic nomination back into the teeth of the party, the leaders calmly selected someone else in accordance with the procedures outlined above for that party.
And in 1912 Vice-President James S. Sherman, after he had been legally nominated by the Republican party and was running for re-election, died a few days before election. The Republican National Committee, meeting in crash session, designated Nicholas Murray Butler as his replacement, a substitution which was amicably accepted both by the voters and the Republican electors, who had earlier been pledged to Sherman.
I would assume from these precedents, and from the clarity of the bylaws governing the two major parties, that accidents within this period can be handled expeditiously and in a manner which the public will accept. There is no federal law, however, sanctioning these procedures and perhaps there ought to be, except that most of the operations of our political parties are not the subject of public law.
Election day in November to the vote of the Electoral College in December. It seems clear beyond contention that should a President-designate die or withdraw in this period, the electors would be free to vote for whomever they wished. Eligible citizens of the entire nation, irrespective of party, would be possible candidates, but obviously every effort would be made to keep the electors committed to voting for whomever the party officials nominated. Those nominations would be made in accordance with the rules cited earlier, in view of the fact that legally the election had not been completed in November and would not be until the Electoral College had met. If the substitute designated by the party were reasonably acceptable to the electors, it would be logical for them to support the party, for to do otherwise would bring down upon them a heavy burden of opprobrium. But it must be repeated that under our system these faceless electors, chosen arbitrarily and at random, would have the obligation to elect a President and the freedom to choose whom they wished. This is an extraordinary delegation of powers that not one American in a hundred thousand realizes he has made.
Vote of the Electoral College in December to vote-counting and certifying in Congress on January 6. Should a President-elect die or withdraw during this period, there would be debate as to what should happen. Some have argued that the Greeley precedent would apply and that Congress would again refuse to count votes belonging to a dead man, but the analogy is not good. Greeley died before the Electoral College met, so that the electors were voting for a man they knew to be dead; in the case represented by this paragraph, the electors would have voted for a living man, who had subsequently died, but who was entitled at the time of voting to all votes cast on his behalf. Most constitutional experts believe that the language of the Twelfth Amendment supersedes this tradition and gives Congress no choice but to count all electoral votes cast, provided the man voted for was alive when the electoral ballots were cast. The House of Representatives committee report endorsing the Twentieth Amendment sustains this view but has not the force of law. Congress, this report said, could exercise no discretion in the matter and would declare that the dead candidate had received a majority of the votes. The operative law would then be the Twentieth Amendment, Section 3, which states: “If, at the time fixed for the beginning of the term of the President, the President-elect shall have died, the Vice-President-elect shall become President.” Mark Gruell, Pennsylvania’s parliamentarian, has made a study of these problems, and states, “Under present law, the electoral votes must still be counted and declared in Congress. It would therefore be the President-elect who had died, and the Vice-President-elect would become President.” Furthermore, when the Vice-President-elect did take office as President, he would be authorized under the Twenty-fifth Amendment to nominate a new Vice-President. The ambiguities that arise in this time period could easily be clarified.
Vote-counting and certifying in Congress on January 6 to inauguration on January 20. Here the laws are clear without question. Should the President-elect die in this interval, the foregoing provisions of the Twentieth Amendment would elevate the Vice-President-elect to the Presidency. Should the Vice-President-elect die in this interval, the Twenty-fifth Amendment authorizes the new President, upon taking office, to nominate a new Vice-President, subject to confirmation by the House and Senate. The admirable clarity of this law should be extended to the entire process, and this could easily be done.
Whatever conclusion one reaches in trying to fathom the constellation of incongruities in this lottery, he must in the end decide that this is the silliest instrument of self-government that sensible men could devise; and it stands out with special prominence because the rest of our system is so rational.
I think it peculiar that free men would hesitate to change something palpably wrong out of respect for the Founding Fathers of this nation, when those Fathers, finding themselves faced by a part of their invention that did not work, had no hesitancy in initiating steps to junk it, and this within twelve years of when they launched the system. The first election held under the plan adopted by Washington, Madison, Hamilton, and Franklin took place in 1789, and since Washington was elected unanimously, there was no problem. The 1792 election was equally smooth, and in 1796, when everyone understood that John Adams was intended to succeed, the system once more functioned, but in 1800, as we have seen, the Jefferson-Burr election resulted in chaos, and within the quickest possible time the very men who had framed the election system altered it, offered the nation an amendment, and rammed the change through in time for the 1804 election.
If the Founding Fathers were alive today, if they could see the idiotic mess into which their invention of electors and House elections has led us, they would abolish both before the 1972 election was held. They would whip up an amendment and campaign for it across the nation, because to do otherwise would be illogical, and they were not illogical men.
It was with these thoughts that I watched this tangled election come to its fumbling conclusion. As the year ended I gave thanks that what could have ended so poorly had ended so well. But on Friday, January 3, 1969, a dramatic event erupted, proving to me that the election was not going to end as peacefully as I had thought, and proving to the A
On this day Senator Edmund S. Muskie, Democrat of Maine, and Representative James G. O’Hara, Democrat of Michigan, announced that they intended to institute a procedure which would dramatize for the American people the perils inherent in the Electoral College.
Their strategy was this. When the reports from the states were opened in the joint session of Congress on January 6, they intended to invoke a never-before-used clause from the election law of 1887, which had come into being to correct the abuses uncovered in the Hayes-Tilden deadlock of 1876. Under this law, they would challenge the renegade electoral vote cast by Dr. Lloyd W. Bailey of North Carolina, who had run on the Republican ticket, been elected on that ticket, but who had decided on his own initiative to ignore the mandate of the voters and to cast his vote not for Nixon, who had carried North Carolina (627,192 Nixon; 496,188 Wallace; 464,113 Humphrey), but for Wallace.
Thus two Democrats would try to force an elector to vote for a Republican instead of for a third-party candidate, and in so doing would focus the attention of the nation upon a glaring weakness in our electoral system. In this respect their action was a laudable illustration of high-minded and unselfish statesmanship.
But apparently they were unaware that the 1887 law gave Congress no authority to challenge the propriety of an electoral vote once it had been cast, duly recorded and accurately reported to Congress. Therefore, what Muskie proposed was that Congress adopt illegal procedures to correct an evil which existed only because Congress had refused for so many decades to tackle election reform.