election into the House: however, it is rare for such candidates even to win any
seats in the college.
The states are not equally represented in the US electoral college. Each state
is allocated the same number of electors as it has members of the House of
Representatives, plus two (although the District of Columbia, with no House
representation, receives three electoral college votes, and Delaware and North
Dakota, with one House seat, receive only two electoral college votes). Thus a
state with two House members would get four votes and a state with 30 House
members would get 32 votes. This system of course tends to under-represent
the more populous and over-represent the less populous states. The US
electoral college never meets as a body, since the electors of each state assemble
at their own state capital and cast their votes there.
Criticism of the electoral college surfaces regularly in the USA, and two
major arguments are frequently levelled against it. Firstly, because it was
devised as a method of protecting the presidency from the excesses of popular
government, it has come to seem anachronistically undemocratic. For this
reason many liberals in the USA are in favour of direct election of the
president, while many conservatives, who argue that the founding fathers of
the US Constitution stressed the country’s being arepublic, while not
mentioning democracyper se, are anxious to retain the college. Secondly,
the fact that the votes are distributed on a winner-take-all basis means that the
candidature which wins a large state such as California or Texas by the
slenderest of margins will gain an enormous advantage, since it will collect
all the electoral college votes for that state. There is certainly an element of
suspicion ofdirect democracyin the system, and it does to some extent
distort the popular vote. Indeed, it is possible for the electoral college to consist
of electors favouring a candidature which was not favoured by a majority, or
indeed even a plurality, of voters in the election to the college itself. It is not
unusual for a presidential candidate with a lead of only a few per cent in the
total vote to collect an overwhelming number of electoral college votes. Most
Americans were themselves only vaguely conscious of the role of the electoral
college until the debate surrounding the election of President George W. Bush
in 2001. This firmly brought home the counter-majoritarian impact the
electoral college can have, and that part of the constitution is now seriously
in doubt.
In the United Kingdom an electoral college featured in the controversial
reform of theLabour Party’smethod of electing its leader. Prior to 1981 the
leader was elected by the votes of the parliamentary Labour Party alone; then,
as a result of a concerted movement to give the extra-parliamentary elements in
the Labour Party greater control over policy, it was agreed that trade unions
and constituency parties should also participate in leadership elections. The
electoral college was expected to give the predominant voice to members of
Electoral College