Politics and elections 89margin of Electoral votes, and the unpledged slate that won in Mississippi
cast their votes for Senator Harry F. Byrd along with some of the unpledged
Electors from Alabama.
The Electoral College, therefore, would seem at first sight to be merely a
rather complicated mechanism for the indirect registration of the people’s
will. Yet that is not the case at all. To understand why the structure of the
Electoral College is so important, it is necessary to examine the way in which,
purely by convention, the states have come to operate the machinery of the
College. The Constitution simply laid down that ‘The Electors shall meet in
their respective States, and vote by ballot for President and Vice-President’,
but it did not stipulate the manner in which balloting should take place. The
most obvious way to conduct the balloting might be to allocate the Electoral
College votes among the candidates proportionately to the number of votes
they received in the popular election. Thus in 2004 John Kerry won 54.3 per
cent of the popular vote in California, and George W. Bush won 44.4 per cent,
other candidates received the remaining 1.3 per cent. California, with the
highest population in the country, had fifty-five votes in the Electoral Col-
lege, so it would seem that the obvious way to distribute these votes would be
to give thirty to Kerry and twenty-five to Bush. This would seem surely to be
the fairest way to express the views of the 12 million Californians who voted
in the election. In fact, most of the States do not allocate Electoral College
votes in this way. By convention, all the Electoral College votes of a state are
given to the candidate who attains a plurality, that is a simple majority, of
the popular vote in the state. This is called the ‘unit rule’ and it operates in
all the states other than Maine and Nebraska, both states with small popula-
tions unlikely to affect the outcome of the election. Thus, in the example
given above, all of California’s 55 Electoral College votes went to Kerry.
The effect of this method of casting the Electoral College votes is to in-
crease enormously the effects of sectional and geographical factors on the se-
lection and election of presidential candidates. The significance of the more
populous states becomes disproportionately great. To succeed in an election
a candidate must get an absolute majority in the Electoral College, and the
votes of a relatively small number of large states will put him or her well on
the way to achieving this aim.
There is a total of 538 Electoral College Votes to be won, so that a candidate
needs 270 to win. When aiming at this figure the big votes of California (fifty-
five votes), Texas (thirty-four votes), New York (thirty-one votes), Florida
(twenty-seven votes), Pennsylvania (twenty-one votes), Illinois (twenty-one
votes) and Ohio (twenty votes), become critically important. Each candidate
hopes to capture some of these large states with enough of the middle group,
like Massachusetts, New Jersey or Virginia, and some of the smaller states to
reach the magic figure. Thus the states with large populations play a dispro-
portionate part in electing the president, in influencing presidential politics,
and consequently in widening the gap between congressional and presidential
politics. In this way the Electoral College usually exaggerates the margin