Politics and elections 91has been elected by the date on which the new president should take office,
then the vice-president-elect shall act as president. Of course if the Electoral
College failed to elect a president they might also fail to provide an abso-
lute majority for any vice-presidential candidate. In such a case the Senate
chooses the vice-president from the two top candidates, and one glimpses
the extraordinary, though fortunately extremely unlikely, possibility that the
vice-presidential candidate of a party with a minority of the popular vote
might become vice-president, and then act for a time as president.
Such an extreme situation has not occurred, but on two occasions the elec-
tion has been thrown into the House of Representatives – the presidential
elections of 1800 and 1824. In the former case Thomas Jefferson was elected,
but only after thirty-six ballots in the House. On the second occasion the
election of John Quincy Adams turned upon the vote of one member of the
New York delegation, General Stephen Van Renssalaer, whose decision to
vote for Adams seems to have been arrived at in a rather strange fashion.
As Van Renssalaer sat in the House deliberating upon how to cast his vote
he bowed his head in prayer, only to see on the floor a piece of paper with
Adams’ name written on it. He picked it up and cast the vote that decided the
issue. In the election of 1968 the possibility of a deadlock occurring seemed
very real. The intervention of a third-party candidate with wide support,
Governor George Wallace of the American Independent Party, might have
prevented either of the major party candidates from achieving an overall
majority in the Electoral College. Wallace hoped that if this were to happen
he could use his position to bargain for policy concessions on civil rights from
the other two candidates. If the election had been thrown into the House
the Southern states might have been able to cause a deadlock there, possibly
with disastrous consequences for the political system. In 1992 and 1996 Ross
Perot could have had a similar role, but he failed to gain a single Electoral
College vote in either election. During the extraordinarily protracted elec-
tion of 2000 the real possibility arose of the failure of either candidate to
achieve an absolute majority in the Electoral College, which would have had
unforeseeable consequences.
These complications in the Electoral College system have led to many
proposals for its reform or abolition, but perhaps the greatest criticism of the
system is that it turns the only really national event in the American political
calendar into a process of sectional coalition-building. It is within this con-
text that the presidential campaign is conducted. Some students of voting
behaviour have suggested that election campaigns are little more than ritu-
alistic performances through which the candidates must go, although their
influence on the result of the election is usually very small, and nowhere near
as significant as the amount of time, energy and money that is spent on them
would suggest. Yet no politician dare make such an assumption; certainly in
a close race like that of 1960 almost any aspect of the campaign might have
been ‘decisive’ – Kennedy’s telegram of support to the jailed black leader
Martin Luther King, or even the fact that Nixon perspired freely on televi-