America’s baroque electoral system is a disaster waiting to happen

AMERICA may be the oldest modern democracy, but wisdom has not come with experience. The way it elects its president is dangerously antiquated.

Four American presidents have been elected even though their respective opponents had received more votes - and there could well be a fifth case of the phenomenon this week.

The first president to be elected after losing the popular vote was John Quincy Adams in 1824. Ironically, he was the first son of a former president to be elected and - like his father before him - he failed to get re-elected.

George W Bush was the fourth man to be elected president with fewer popular votes than his opponent. And he and his father could emulate the Adams pair by both failing to win re-election.

The third time that a president was elected after losing the popular vote was in 1888 when Benjamin Harrison won.

In most national public opinion polls President George W Bush has been ahead of John Kerry. But in the last couple of weeks, the candidates have been neck-and-neck in the polls, the difference between them being smaller than the statisticians’ presumed margin of error.

Therefore, either of them could win the national vote yet lose the election.

The electorate does not even get a chance to vote for the men named on the ballot next Tuesday. They will be voting to elect 538 people who are not named on any ballot. Those elected are then supposed to vote for specific candidates when they meet to elect the president and vice-president in December. Each state is allocated electors in relation to its population, and it is those people who will actually be chosen on Tuesday.

The winner needs to get at least 270 electoral votes. The 11 largest states have a total of 271 electoral votes and Kerry was leading in the polls in seven of those states with a total of 180 electoral votes, while Bush was ahead in just three (Texas, North Carolina and Georgia) with a total of 64 electoral votes.

A range of recent polls in Florida and Pennsylvania have had each candidate in the lead, or tying in a dead heat.

Bush is comfortably ahead in 23 states while Kerry was clearly ahead in only 10 states and the District of Colombia.

It could come down to Florida again, but Kerry can win without that state. He is doing well on the west coast and seems likely to carry California, Oregon and Washington with their 73 electoral votes, while Bush looks like winning Alaska’s four electoral votes by an avalanche.

Bush is well ahead in the polls and looks likely to win at least five of the mountain states - Montana, Idaho, Wyoming, Nevada and Utah with their 19 electoral votes.

But in the latest poll published this week the candidates were in a dead heat in Colorado with its nine electoral votes.

The president is also doing well in the south west, where he seems poised to take Arizona, Texas and Oklahoma, with their 51 electoral votes, while New Mexico is too close to call with its five electoral votes.

Bush also looks particularly strong in the prairie states of North Dakota, South Dakota, Kansas, Nebraska, Missouri and Iowa, where he could take the 35 electoral votes, with only Iowa (seven electoral votes) affording Kerry a real chance. The president is also likely to carry most of the old South with its 132 electoral votes. He appears marginally ahead in Florida, but Arkansas was a dead heat in two polls last week. Bill Clinton’s intervention in the campaign on Kerry’s behalf could well make the difference in Arkansas, his home state.

Kerry is doing very well in his stronghold in the northeast, stretching from Washington DC to Maine. He is ahead in the capital and all 10 states and is likely to carry most of them with their 127 electoral votes.

If Kerry is to win the election without carrying Florida, he will have to do particularly well around the Great Lakes.

Excluding New York - generally considered as belonging to the north east - the other seven states bordering on the Great Lakes have a total of 110 electoral votes. Kerry is comfortably ahead in Illinois with its 21 votes and he is leading in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan and Minnesota, which have a further 68 electoral votes. Bush is only comfortably ahead in Indiana with its 11 electoral votes, and the latest polls in Wisconsin, which has 10 votes, have gone both ways.

There are also other anomalies that could have a crucial impact in a close election. All of the electoral votes in each of 47 states are supposed to go to the candidate who wins most votes in that state, with the exception of Maine and Nebraska which give two electoral votes each to whoever wins the overall vote in the state, and the remaining three electoral votes in Nebraska and two electoral votes in Maine will be decided by the count in each of their congressional districts.

To further complicate matters, however, Colorado will be voting on Tuesday to decide whether its nine electoral votes should be apportioned in relation to the actual vote.

If neither candidate has a majority when the electoral votes are counted - as a result of a tie, or because the outcome in one of the states is being disputed in the courts - the election will be decided in the House of Representatives, where the representatives from each state will have just one vote per state. Thus the vote of the lone representative from states like Vermont, Montana or South Dakota will count the same as the total votes of the 53 congressmen from California, or the 29 from New York. Bush would seem odds on to win in the House of Representatives.

If you think all of this is crazy, there is even worse to come. There is the danger posed by what they call “faithless electors”.

Even though all the electors are supposed to vote they way they are mandated, in 21 of the states they are not legally obliged to do so. In the other states, failure to vote as mandated is merely a misdemeanour, or punishable by a fine. In the past 50 years, eight electors have not voted as they were mandated.

The last time this happened was in 2000, when one of the Democratic electors from the District of Columbia refused to vote for Al Gore and abstained.

In 1976, a Republican who’d been mandated to vote for Gerald Ford voted for Ronald Reagan, while a Republican from North Carolina voted for George Wallace instead of Nixon in 1968.

If Kerry should win 270 electors on Tuesday, it would require just one elector to switch his/her vote in the electoral college and the vote would end in a tie. The House of Representatives could then elect Bush.

Each side has spent hundreds of millions of dollars on its campaign, so there could be millions of more reasons why somebody would switch when the electors meet in December. Such a system is not just antiquated - it is an invitation to disaster. Have these Yanks ever heard of Murphy’s Law?