Published: January 08, 2009 04:34 pm      

The quirky Electoral College system finally delivers us a new president

Zane Lawhorn is now a part of history. The Princeton optometrist was one of five Republican presidential electors from West Virginia whose votes were formally accepted on Thursday in the United States Capitol.

Bluefield attorney J. Franklin Long came close to being able to cast one of the state’s electoral votes for Barack Obama, but was a bystander in the process since he was a potential Democratic elector. The Mountain State cast 55.68 percent of its votes for Republican John McCain, and all of West Virginia’s electors are anointed by a winner-take-all process.

The votes of 538 individuals making up the Electoral College had to be verified and adopted to carry out an unwieldy process outlined by the U.S. Constitution and fleshed out by the U.S. Code and by legislation in each state.

Now, legally, we have a president-elect.

The whole setup is the result of a compromise by the framers of the Constitution in the 1780s. Some wanted the president selected directly by Congress; others wanted the choice made strictly by “popular” vote — which then meant white male landowners above the age of 20.

In the 2008 election, Virginia cast 13 electoral votes and West Virginia had five, equal to the total number of U.S. congressmen and senators apportioned to the states. The date for the electors to vote is always the first Monday after the second Wednesday in December, and those votes are counted at a joint session of Congress in early January.

Not all electors are required to vote for the person who got the most votes in his or her state, however. Most do, because they were put on a “slate” as loyal members of a political party by the party apparatus. When the final vote totals are checked out, most states accept that slate as the ones to cast the official electoral votes.

There are exceptions to that loyalty. A state law in Virginia (section 24.1-162) states that electors “shall be expected” to vote for their party’s nominee, but that kind of language does not create an ironclad requirement. West Virginia does not have any kind of law binding electors. In 1988, to make a point about the process, one elector flip-flopped his expected selection, voting for Michael Dukakis as vice president, and Sen. Lloyd Bentsen as president.

That didn’t have any effect on the outcome — George H. W. Bush had the necessary majority — but it again illustrated a problem, which still to this day has not been legally tidied up.

The government website archives.gov states that more than 99 percent of electors have voted as “pledged.” That being said, American history is dotted with occasional “faithless electors,” as they are called.

In 1976, one Washington-state elector bolted to vote for Ronald Reagan, though a majority of his state’s voters had opted for incumbent Gerald Ford in the general election. In the1960 race, John F. Kennedy beat Richard Nixon 303 to 219 in the Electoral College. Virginia Senator Harry F. Byrd received 14 electoral votes from the Deep South — and one more from a rogue elector from Oklahoma.

According to the archives website, the federal Supreme Court “has held that the Constitution does not require that electors be completely free to act as they choose and therefore, political parties may extract pledges from electors to vote for the parties’ nominees.”

Some states even threaten fines or disqualification for “faithless electors,” the website reports, though no one has ever been prosecuted for his or her choice.

When the system works, it verifies the people’s choice. The most lopsided win under the current system was Franklin D. Roosevelt’s 98.5-percent electoral vote landslide over Alf Landon in 1936.

But there have been failures. In 1824, Andrew Jackson won the popular vote overwhelmingly, and was ahead 99-84 in the Electoral College. But the required electoral majority was 131. The election was thrown into the House of Representatives, which put John Quincy Adams into office instead. (Jackson beat him soundly four years later.)

In 1876, Democrat Samuel Tilden got a quarter-million more popular votes than Republican Rutherford B. Hayes. The qualifications of Tilden’s electors from four states was questioned, however, and after a series of moves that reeked of politics, Congress finally certified that Hayes won the presidency — 185 electoral votes to 184.

Fortunately, this election cycle we have not had a presidential cliffhanger election. No hanging chads, no recounts, no charges of voting irregularities in Ohio as in 2004 or in Cook County, Illinois, as in 1960.

Thankfully, it’s more “no drama” for Barack Obama.

Tom Bone is a Daily Telegraph columnist, sports writer and editorial cartoonist. Contact him at tbone@bdtonline.com.