It's time to let the voters elect a president

Mark B. Cohen

is a Democrat representing Philadelphia in the state House

Every elected official in the United States is chosen by popular vote - except for one. Ironically, our most important public official, the president, is that exception.

The president is selected by a system designed as a political compromise to satisfy 18th-century political concerns that are no longer relevant. It's time we leave behind this outmoded method and allow the president to be elected by popular vote: Whoever gets the most votes wins, just as in every other election.

There is an easy way to change the archaic Electoral College system of choosing the president. And it fits within the confines of the Constitution, so no constitutional amendment would be required.

The Constitution leaves the means of selection of the electors, who ultimately elect the president, to the state legislatures. I am proposing that state legislatures in Harrisburg and elsewhere join together and pledge their electors to the winner of the national popular vote. Once states making up a majority of the electoral vote agree to abide by the popular vote, we will have restored common sense to the presidential election process.

Why should the election of the president be otherwise? Who today would suggest that any new democracy create an Electoral College?

The Electoral College was established by the Founders when there was little history of direct public election. Many of the Founders distrusted the public. Furthermore, newspapers were the primary medium of information in the 18th century, and it was argued that voters in one state would have little knowledge of candidates from other states. And more political power was in the hands of the state legislatures at the time.

But even the Founders did not expect their decisions to be eternal. We've already used the constitutional amendment process to require that senators be elected by direct popular vote rather than by the legislatures, as the Constitution initially provided. Presidents should be elected the same way for many reasons.

We need to elect a president who campaigns, educates voters, and listens to residents throughout the nation. Today's presidential candidates do not campaign in states where the winner - who in most cases will get all of a state's electors - is not in doubt. About three-quarters of the states are therefore virtually ignored by the presidential candidates. Residents of these states feel more alienated from the presidential elections and their system of government.

Originally, many state legislatures chose electors without giving the public a say, and that remains constitutionally permissible. As recently as 1876, electors were chosen by the state legislature in Colorado. In 2000, there was a proposal that the Florida legislature do the same.

Furthermore, because each state's number of electors is equal to its number of members of Congress, including senators, smaller states have more electoral votes per capita. Wyoming, with 506,520 residents, has as much as four times the per-capita Electoral College representation of more populous states, such as California and Pennsylvania. A system that gives one voter four times more say than another is inherently unfair.

Pennsylvania, meanwhile, is among the most underrepresented states in the Electoral College. The number of congressional representatives and therefore electors is determined by the census, which includes nonvoters, such as those under 18 and illegal immigrants. A relatively small share of Pennsylvania's population is made up of nonvoters, so our 4.68 percent of the national voting population claims only 3.9 percent of the electors.

The Electoral College has handed the presidency to the popular-vote loser four times: John Quincy Adams over Andrew Jackson in 1824, Rutherford B. Hayes over Samuel Tilden in 1876, Benjamin Harrison over Grover Cleveland in 1888, and George W. Bush over Al Gore in 2000.

The Electoral College narrowly escaped electing a popular-vote loser on several other occasions. In 2004, for example, Bush defeated John Kerry by more than three million votes, yet a shift of 39,444 votes in Ohio would have elected Kerry. In 1960, Richard Nixon would have defeated popular-vote winner John Kennedy with a switch of 4,430 votes in Illinois and 4,782 votes in South Carolina. In 1948, Thomas Dewey would have defeated popular-vote winner Harry Truman with a switch of 3,554 votes in Ohio and 42,835 in New Jersey.

Direct election would eliminate such situations and sharply reduce the likelihood that fraud or error on a relatively small scale would alter a presidential election.

Over time, every legislature has handed its power to choose the state's electors to its people, but the Constitution still leaves the matter up to the legislatures. Now the legislatures could make presidential elections even more democratic by agreeing to give their electors to the winner of the national popular vote, effectively negating the Electoral College.

My legislation to recognize the national popular vote is now before the Pennsylvania House of Representatives. It takes some time to understand this issue, but in the end it's simple. It's time we elect our president according to 21st-century principles, not an 18th-century compromise.