You, Bill Bartlett, wrote:

>So Wat Tyler was right then, if the voters make a mistake the electoral
>college could over-rule them? Has this ever happened?
Sort of. In 1824 none of the candidates had a Electoral College majority
(nor popular majority), and it was thrown into the House of
Representatives, where Henry Clay, a distant third, threw his electoral
college support behind John Quincy Adams, who trailed the populist Andrew
Jackson, giving JQA the White House despite not even having a plurality
of votes. This is the closest example of the EC nullifying the popular
will--though it really was Congress that did it, and even Jackson didn't
have a majority, only a plurality.

In 1888 Benjamin Harrison beat Grover Cleveland even though the latter
had 100,000 more popular votes. But Harrison had a majority in the
Electoral College without their having to vote against the "will" of the
individual voters.

Unlike parliamentary systems, ours insists on some form of majoritarian
validation for a candidate to take office; pluralities aren't enough. The
EC, with its winner-take-all way of apportioning delegates from each
state, generally accomplishes this. In fact, it always exaggerates the
"mandate" that a President has. For example, in the 1992 election Clinton
only received something like 38% of the vote, because our billionaire
nutball, Ross Perot, siphoned off about 20%. But Perot didn't win a
majority of any state, so the EC votes were divided entirely between Bush
and Clinton, and Clinton got a sizeable "majority." In 1996 there wasn't
any credible third party threat, so Clinton got something like 52%--and a
"landslide" in the EC. Was there any great groundswell of support for
Clinton in the intervening 4 years? Hardly (I was one of many to vote
third party or stay home the second time out), only the disappearance of
any choice outside the two parties along with the distorting effect of
the EC. However, popular wisdom was that Clinton lacked a "popular
mandate" in 1992, while he had one in 1996. Go figure.

The strangling effect that our two-party system has on serious threats to
the status quo is formidable indeed--and not lost on the elites who want
to keep it that way. A recent Supreme Court case illustrates this. We
have a struggling progressive party, the New Party, one of whose
electoral strategies was "fusion." This means that rather than only
fielding its own candidates, the NP would selectively endorse major party
(usually Democratic) candidates--but under their own NP ballot line. In
other words, a voter could vote for Democrat X by checking the box for X
on the NP line. This allows NP supporters to participate "in the system"
when feasible without losing their political leverage. If Democrat X won
by 1500 votes, and got 2000 votes from the NP voters, then the NP could
justifiably claim that they delivered X's seat, and make political
demands upon him/her--unlike the usual case, where the progressive wing
gets courted for their support during the election, then discarded for
the next four years of pro-business rule.

The problem with "fusion" was that a majority of states prohibited it.
The NP challenged this, arguing the self-evident proposition that this
violated their First Amendment rights to free association, and moreover,
that it thwarted true democracy by putting third parties in a no-win
position of either fielding candidates who can't win, or endorsing
major-party candidates who would ignore them later. To this the Supreme
Court basically said, "You make that sound like a bad thing." In one of
the more Orwellian decisions that the Rehnquist court has issued in its
miserable existence, it said that states have a legitimate interest in
"promoting" the two-party system by banning fusion; among the reasons was
that doing so encouraged "stability" in the system and "responsibility"
on the part of voters who might otherwise be tempted to cast protest
votes, etc.

A decision any Chomsky reader could have predicted. (Chomsky, of course,
is an NP member.)

_________
Tresy Kilbourne, Seattle WA
"The environment's in trouble -- and the more it suffers, the tougher it
is on your skin."
   --Seventeen Magazine