The death of the good pope Francis focuses attention on the historic procedure by which the Roman church elects its leader. The College of Cardinals reminds me of the US Electoral College and a point I have made before. It could become the ideal way to choose the leader of any country, if only it were implemented properly.
If popes were chosen by a referendum of all Catholics, the choice would probably not be an improvement. While a plebiscite would be a better way to elect the US President than the present Electoral College (EC), a modified EC, closer to the College of Cardinals and to the American founders’ original intention, would be superior to either.
I’ll call it the IEC, which could stand for Improved Electoral College or Ideal Electoral College. I never thought I’d find myself taking a leaf from the Roman Catholic book.
The present Electoral College’s 538 members elect the president by an absolute majority of at least 270. Each state’s allocation of EC members is proportional to its population. The state has the power to decide how its EC members are chosen, and almost all do it by popular vote. So far, so good.
The rot set in when EC members became pledged to a particular presidential candidate. An EC of pledged members devolves to a proxy plebiscite, but a highly distorted one. A straight plebiscite, cutting out the middle man, would force campaigns to care about the whole country, not just the handful of states thought to be marginal. But a plebiscite, too, is not ideal.
By far the worst thing about the present US Electoral College is that all the states (except Nebraska and Maine) follow an inflexible winner-take-all rule. No matter how slender the popular majority in a state, all its EC votes go to one presidential candidate, zero to the other. I’ve previously pointed out the remarkable fact that a candidate could win the presidency even if his opponent obtains three quarters of the popular vote.
In the 2000 US presidential election, Florida was tied: a hanging-chad dead-heat, plumb in the middle of the margin of error. Yet the winner-take-all rule stated that all Florida’s 25 electoral college votes must go as a block to either Gore or Bush. The presidency hung on the toss of a coin. The Supreme Court was called upon to be that coin. You might think they could have split the 25 EC members 13 to 12. The rules forbade it.
The IEC would actively headhunt, rather than wait for candidates to volunteer
If they’d allocated 21 to Bush and only 4 to Gore, Gore would still have won. Although they couldn’t literally do that, it could have been a way to toss the metaphorical penny. As the world knows they in fact weighted the coin along personal party lines, handing all 25 EC votes to Bush, who consequently became president.
The IEC would take the electoral college seriously. As at present, the members would be respected citizens of their state, elected by popular vote, perhaps one member per congressional district. They’d meet to choose the president by secret ballot. But they would not be pledged in advance to a particular candidate. And there’d be no winner-take-all nonsense.
Like the College of Cardinals, or like a university search committee seeking a new professor, they’d deliberate at length behind closed doors. They’d actively headhunt, rather than wait for candidates to volunteer. They’d exhaustively thrash out the merits and demerits of many candidates, not just two. They’d grill them at interview, read their books and speeches, take soundings, vet them for security clearance. Finally, they’d vote, perhaps in a series of secret ballots until a consensus emerged – with “Habemus praesidentem” proclaimed in a puff of white smoke.
A strong objection to the IEC is that its members might be bribed or coerced. Or the no-pledge rule could easily be chipped away. An aspiring IEC member, although not formally pledged to a presidential candidate, could let slip a de facto endorsement of “My very good friend . . .” Such a slide towards pledging is probably inevitable, but I think it wouldn’t affect all, or even a majority of IEC candidates.
If prior pledging tempted fifty percent of the electoral college, that would still be better than the present mandatory hundred percent in each state. As for corruption, a secret ballot precludes checking up on whether bribes are honoured. And isn’t the present system (or indeed a simple plebiscite) subject to even greater corruption: massive injections of cash into a presidential campaign by multi-billionaires greedy for post-election favours?
An amendment to the US constitution normally requires a two thirds majority in both houses of Congress plus ratification by three quarters of the states. A very high hurdle. (How, by the way, did prohibition ever get through?) But modifying the EC doesn’t require a constitutional amendment. Each state is free to change how it chooses EC members. It’s important, however, that individual states shouldn’t change unilaterally.
Isn’t this terribly elitist? Yes. So what?
If Texas alone adopted the IEC, it would be a gift to the Democrats. If California alone abandoned “winner-take-all”, every future president would be Republican. There would have to be a pact between a carefully calculated minimum of states before any one of them changed. Such a pact is already under discussion for a proposed plebiscite. It could easily be adapted to the IEC.
Citizens are stringently vetted before being entrusted with state secrets or other sensitive information. But the president is handed the keys to the White House, and the nuclear football, without any security clearance at all. He or she could be a Russian agent. The elaborate scrutinizing process undertaken by the IEC would also rule out an obviously unqualified or emotionally unstable president.
But let’s put the advantages more positively. Humans vary enormously in intelligence, judgment, literacy, responsibility, wisdom, knowledge and ability to deploy it. Talk to a great jurist, a world-class philosopher, a Nobel-level economist, scientist, mathematician or writer, and you feel humbled, honoured to belong to the same species.
Even if such qualities are not the ones you seek in a leader, they illustrate the huge variance our species has to offer. Whatever desirable qualities we seek, they are rare. Rare but discoverable. A quarter of a billion Americans must include many individuals with ideal presidential qualifications, whatever those qualifications might be. Isn’t it obvious that a search committee convened with the sole purpose of exhaustively ferreting out that crème-de-la crème ideal must do a better job than the present system? Or than a simple plebiscite.
Crème-de-la crème? Isn’t that terribly elitist? Yes. So what? I’m not the first to point out that you want an elite pilot to fly your plane, an elite surgeon to remove your appendix or your tumour, an elite architect to design a bridge or a building. Shouldn’t the leader of a country make at least a minimal approach to the same exacting standards?
The IEC may be elitist but it is democratic: a delegated democracy. It will never be adopted. It’s much too sensible. But one can dream.
Richard Dawkins is a scientist and author
