Today when you ask people why they don’t like the Electoral College, their #1 answer would probably be “Because it can allow the person with fewer votes to win.” This concern was discussed in the 1960s by the Bayh Subcommittee, but skeptics (including RFK) pointed out that we had not had a minority President since 1888. Maybe that was a long-shot possibility, they thought. Turned out they were wrong, but that’s just another example of a poor structural prediction.
The #1 concern in the 1960s was that we would have contingent elections in the House of Representative. Strom Thurmond tried to achieve this with his third-party run in 1948. This then triggered some state reforms that led to Ray v. Blair, a significant Supreme Court case on presidential electors. In 1960, some Southern states tried choosing “unpledged” electors to trigger a contingent election. And in 1968, George Wallace ran a third-party candidacy to do the same.
It’s no surprise, therefore, that high tide for Electoral College reform was 1969. People worried that we could have an acting President on Inauguration Day if the House was deadlocked. People worried about whether a President who was elected despite being a clear loser in the popular vote (John Quincy Adams in 1824) could govern modern America or be an example of democracy in the Cold War. People worried about faithless electors. People worried about a contingent election giving us Nixon/Muskie instead of Nixon/Agnew because of the party balance in the Senate. Finally, people worried that a contingent election triggered by the white South would kill civil rights. In this respect, I wonder to what extent the assassination attempt that crippled Wallace’s 1972 campaign might have mattered.
Nobody that I know of defends the contingent election procedure. Acceptance of the Electoral College today rests on the assumption that this is not a threat. But that could just be another poor structural prediction.
Posted by Gerard Magliocca on July 16, 2025 at 08:54 AM