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The Maine system, by which one electoral vote goes to the winner of the popular vote in each congressional district and two electoral votes go to the winner of the state-wide popular vote, is clearly better than the winner-take-all rule applied in the other 49 states. Better than the Maine district system would be one dividing the states into presidential electoral districts, each smaller than a congressional district, which now includes about 450.000 persons.
If each presidential elector represented, say, a district of 100,000 persons, a candidate for the Electoral College could campaign effectively without spending great sums of money for campaign activities. One person with a few volunteers could, in the course of a presidential campaign, reach all voters in his 100,000-person constituency. If the country were divided into some 2.000 districts, 2,000 presidential electors would be chosen.
Obviously, if a majority of those chosen were Democrats, a Democratic President would be chosen; if a majority were Republicans, a Republican would be President. If neither party had a majority, the third- or fourth-party electors would hold the balance of power and their votes would have to be solicited by other parties. *
This procedure is no different from the one followed within U.S. political parties at their conventions (or on the way to conventions). The voters of Great Britain employ a similar procedure in the selection of a Prime Minister under the parliamentary system.
A President chosen through this process would clearly be a Constitutional President, and he would be chosen by electors who represented a majority, if not of the voters, almost certainly of the citizens.
We should follow the advice of John Holcombe, who in the early years of this century argued that “in no reactionary spirit, therefore, but with views thoroughly progressive,” we should “return for relief to the wisdom of the fathers by making effective their admirable device — the Electoral College.”
The need for purifying and perfecting the process of the selection of the President is most important at this time, because of the complexity and weight of the demands of the presidential office — and because voter knowledge of the qualifications of the presidential candidates is obscured or distorted with the intrusion of media hype. Yet it is better to improve the representative process, than to propose that it should be done away with because the representative process has not worked in the Electoral College.
Sen. McCarthy is a resident of Woodville, and a former Democratic Senator from Minnesota. He is mounting an independent campaign for the Presidency this year— his fourth try for the office.
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