We see where the New York Times has joined the clamor for the establishment of a system of electing the president by popular vote. It issued an editorial on November 15 calling for the abolition of the Electoral College. It understands the difficulties of getting a proper constitutional amendment designed to do away with the system under which voters in the 50 states go to the polls to choose electors who then vote in the Electoral College for president. So instead the Times endorses the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, which is a kind of end-run around the constitutional amendment process that would obligate member states of the compact to cast their electoral votes for the winner of the popular vote nationally.

The idea seems to be that the Electoral College disenfranchises voters in some states because it steers the campaign to the so-called swing states. It’s hard for us to see how New Yorkers are disenfranchised because the majority of their state is so likely to vote Democratic that few national candidates campaign here, a point your editor has made in the American Spectator. It’s also hard to see how New Yorkers would have been further enfranchised if, after they voted for Senator Kerry by a margin of 1.4 million votes in 2004, the state’s electors had gone to the Electoral College and cast their votes for George W. Bush. Yet that’s what the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact would require.

Already the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact has been ratified by eight states and the Columbia District. It has also been endorsed by the Honorable Hendrik Hertzberg, chief political columnist for the New Yorker and the Compact’s distinguished defender. New York is part way down the road to ratification; the Senate in Albany has approved the compact. If the Assembly eventually follows, and the governor signs, it would represent a big step forward for the compact, which goes into effect when the measure has been ratified by enough states to account for the 270 votes needed in the electoral college to elevate someone to the presidency. 

The Times editorial, meantime, notes that the Gray Lady once characterized the Electoral College as a “cumbrous and useless piece of old governmental machinery.” That was back in 1936, when the Times appeared to have its nose out of joint because Alf Landon won but eight electoral votes though he’d won 36% of the popular vote against President Roosevelt. We went back and read the long-ago Times editorial, and it is true that the editors worked themselves into a whale of a swivet over poor Landon’s fate. They don’t seem quite so upset that Governor Romney racked up only 38% of the votes in the Electoral College despite the fact that he won nearly 48% of the popular vote. But consistency was never the Times’ long suit.

Not even with its past positions. It turns out that in that long-ago editorial the Times did not actually endorse ending the Electoral College. It whinged about it, but then it warned against moving with haste. “Simple as the plea might appear,” the Times wrote, “it contains many complexities and will meet with many objections.” It then went on to note that under the Constitution, the presidential election “is under the control of the States.” It is, the Times pointed out, the States that define the qualification of voters, “fix the method and times of registration,” and “actually conduct the election by their own officials.” It questioned whether they’d readily place themselves under a universal federal law.

It is one of the tragedies of the American story that when the states most famously made an issue of their rights, it was to protect their ability to discriminate against African Americans. It is true that the Electoral College was a compromise designed, at least in part, to appease slave states worried about more “diffuse” voting in the north. Slavery, though, has been banished from the land by constitutional amendment, as moviegoers to Steven Spielberg’s “Lincoln” are being so wonderfully reminded. Jim Crow, that is the system of racist laws, has been defeated, though the battle against racism will always have to be levied.

Neither Jim Crow nor slavery, though, were the only logic of the Electoral College, at least not to those of us who see a virtue in the federal system in which America is not only a polity of individuals but a contract among states with their own spheres of sovereignty. It has always struck us as a myopia of liberalism that it has so long sought to undercut this system by moving so many issues to a national level and seeking a homogenized nation. We have no doubt that this is the agenda of those plumping for an end to the Electoral College. The National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, after all, has been approved only by states that tilt to the Democratic Party.