The Ones Who Really Elect the President

Richie Robb is a Republican poster boy in West Virginia, a poor Appalachian state where his kind are vastly outnumbered by Democrats.

Robb's political resume could have been written by Hollywood — senior class president at Marshall University, where he was captain of the varsity football team; an intelligence officer with the U.S. Army in Vietnam, where he was awarded a Bronze Star; a veteran who graduated from law school. Handsome in a sitcom dad way, he is married to a teacher who is also a professional figure-skating instructor.

Robb has won eight consecutive elections as mayor of South Charleston, a quaint town of 13,268 nestled in the mountains west of Charleston, which may explain its "Someplace Special" slogan.

Earlier this year, mayor Robb lost the Republican nomination for governor to Monty Warner, a retired Army Ranger colonel and paratroop commander who is one of the state's major developers when not teaching Sunday school. The Grand Old Party nod seemed more of a prize this year after the Democratic incumbent dropped his re-election bid when his extramarital affair with a state employee was revealed.

At the Republican's state convention, Robb was told he had been placed on the party's slate of presidential electors. His response to the consolation prize was a polite "That's nice." He hadn't asked for the honour.

Party in a tizzy

Often forgotten in the heavy mythology surrounding American democracy is a stark fact — only 538 citizens cast a direct vote for president. A candidate needs 270 votes to become president. If West Virginians vote for George Bush, as polls in the battleground state suggest they will do, then Robb, as a Republican elector, will get to vote for president.

Whether he votes for Bush or not has sent his party into a tizzy.

Tens of millions will troop to polling stations across the United States on Tuesday, joining millions of others who have already voted by mail or other means, in selecting state officers, governors, congressmen, senators, and the president. As all were taught in civics class, but have likely forgotten, they are voting not for George W. Bush or John Kerry but for slates of electors nominated on each candidate's behalf. Those successful slates, known collectively as the electoral college, will gather in state capitols on December 13 to pick the Leader of the Free World.

The system, a throwback to 18th-century notions of democracy, allowed Bush to win the presidency four years ago, even though he won a half-million votes less than the Democrats' Al Gore.

How it, um, works

Each state is allocated electoral college votes based on its representation in Congress. Like all 50 states, Wyoming has two senators. The state where Vice-President Dick Cheney claims residency is represented by a single Congressman. So, Wyoming gets three electoral college votes. California, with two senators plus 53 congressmen, gets 55 votes.

(While congressional districts are supposed to reflect population, the electoral college is weighted towards the smaller states. California has 18 times the electoral college votes of Wyoming, while supporting about 70 times the population.)

The race for the presidency is a state-by-state showdown. All but two are winner-take-all contests, so Bush's victory (ahem) by 537 votes in Florida in 2000 was enough to give him the state's 27 electoral votes and the presidency.

The electoral college votes can be shared among candidates in only two states — Maine (4) and Nebraska (5). A referendum question on the ballot in Colorado (9) offers voters a chance to distribute the state's electoral college votes more in following with each candidate's results. Polls show the initiative failing, as many fear an all-but-guaranteed 5-4 or 6-3 split in the electoral college vote will make Colorado too small a prize for candidates to bother contesting in future elections.

Redneck scheme

Calls to reform the electoral college are a quadrennial feature of American politics, no more so than following the debacle of four years ago. Nothing happened. The current system favours small states, many of which have been Republican stalwarts for 30 years. Why would those states, or the Republican party, ever support a constitutional amendment erasing that built-in advantage?

The danger in not reforming the electoral college seemed clear during the 1968 election. George Wallace, a redneck darling, campaigned on a law-and-order and segregationist platform for the American Independence Party. His goal was not to win the election — too many Americans found his racial policies abhorrent — but to select personally the president.

Under the constitution, a contest in which no presidential candidate gets half the electoral college votes is sent to the House of Representatives. Wallace's dream was to deny Richard Nixon, the Republican, and Hubert Humphrey, the Democrat, an outright victory, but he also had no intention of allowing the race to be decided in Congress. Wallace wanted to be kingmaker. He had all the electors pledged to him to sign an affidavit agreeing to vote for Wallace or whomever he told them to support.

On election day, Wallace won his home state of Alabama and four neighbouring states from the old Confederacy, claiming 46 electoral votes. Nixon had 301 votes, though, so Wallace's scheme was thwarted. The racialist demogogue did not get to negotiate an end to civil-rights legislation in exchange for his electoral votes.

'Reckless gamble'

Wallace remains the last third-party candidate to find himself on the electoral-college scoreboard. (While Ross Perot took 19 per cent of the vote in 1992, he won not a single state, thus earning nothing in the electoral college.) Only Nixon's narrow victories in a handful of states prevented a racialist demagogue from being in position to handpick a president.

The thought of Wallace exercising such power drove one Democratic elector from Pennsylvania to devise a plan whereby he would convince Republican electors to settle the election among themselves as a compromise between two honourable parties. James A. Michener wrote a book about his experience as an elector, Presidential Lottery: The Reckless Gamble in our Electoral System. Perhaps not surprisingly, it did not sell as well as the author's fiction, which includes such blockbusters as Hawaii, Texas and Tales of the South Pacific.

Few electors are as well known as Michener. Many are party faithful, earning a cheap reward for years of tireless and thankless duty.

Robb 'n' Hood

Former Orlando mayor Glenda Hood was one of 27 Republican electors from Florida in the disputed campaign of 2000. She was allowed to vote for Bush after the U.S. Supreme Court ordered, by a 5-4 vote, a halt to the recounting of ballots in the state.

Hood is back in 2004, but not as an elector. She is Florida's secretary of state and the official in charge of elections. Democrats and independents are already bitterly criticizing her decisions, and many suspect a fair election in the state will once again be impossible.

Passions are running high in West Virginia, too. A reporter who spotted Robb at a Labor Day rally featuring Jesse Jackson as a speaker wondered if the mayor was wavering in his support for the Republican ticket. The reporter's instincts were good — Robb said he likely would not vote for Bush as an elector. He later clarified his position, adding he was not going to vote for Kerry. Robb might vote for some other person, or perhaps even abstain.

Republicans are angry with Robb, but he doesn't feel he owes an apology. He didn't ask to be made an elector and no one in his party bothered to ask him if he backed Bush.

"Mine's not even a defection," he told a Pittsburgh newspaper columnist.

No obligations

The mayor may pay a personal price for his apostasy, but there is no official punishment in West Virginia for being what is known as an "unfaithful elector." Only 14 states have penalties for those who do not vote for a candidate on whose slate they appear.

So, a majority of the 538 electors can vote for whomever they please.

Only a handful of electors have exercised such power in the past. In 2000, Barbara Lett Simmons, a Democratic elector from the District of Columbia, withheld her vote to protest her city's lack of representation in Congress. The final tally was Bush 271, Gore 266.

In 1988, a West Virginia elector — the Mountain State again, must be something in the air — deliberately reversed the Democratic ticket, voting Lloyd Bentsen for president and Michael Dukakis for vice-president.

A Washington State elector voted for Ronald Reagan instead of Gerald Ford in 1976, perhaps anticipating the California actor's future popularity. Four years earlier, Virginia elector Roger McBride cast his ballot for John Hospers, the Libertarian candidate.

'No exit'

Robb says he has been outspoken in his opposition to the president's policies for two years.

"We were told by Bush that we have to sacrifice in times of war, but the upper crusts don't seem to be sacrificing as much," he told the Charleston Daily Mail. "There's still no exit strategy to the war, and there's a growing sense we have weakened in our cause."

The mayor does not consider himself a maverick, nor does he relish the attention he has received.

"This isn't something I asked for, it just sort of landed in my lap," he said.

Victoria reporter Tom Hawthorn is a frequent contributor to The Tyee.