Is Maine Electoral College system a national model?

It has happened only once in the history of the republic. In 1828, favorite son John Quincy Adams swept all of New England – with the lonely exception of Maine’s eastern-most congressional district, where Andrew Jackson prevailed. Adams was awarded eight of Maine’s nine voting delegates to the Electoral College. But Jackson won the White House, his 178-to-83 electoral margin padded by the ballot cast by a single delegate from Down East Maine.

Secretary of State Dan Gwadosky says he’s getting a lot of calls from other state ballot chiefs about Maine’s unusual way of allocating its electoral votes. As the country got bigger and moved west, Maine’s nine U.S. House districts shrunk to only two. Today we have just four electoral votes. In all the other states except Nebraska, which adopted Maine’s model a few years ago, the winner of a state’s popular vote takes all of its Electoral College delegates. Under Maine’s system, which goes back to the state’s entrance into the union in 1820, each congressional district is an election within an election.

Indeed, there was credible speculation before the Nov. 7 election that Gov. George W. Bush might carry Maine’s rural northern 2nd District even though Vice President Al Gore was favored to take the statewide and urban 1st District vote. Bush aides said that the governor re-routed his final week campaign visit from Portland to Bangor after former GOP Rep. David Emery called Bush’s headquarters in Austin, Texas, with polling data indicating that a three-to-one electoral split was possible in Maine. Democrats countered by scheduling vice presidential nominee Joe Lieberman for a last-minute Bangor rally.

How could one measly electoral vote be that important, you ask. If Bush wins Florida and the presidency, his margin in the Electoral College will be one vote.

That fact obviously is grating on Democrats. New York Sen.-elect Hillary Clinton announced that her first act when arriving in Washington, D.C., will be to introduce a constitutional amendment abolishing the Electoral College. A survey by the Associated Press of Democratic electors found that more than one-third want to scrap the current system.

Dinosaur that it is, the Electoral College has its defenders. Gwadosky pointed out that the presidential candidates almost certainly would have bypassed Maine because of its tiny popular vote total without the electors. Look at the election night map of America. In the entire United States, Bush won more than 2,400 counties. Gore captured only 600. Yet Gore seems to have narrowly won the popular vote. A handful of big cities and states dictated that outcome.

Paul A. Rahe, a professor of American history at Tulsa University, asserts the Electoral College is the defender of America’s diversity.

“No party intent on victory can afford to pour scorn on the Jews of New York, the Mormons of Utah, the Muslims of Michigan, the Catholics of Illinois, the Armenians of Massachusetts, or the evangelical Protestants of Oklahoma,” he wrote in the American Spectator Magazine.

Gwadosky thinks Maine’s system for allocating elector votes could be the improvement that rescues the Electoral College. Mrs. Clinton’s amendment is DOA on Capitol Hill because adoption would require the approval of three-fourths of the state legislatures. The small states will never sanction that. By localizing the electoral vote to each of the country’s separate and unique 438 congressional districts, the battle for president becomes a national chess board where candidates would seek pockets of votes in states they otherwise would never visit. The difference between the electoral vote and popular vote is diminished.

More importantly, if there is another razor-thin national popular vote, ballot examinations and recounts would be confined to House district populations of about 500,000 rather than the nightmare of a national 100-million-vote recount in every single U.S. precinct. Jed Rubenfeld, who teaches constitutional law at Yale University, thinks the Maine-Nebraska model would be an improvement, although he cautioned if other states rushed into implementing a “hodgepodge” of competing reforms the result might be worse than the existing system.

Gwadosky said his office has been flooded with inquiries from scholars and other election officials interested in Maine’s model. The Maine secretary of state says he is going to make a presentation on the subject during February’s conference of state ballot chiefs in Washington, D.C.

“We certainly are going to advocate the Maine process. It’s a good middle ground,” said Gwadosky. Which is a statesman-like position for a top Democratic official to take, given the fact that his party’s presidential candidate may end up winning the nation’s popular vote but losing the White House by one vote in the Electoral College.

John S. Day is a columnist for the Bangor Daily News who is based in Washington, D.C. Readers may send e-mail messages to zanadume@aol.com.