Electoral College Votes Today in a Democratic Denouement

After all the weighty legal battles and absurdities, nonstop media coverage and national fascination, this year’s riveting presidential election has one more spotlight to throw.

The electoral college meets today.

And Augusta Petrone will be there.

Petrone, a 62-year-old housewife, is one of four New Hampshire electors who are to gather at the Concord, N.H., statehouse at 11 a.m. to vote for president. She intends to cast her ballot for President-elect George W. Bush, who won New Hampshire by about 7,000 votes, despite pressure by some Democrats and electoral reformers to entice Republican electors like Petrone to defect and elevate Vice President Al Gore, winner of the popular vote, to the White House.

The pressure has come from all quarters, from Democratic state legislators to the Nation magazine to grass-roots Web-based efforts. And they have been met with a chorus of opposition, ranging from the Bush faithful to academics perturbed by the prospect that electors might thwart the U.S. Constitution.

“I certainly hope they don’t, and it doesn’t make any difference which party it is,” said Judith A. Best, a political science professor at the State University of New York College at Cortland who has testified before Congress on the role of the electoral college. “That would be the most reprehensible thing I could think of. When I and every other voter votes for whichever candidate, we expect the electors to cast their votes to represent the [state] winner.”

Few credit the efforts with any chance of success. Yet David Enrich, an organizer of one of the highest-profile campaigns-- https://www.votewithamerica.com--said Saturday the effort has helped prepare the ground for electoral reform even if all of Bush’s 271 electors stay true. Only two need stray to throw the race into a tie.

“People are really getting the message that it’s important that the candidate who wins the most votes nationally should win the election,” said Enrich, a senior government major at Claremont McKenna College. “Prior to this election, very few people knew the electoral college existed, much less really thought about it on a critical level.”

Indeed, the electoral college has moved, for many Americans, from the constitutional shadows to center stage. With proposals for reform likely to emerge in the next Congress, the structure of presidential elections could become as dissected as a Florida butterfly ballot.

There’s a lot to analyze.

Elector Selection Process Varies

Under the Constitution, the president is elected not by popular vote, but by the electoral college, which gives more weight to voters from sparsely populated states like Wyoming than to crowded states like New York. Each state gets a vote for each U.S. Senate seat (two), and one for each congressional district, which ranges from one in Montana to 52 in California.

While critics say that violates the concept of one person, one vote, defenders say it helps even the political playing field by ensuring that candidates pay attention to small and rural states. Yet under that system, this past election was fought in the Midwest and Florida while the larger states--New York, Texas and California--saw little campaigning because of overwhelming support for one candidate over the others.

How the electors are selected is up to each state, and there is little uniformity to the process. In Utah and Arkansas, among others, electors are selected at state party conventions. In Florida and New York, party committees make the selections. In Mississippi and Arizona, the slates are elected in the primaries.

California fragments the process further by allowing each party to adopt its own methods. The Republicans draw electors from elected officials and candidates as well as local party leaders. The Democrats allow their congressional candidates, and the most recent U.S. Senate candidates, to each select an elector.

This year, U.S. Rep. Brad Sherman (D-Sherman Oaks) picked his mother. For the second time.

“The first time, since I knew nothing about it, it was all new,” said Lane Sherman of Newport Beach, who cast her first ballot for President Clinton four years ago. “You spend some time signing papers. A lot of papers . . . they handed us the ballots and we signed them and then we had our pictures taken and that was that.”

The electors, who meet in their respective states, are as diverse as the political parties they represent. Patty Fedewa, a National Labor Relations Board lawyer in Detroit, is a Democratic elector. So is Sunil Aghi, an insurance man from Anaheim.

On the other side of the political aisle stands Joe Arpaio, the controversial sheriff of Arizona’s Maricopa County and a Republican elector. There also is Marsha Nippert, a Sarasota, Fla., housewife married to a doctor.

Wayne MacDonald, a New Hampshire state welfare-fraud investigator and chairman of the Rockingham County Republican Committee, is looking forward to participating in what until now has for him been a murky process.

“It is fun on the one front,” said MacDonald. “But it’s unfortunate the election came out this way. . . . It would be nice if the president could have had more of a mandate instead of having to put so much effort into uniting the country.”

Petrone, a longtime Republican volunteer, plans to milk the moment. She’s bringing her husband, then hopes to adjourn for lunch with the other electors. She’s been interviewed several times, including on one radio show that also included an elector from neighboring Massachusetts who talked about that state’s near-pageant approach to casting their electoral votes.

“They’re going to wear black ties and long black dresses and have a little procession going into the chambers,” said Petrone, with a tinge of electoral envy in her voice.

Beyond the experience of being a straphanger to history, Petrone and the other New Hampshire electors also receive mileage: “Not to exceed $25,” she said.