Schrag: How We Choose a President

Literacy tests and poll taxes, now banned everywhere, had a long and dishonorable history in America, lasting well into the last century, especially in the South. The ID requirement in states such as Indiana, which discourages poor and minority voters and will probably be upheld by a conservative U.S. Supreme Court, squints back in that direction. But chances are that for each fraudulent vote thwarted by the ID requirement, many more legal ones are discouraged.

All this ought not be surprising in a country that still gives Wyoming and North Dakota as many Senate votes as California and is still stuck with the creaky Electoral College. Both are 200-year hangovers that, unlike most of the other original restraints on representative democracy – the exclusion of women and blacks from the voter rolls, for example – remain to plague us.

If the national popular vote determined the winner in presidential elections, candidates of both parties, instead of focusing only on swing states, would have an incentive to campaign in states such as California, regarded as safely in the camp of one or another party.

Last Saturday, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger again celebrated the fact that the change of California's primary date was, for the first time, likely to give California a major voice in the choice of the major party candidates. In past presidential years, California, with its late primary, was at best an afterthought. By the time Californians voted the outcome had often been decided.

Schwarzenegger appears to be right – actually only half right. For, while he supported the change to the Feb. 5 date, he vetoed a bill that would have spurred the effective abolition of the Electoral College system and given California real clout.

Under the bill, passed by the Legislature in 2006, if states representing a majority of Electoral College votes passed similar laws, California would give all its Electoral College votes to the winner of the national popular vote. Schwarzenegger blocked it because "It disregards the will of a majority of Californians," in cases where Californians voted for someone other than the winner of the national popular vote.

It was a silly argument since, as in the elections of 1976, 2000 and 2004, the existing system can also give the presidency to a candidate most Californians didn't vote for. And as we learned again in 2000, a candidate can become president even though an opponent has more popular votes. Hypothetically, the margin could run into the millions.

And then, of course, there are the hackable voting machines and election officials who, as in Florida in 2000 and Ohio in 2004, doubled as their state's Bush-Cheney presidential campaign chairs. We're not Kenya or Kazakhstan, but then again. …

Peter Schrag is the former editorial page editor of the Sacramento Bee. This article is published with his permission.