By Bob Ward

Editor of the Texas Journal

After every presidential election there is a cry to abolish the electoral college, and it will no doubt be louder and shriller after this one. We may be confronted with the reality, not just the "theoretical possibility" of a president who lost the popular vote and attained the office through the electoral college.

Should that occur, it will be the fourth time in our history and four times out of 52 elections is not bad. And none of them brought down the republic. It is certainly no basis for scrapping a system that has very important benefits.

In fact, it is being generous to critics of the electoral college to concede it has already happened three times. In reality it has only happened once. The first time a candidate became president without winning the popular vote was in 1824 when John Quincy Adams lost the popular vote to Andrew Jackson. But Adams lost the electoral college

vote as well. Because no candidate had an electoral college majority in that four man race, the decision was bucked to the U.S. House of Representatives which chose Adams. It was the House that put Adams into office, not the electoral college system which reflected the popular vote, as it usually does.

It supposedly happened again in 1876 when Rutherford B. Hayes became president after losing the popular vote to Samuel J. Tilden. But the consensus among historians is that the electoral votes were stolen. In Oregon, for example, the governor violated state law by disqualifying an elector and certifying one he chose himself.

The only real case of a discrepancy between the electoral and popular counts came in 1888 when Grover Cleveland lost his bid for re-election. During his first term, Cleveland managed to anger virtually every part of the country except the South. He alienated the Northeast by attempting to reduce tariffs. He angered Union Civil War veterans by vetoing their pensions and ordering the return of captured Confederate battle flags to the Southern states. He angered the West by vetoing legislation that would have furnished seed grain to Texas counties hit by drought.

Cleveland, despite his popular vote victory, carried only 18 states, all but two of them southern or border states. As a result, he lost the electoral vote to Benjamin Harrison. On that occasion, the electoral college saved the nation from being governed by a president with significant support in only one region.

In the current election, for example, we see Al Gore's support confined to the Northeast, Upper Midwest and the West Coast. By contrast, George W. Bush had the backing of the vast expanse of middle America including the plains states, the South and the Mountain West. Without the electoral college, these areas would have virtually no role in electing the President compared to the population heavyweights in the industrial Midwest and along the coasts.

Like the U.S. Senate, which has two members from each state regardless of population, the electoral college makes sure the big states don't eat the little states by guaranteeing each state at least three votes.

Because the Constitution requires an absolute majority of the electoral college, and not just a plurality, to be elected, we have never had a candidate decisively rejected by the American people who nevertheless slithers into office via the electoral college. Ordinarily, the electoral vote amplifies the popular vote.

One improvement might be to make the popular vote in each state binding on the electors or even to eliminate the electors completely and simply put the state's electoral total in the winner's column without the need for unfamiliar persons to cast that vote.

Because the electoral college preserves a lot of important interests including, the political identity of the states, it would be a serious mistake to abolish it just because it thwarts the legacy of Bill Clinton.