November 21, 2007
Lincoln’s Plan to Battle the Electoral College Posted by Julie M. Fenster at 10:40 AM EST “This is as plain as adding up the weights of three small hogs.”
With the offhand manner of the truly ardent salesman, Abraham Lincoln tried every trick he knew to convince opposition voters in 1856 that the Electoral College was a trap, that it would lead people into “throwing their votes away,” in his words, and that, in short, if they really wanted their man to be President, they would support his man.
It was as plain to Lincoln as adding up the weights of pigs.
The distorting influence of the Electoral College is just as obvious 151 years later, with 42 states actively considering changes to their system of presidential voting.
Lincoln gave the subject of electoral voting a great deal of thought. Perhaps too much. In the drive to make people understand, he grew desperate. He stooped low: He invented junk mail. (It is one of the more shocking revelations I was forced to make in my book The Case of Abraham Lincoln.)
In Illinois, at any rate, junk mail had never been seen before—a printed letter carefully disguised as a handwritten one and distributed in bulk to unsuspecting voters. The subject was the electoral outlook, and the theme was that either people played the system’s game or risked wasting their votes.
“Be not deceived,” Lincoln exhorted each recipient. (They already were—if they believed they were holding a personal letter from Abraham Lincoln.)
The people who received the form letter ought to have heeded the message anyway. Lincoln cared passionately about the three-way campaign for the White House, it being the battle that succeeded in drawing him into the Republican Party.
He decided that the most cunning strategy against the electoral college was to take advantage its very essence, proxy voting. To salvage hope for the other candidates, the election in Illinois had to mean something, its electoral votes had to be up for grabs.
States such as New York and Texas haven’t known that sensation in years. In 1856 Illinois wasn’t any different. James Buchanan seemed to have it sewn up.
Most people, then or now, groused a little and then went through the motions of casting a vote in a state with a foregone conclusion.
Lincoln was different. A man comforted by logic, he was actively annoyed by the Electoral College. His plan in the three-way race of Buchanan, Frémont, and Fillmore was typical of his objective thinking.
“Fremont and Fillmore men,” Lincoln wrote, “unite on one entire ticket, with the understanding that that ticket, if elected, shall cast the vote of the State, for whichever of the two shall be known to have received the larger number of electoral votes, in the other states.” It may not have taken hold, but it was incisive.
The kind of frustrations that Lincoln felt toward the Electoral College during the campaign haven’t faded, nor has the spirit behind his solution. A plan circulating in state legislatures today, and already passed in Maryland, echoes the Lincoln scheme. When states representing at least 270 electoral votes adopt the same law, each will be pledged to give its entire electoral vote to the candidate winning the popular vote nationally. The bill does require a leap of faith in the belief that the majority should rule—a concept known in the past as democracy.
Neither Lincoln’s plan nor the one currently under discussion dallies with the mere abolition of the Electoral College. They each endeavor instead to outwit it, as it has outwitted voters, as well as some very good candidates, ever since its inception.
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