We try to satisfy your hunger for more information about the U.S. Electoral College. Enjoy!
FICTION SECTION:
The People's Choice by Jeff Greenfield.
A TV commentator writes his first novel -- about the Electoral College!
EC books Most of the best stuff about the Electoral College is not on the Internet. Public library resources vary. Here are some sources to look for. For convenience, mostly, there may be a link to purchase books, too. If you buy a book through this link, I may get paid something someday.  Presidential Elections, 1789-1996 by Congressional Quarterly. Even if this title is not in your library, CQ has a number of other books with much of the same information. There is a tremendous amount of information on every presidential election, including complete electoral and popular votes (even minor parties), primary voting, convention votes and loads of presidential election trivia. It also has summary biographies of all the presidential and vice-presidential candidates. Work with the information in this book and learn things you'll never find in a history textbook. A major source for information to debunk myths about Presidential elections.  The Electoral College by Christopher Henry. This book is written for a young audience, which is to its credit. Young people seem to have much more respect for the importance of U.S. institutions, and this book reflects that respect. There are clear explanations of how the electoral college came to be, how it became the institution it is today, and how it might be reformed. But it honestly recognizes the advantages of the system and the problems that might arise out of changing it. The People's President by Neal R. Peirce (1968). This is the mother of all anti-Electoral College tracts. Peirce was the political editor of Congressional Quarterly from 1960 on. The irregularities in the 1960 election seem to have inspired him to a crusade against the Electoral College. It's a large book (400 pages) full of statistical analysis and historical reporting. Unfortunately, it is single-mindedly against the electoral college and in favor of direct election of the president. Peirce does not fairly present arguments pro and con. Many pages are devoted to one-sided polemic. And information is skewed or left out that doesn't support his point. He repeats the line about Andrew Jackson being the popular choice in 1824 (the true story is buried in a footnote); he fails to note the extreme regional vote concentration in the 1888 election; and so on. With the huge amount of work that went into this book, it is very sad that its bias makes it an unreliable reference. One interesting, though obsessive, appendix lists 20 elections where a small change in popular vote percentage (computed to the 3d decimal point) would have changed the outcome of the election, usually to make the loser of the popular election the winner of the electoral college. Peirce never inquires why, of the 20 close elections (23 as of 1996), only 3 (1824, 1876 and 1888) actually produced minority presidents. If the Electoral College is really such a loose cannon, the random misfiring should be more frequent. The Case Against Direct Election of the President by Judith V. Best (1975). This book is undoubtedly difficult to find, but well worth searching out. In her opening chapter, Best sets forth the indictment against the electoral college system. Then the rest of the book answers the charges in chapters about the runner-up presidency, the House election, the faithless elector, inequalities in voting power, electoral certainty, and the federal system. It is relatively brief, but somewhat dense at times. |
ELECTORAL CALCULATOR Do your own electoral college strategy with this Java Script electoral college calculator. GO!
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