A Primer on the Electoral Process
Many people are angry about and befuddled by our convoluted process for choosing the president. The confusion has been made worse this year as millions of new voters and independents are going to the polls — people who have never been involved in politics or a political party. They want the process to be simple and straightforward: you cast your vote, the votes are counted, and the candidate with the most votes wins.
But that is not how it works. At the core of this issue is control of our political parties.
If you want to understand the electoral process, don’t turn to the U.S. Constitution: it says nothing about political parties or “the people” electing the president. The founding fathers were trying to limit the power of the federal government by separating the three branches of government — legislative, executive and judicial. So instead of Congress (the legislative branch) choosing the president (head of the executive branch), they decided to leave it up to the states and set up a special committee called the Electoral College, which is composed of one elector for each senator and congressman in a state. This body was set up with the provision that no public official could be an elector.
But the founding fathers didn’t specify how the state legislatures were to choose their electors.
Initially only three states — New Hampshire, Massachusetts and Pennsylvania — chose to allow the people to vote for the electors; the other states left it to their state Legislatures to appoint them.
Over time, more states decided to allow the people to choose. But in 1824, Andrew Jackson, a populist, lost the presidency despite having pluralities of both the popular and electoral votes when the outcome was decided by six states where the electors were appointed by the state Legislatures.
It was not until 1868, when South Carolina switched to using the popular vote, that all registered voters in the United States were able to vote for the president. Thus, popular election of the president in the United States is a tradition — not a right guaranteed by the Constitution. And how the presidential election is conducted is up to each state, and not the federal government. If you want to change this, you would have to amend the Constitution.
Soon after the Constitution was adopted, voters began to organize into associations for the purpose of getting like-minded politicians elected to office. These political parties are private organizations — not government agencies — and each state treats them differently.
The Constitution grants all citizens the right to run for public office, including the presidency, but not the right to run under a particular party’s label. States cannot restrict this right to run by requiring that candidates belong to a political party or by giving favorable treatment to candidates of a political party. But access to the ballot can be an issue.
In Louisiana, in order for a political party to be recognized by the state government, at least 1,000 voters must be registered as affiliated with that party. The party must file a notarized registration statement with the Secretary of State and pay a $1,000 registration fee. We currently have five recognized political parties: the Democratic Party, the Republican Party, the Libertarian Party, the Green Party, and the Reform Party. If a candidate is a member of one of these parties, the name of that party appears on the ballot after the candidate’s name. If a candidate is a member of a party that isn’t officially recognized, their name will still be on the ballot, but it will have an O for “other” after it. And if a candidate belongs to no political party, an N for “no party” will come after their name.
Political parties make their own rules for choosing their candidates. For presidential candidates, there are three common methods: regional meetings called “caucuses,” a statewide convention or a statewide primary election, which may be “closed” (only party members can vote) or “open” (non-party members can also vote).
The caucus is the oldest method. In the past, it was often characterized as centering around “smoke-filled rooms” where party bosses controlled the outcome. Conventions became popular in the mid-1800s, and were generally considered to be more open and inclusive than caucuses. And primaries became popular during the progressive era in the 1920s, when they served as a means of shifting political power from party bosses to the populace.
Today, most parties use a mix of these methods to choose the delegates to their national convention.
The question raised by Donald Trump’s campaign — and to a lesser extent by the Sanders campaign — is whose convention is it and who writes the rules? Trump’s contention is that since he has received more votes in primary elections and has more delegates than any other candidate, the Republican Party is “stealing” the nomination from him if it does not name him as its candidate.
But from the perspective of party regulars — people who have worked for years or their entire lives to build up the Republican Party, and whom Trump derisively calls “the establishment” — it is not “the people’s party” or Trump’s party; it is their party, and they want to choose a candidate who can win in November.
As I write this, Donald Trump has garnered more votes than any other candidate. But he has received only 37.1 percent of all votes cast in Republican primaries. And many of those came from independents who voted for him in open primaries. That means two-thirds of Republicans voted for someone other than Trump.
Polls show Trump losing by wide margins to both Clinton and Sanders in a national race. Trump may claim that if the Republicans nominate someone other than him, it will disenfranchise his supporters. But waiving the 150-year-old rule that the nominee must be elected by a majority — not just a plurality — of the delegates would disenfranchise the majority of Republicans who support someone else.
Yes, the presidential electoral process is confusing. Yes, special interests have too much influence in our two major parties. Yes, millions of Americans are angry and feel disenfranchised. The solution to that is either to reform an existing party from within or form a better party and compete in the political marketplace. But no one has a “right” to a party’s nomination unless they gain it playing by the party’s rules.
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