The College of Cardinals: a model for choosing a leader?

Richard Dawkins

The College of Cardinals, recently in stately conclave met, calls to my mind the Electoral College (EC) of the United States, and my view that it could become a very good way to choose the leader of any country, if only it were implemented properly. And I do mean any country. For the sake of discussion I’ll talk about the United States, but I’m mindful of the hair-trigger territorial sensitivities of some Americans: “Mind your own business! Put your own house in order! Take your limey nose out of our affairs!” The election of a US president has a huge effect on the whole world but most of us can’t vote, so let us at least express an opinion from the sidelines.

Whether the US founding fathers originally devised the EC to forestall a future rogue president, I do not know. But their careful three-way separation of powers between the legislative, judicial, and executive branches, is the kind of thing one would put in place if one anticipated a possible president with aspirations to subvert the constitution and crown himself absolute monarch. Of course it does rather assume that the legislative and judicial branches will do their job. But that’s another story.

If popes were chosen by a plebiscite of all the world’s Catholics, a very different kind of pontiff would emerge. It would probably not be an improvement. While a plebiscite would certainly be a better way to elect the US President than the present Electoral College, I shall argue that a modified EC, closer to the College of Cardinals and to the American founders’ original intentions, would be superior to either. I’ll call it the IEC, which could stand for Improved Electoral College or Ideal Electoral College. I must say I never thought I’d find myself taking a leaf from the Roman Catholic book.

The present EC’s 538 members meet to elect the US president by an absolute majority of at least 270. Each state has an allocation of EC members proportional to its population. The state government has the power to decide how its EC members are chosen, and almost all the states do it by popular vote. So far, so good. The rot set in when EC members became pledged to a particular presidential candidate. An EC of pledged members devolves to a proxy plebiscite, but a highly distorted one. You might as well have a straight plebiscite and cut out the middle man. Among many advantages, presidential campaigns would care about the whole country, not just the handful of states thought to be marginal. But a plebiscite, too, is not ideal as a way to choose a leader. An electoral college could be far better, if suitably tweaked.

Easily the worst thing about the present EC – and this really is an out-and-out scandal – is that all the states (except Nebraska and Maine) follow an inflexible winner-take-all rule. No matter how slender the popular majority in a given state, a hundred percent of the state’s EC votes go to one presidential candidate, zero to the other. I’ve previously pointed out the remarkable fact that, because of the winner-take-all rule, a candidate could win the presidency even if his opponent obtains three quarters of the nationwide popular vote.

In the 2000 US presidential election, the popular vote in Florida was tied: a hanging-chad dead-heat, plumb in the middle of the margin of error. Yet the winner-take-all rule stated that all Florida’s 25 electoral college votes had to go to either Gore or Bush. The presidency hung on the toss of a coin. The Supreme Court was called upon to be that coin. Reflecting the tied vote, you might think they could have split the 25 EC members 13 to 12. The rules forbade it. If they allocated 20 to Bush and 5 to Gore, Gore would still have won the presidency, such was the tally of EC votes in the rest of the country. Again, it wasn’t literally allowed but, given that they were in the business of tossing a penny for the 25 votes, it might have seemed a reasonable way to toss it. Actually, as the world knows, they weighted the coin along personal party lines, handing all 25 EC votes to Bush, and consequently the presidency.

A British parallel: until a few years ago, the Labour Party gave each trade union a block vote equal to the number of its members. This meant that the leader of a very large union was in the absurdly powerful position of personally wielding a million votes at a single stroke, regardless of whether his union members agreed overwhelmingly, or only marginally, on the issue.

The IEC would take the electoral college seriously. As at present, the members would be respected citizens of their state, elected by popular vote within the state, perhaps one member per congressional district. They’d meet in the nation’s capital to choose the president by secret ballot. But they would not, repeat not, be pledged in advance to a particular candidate. And there would be no winner-take-all nonsense. Instead, the members of the IEC would exercise their own judgment, regardless of the other EC members from their own state. Like the College of Cardinals, or like a university search committee seeking a new professor, they’d deliberate at length behind closed doors. They’d actively headhunt, rather than wait for candidates to volunteer. They’d exhaustively thrash out the merits and demerits of many rival candidates, not just two. They’d grill them at interview, read their books and speeches, take soundings, vet them for security clearance. Finally, they’d vote in a secret ballot, or perhaps a series of secret ballots until a consensus emerged – with “Habemus praesidentem” proclaimed in a puff of white smoke.

Of course there are important respects in which the IEC should depart from the model of the College of Cardinals. The cardinals are choosing from among their number, which would not, or at least should not, be the case in the IEC. And the cardinals are appointed, whereas the members of the IEC would be elected by the people of their respective state. In other words, the IEC system would be a (delegated) democracy, whereas the College of Cardinals is at best an oligarchy.

The main objection to the IEC is that it’s vulnerable to corruption. Its members might be bribed or coerced. Or the no-pledge rule could easily be chipped away. An aspiring IEC member, although not formally pledged to a particular presidential candidate, could let slip a de facto endorsement of “My very good friend . . .” Such a slide towards pledging is probably inevitable, but I think it wouldn’t affect all, or even a majority of IEC candidates. And if prior pledging tempted fifty percent of the electoral college, that would still be an improvement over the present mandatory hundred percent. As for corruption, I think secret balloting would go a long way towards solving the problem. There’d be no way to check whether the quid pro quo of a bribe was honoured. And, when you think about it, isn’t the present system (or indeed a simple plebiscite) subject to a different kind of corruption: massive injections of cash into a presidential campaign by multi-billionaires greedy for post-election favours?

Now, here’s what looks like a major problem. An amendment to the US constitution normally requires a two thirds majority in both houses of Congress plus ratification by three quarters of the states. A very high hurdle. (How, by the way, did prohibition ever get through?) But modifying the EC would not require a constitutional amendment. The US constitution allows each state to change how it chooses its EC members. It’s important, however, that individual states should not go it alone, unilaterally. They need to take a good number of other states with them. If Texas alone adopted the IEC, it would be a gift to the Democrats. If California alone abandoned “winner take all”, all future presidents would be Republican. There would have to be a pact between a carefully calculated minimum of states before any one of them changed its method of electing EC members. Such a calculated pact is already under discussion for a proposed plebiscite. It could easily be adapted to the IEC.

Civil servants and military officers are subject to stringent vetting before they are entrusted with state secrets or other sensitive information. But the president is handed the keys to the White House, and the nuclear football, without any security clearance at all. He could be a Russian agent. The elaborate scrutinizing process undertaken by the IEC would take care of that, while also ruling out an obviously unqualified, corrupt, criminal, or emotionally unstable president.

But let’s put the advantages more positively. Humans vary enormously in intelligence, judgment, literacy, responsibility, wisdom, knowledge and ability to deploy it. Talk to a great jurist, a world-class philosopher, a Nobel-level economist, scientist, mathematician or writer, and you feel humbled, honoured to belong to the same species. Even if such qualities are not the ones you seek in a leader, they illustrate the huge variance our species has to offer. Whatever desirable qualities we seek, they are rare. Rare but discoverable. A quarter of a billion Americans must include individuals with superb presidential qualifications, whatever those qualifications might be. Isn’t it obvious that a search committee convened with the sole purpose of exhaustively ferreting out that crème-de-la crème ideal must do a better job than the present system? Or than a simple plebiscite.

Crème-de-la crème? Isn’t that terribly elitist? Yes. Of course it is. So what? I’m not the first to point out that we want an elite pilot to fly our plane, an elite surgeon to remove our appendix or our tumour, an elite architect to design for us a safe bridge or high-rise building. A fortiori, shouldn’t the most powerful person in the world meet the same exacting standards? At very least.

The IEC will never be adopted. It’s much too sensible. But one can dream.