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Latif Nasser
@latifnasser
The US election is nigh. If you RAGE that it’s down to a few votes in a few swing states, I've got a story for you. A political drama about just how close we came to abolishing the Electoral College. And BONUS, it’ll explain why we still use this old relic to pick Presidents.🧵
A black and white cropped photo of Senator Birch Bayh standing on a vertical version of the Radiolab logo with an electoral college map projected on the back. A more standard Radiolab logo in the top left.
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Latif Nasser
@latifnasser
Story starts with a US Senator named Birch Bayh (rhymes with Guy). When he started his term in 1963, he was young, dashing, ambitious, “the Kennedy of the Midwest.” His only problem was …
Senator Birch Bayh closeup photo, clean shaven, short black hair, blue eyes, looks like he is listening attentively
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Senator Birch Bayh in short sleeve white dress shirt with a tie and black pants, standing with one foot perched up on a crate, speaking into a megaphone to a crowd of protesters.
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Latif Nasser
@latifnasser
No one took him seriously. At a time when everything was based on seniority, Bayh had no power at all. Until one day, longtime Senator Estes Kefauver had a fatal heart attack on the floor of the Senate. Now Kefauver happened to be …
newspaper headline: Kefauver Dies of Ruptured Artery with a black and white photo of Kefauver in a tux
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Latif Nasser
@latifnasser
The chair of the Senate Subcommittee on Constitutional Amendments. It was a dud of committee, known as a graveyard where ideas about how to change the constitution went to die. Bayh begs the guy in charge to let him take it over. And … he gets it! But only two weeks later-
Birch Bayh and his wife Marvella stand at the White House's West Wing Colonnade with JFK
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Latif Nasser
@latifnasser
JFK is shot dead. In the rush to swear in VP Lyndon B Johnson, questions arise: - if LBJ becomes President who becomes VP? - And what if LBJ got shot or had another heart attack in the meantime? Succession is unclear. No small deal in the age of the nuclear button. What to do?
JFK riding in a black convertible in a Dallas motorcade moments before he got shot in 1963
Lyndon B Johnson being sworn in as President on board Air Force One.
NYT article from Dec 8 1963: "Succession Problem: The Death of Kennedy Again Points Up the Need to Devise Solution" plus an editorial cartoon of a man sitting wearing a coat that says "continuity of govt" under him is the caption "Safe from Assassins"
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Latif Nasser
@latifnasser
It was a constitution problem, so Bayh thought, I can fix this. He wrote a draft amendment on ‘presidential disability & succession.’ BUT changing the constitution is the HARDEST thing a politician can do. 2/3s of the House + 2/3s of the Senate + 3/4s of states need to agree.
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Latif Nasser
@latifnasser
But Birch Bayh … pulled it off! The 25th Amendment! It was so successful that he gets a call from the President with an amendment request of his own …
Birch Bayh sitting in the Oval Office talking to President LBJ. They are wearing suits and laughing.
Cover of a book, titled One Heartbeat Away by Birch Bayh with a Foreword by Lyndon B Johnson and Preface by Dwight D. Eisenhower
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Latif Nasser
@latifnasser
LBJ asks him to tweak the Electoral College, to ensure a 3rd party spoiler (like Alabama’s George Wallace) couldn’t hijack the election. As a fellow Democrat, Bayh agrees. But once he holds hearings & learns from experts about the system, what he learns radicalizes him:
LIFE magazine cover for August 2 1968, reading "Wallace - Coming on Fast - The Spoiler from the South"
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Latif Nasser
@latifnasser
In 1787, the Founders at the Constitutional Convention debated how the USA should pick its President. Leave it to the people? Nah, there’s no mass media, the people don’t know the candidates! Leave it to congress? Nah, that violates separation of powers! So instead …
Painting of the Founding Fathers at the Constitutional Convention of 1787 with George Washington on the Stage, flags behind him, a chandelier overhead
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Latif Nasser
@latifnasser
They came up with a sort of bank shot. You vote for a group of people, and then THEY vote for President FOR YOU. Those middlemen (all men) would be called electors.
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Latif Nasser
@latifnasser
They modeled the group (college = fancy word for group) of electors on a smushed together version of the House of Representatives and Senate. (Effectively, your state has as many votes as it has officials repping it in DC.)
Library of Congress map of USA with numbers on each state corresponding to how many electoral votes it has.
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Latif Nasser
@latifnasser
Hidden in those numbers, though, were compromises to small states and slave-holding states, so they’d get a little extra weight. But here’s why all that wonky math ends up being less than totally democratic.
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Latif Nasser
@latifnasser
Issue #1: electoral math means if you live in a smaller state, you get more say in who is president. Famously, 1 Wyoming vote = 3+ California votes.* (*Especially awkward since in 1962-63, SCOTUS codified “one person one vote.”)
MMA fighter matchup poster: "3 vs 1 but Why?"
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Latif Nasser
@latifnasser
Issue #2: nearly all states are winner-take-all, which means if you disagree with 50%+1 voters in your state, your vote is basically erased. Tens of millions of votes are discounted this way every election. And worst of all:
Old timey movie poster for a boxing movie called Winner Take All starring Tony Martin, Gloria Stuart. Has nothing to do with anything I'm talking about, I just thought it would be weird funny image.
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Latif Nasser
@latifnasser
Issue #3: the person who gets the most votes doesn’t necessarily win. That's happened 5 times out of 59 elections in American history (aka 8.5% of elections). In 1968, it came close: Nixon won 100+ more electoral votes than Humphrey BUT not even 1% more actual votes than him.
The 5 US Presidential Elections where the winner lost the popular vote ... 1824, 1876, 1888, 2000, and 2016.
Nixon versus Humphrey election match up. Nixon got 301 electoral votes and 43.4% of the popular vote. Humphrey got 191 electoral votes but 42.7% of the popular vote.
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Latif Nasser
@latifnasser
At a time (like now) when the country was highly polarized and violent, Bayh figured that a president who lost the popular vote could be dangerous, possibly even existentially so, to the country.
Headline: Dr. King is Slain by Sniper, Looting, Arson Touched Off by Death
A photo of a student killed at Kent State.
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Latif Nasser
@latifnasser
So Bayh decides he doesn’t want to tweak the electoral college after all. As he puts it, that’d be “like shifting around the parts of a creaky and dangerous automobile engine, making it no less creaky and no less dangerous.” Instead he decides … to destroy it.
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Latif Nasser
@latifnasser
(oh man this always takes longer than i think it will. have to go pick up my kid from school. will finish this evening...)
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