he message for this particularly long morning-after should be: A close election does not amount to a constitutional crisis. A constitutional crisis results when the Constitution provides no guidance about what to do next, and politicians and officials must fly blind. But the US Constitution is far from silent on how to proceed in the current situation.
There are, to begin with, rules and procedures in place in each state of the union that determine how to do a recount, if one is needed. State laws govern the means by which popular votes are converted into electoral votes, winner take all in 48 states, district by congressional district, plus two at large statewide in Maine and Nebraska. If there is a tie in the Electoral College, now quite unlikely, the decision goes to the newly elected House of Representatives, with voting state by state, each state having one vote.
By now nearly everybody knows this. But because the election was close, people are bound to ask whether the machinery needs a second look. What we don't want and don't need, it seems to me, is machinery that automatically converts a close election into something else. We had a close election presumably because the voting population was closely divided, and the new president ought to live with that fact. This may mean no bold new initiatives and it certainly means no credible claims about electoral mandates.
But as a matter of fact, the closeness of an election at the presidential level rarely constrains presidents very much. The real constraint is the closeness of the party division in Congress, and the next Congress we know will be very narrowly divided.
For most of the last 50 years or so innovative legislating has required cross-party majorities. Presidents have had to work hard to put these majorities together, and they have frequently failed to do so, resulting in a condition sometimes called stalemate or gridlock. Nobody likes these unpleasant words, but sometimes this is what the American people vote for, and it seems to me obvious that this is what we voted for in the elections of 2000. We will have opportunities to revise our judgments two years from now, and two years after that, and so on, as the Constitution provides.
Presidential performance in foreign affairs and in managing the business of government more generally is in some ways constrained by a close election, but in most ways not. Obviously, a healthy majority in Congress would help a president who wanted to pay our UN dues, but there again the president's own majority might help a little, but nothing like having a few more votes on the hill. Even so the incumbent president still gets to staff the top of the government, preach from the bully pulpit, move troops, make judicial nominations, and take administrative actions. Wide electoral margins are certainly useful to sustain such activities but are not essential.
No doubt a national debate is in the offing about the usefulness of the Electoral College, even though the Electoral College is not responsible for the close election we have produced.
People will say it is a cause of confusion among the populace, seems undemocratic, makes candidates spend too much money, and accounts for other unrelated maladies. I think the case for maintaining this piece of 18th century machinery was strong during the long period in our national life when legislatures in the states were malapportioned and favored rural interests, and Congress also reflected this bias.
The fact that big urban two-party states voted in the Electoral College on a winner-take-all basis - as indeed all states did - meant that urban and two-party states and the interest groups they harbored got an advantage that they were denied by the dominance in Congress of rural interests in one-party states. But the line of court cases that started with Baker v. Carr of half a century ago has changed Congress.
Maybe urban interests need the Electoral College less than they did. What going to a straight popular vote would probably accomplish might be to reward those states in which parties existed that could produce extra voters most efficiently. This would over the medium term encourage the formation or resuscitation of parties that were good a turning out the vote and might make candidates more beholden to such parties. Against these advantages we would have to weigh the probability that abolition of the Electoral College would encourage splinter parties, spoilers, and nuisance candidacies, hence more, not less of Ralph Nader and Pat Buchanan.
We will have plenty of time to contemplate that.
Nelson W. Polsby is professor of political science at University of California at Berkeley.
