Electoral College To Vote

Press, Volume CVIII, Issue 31864, 17 December 1968, Page 21

Electoral College To Vote

(N.Z. Press Association—Copyright) # WASHINGTON, Dec. 16. In the only Presidential election that officially counts, the Electoral College will vote today to make Richard Nixon the nation's 37th President, the Associated Press said.

Although Mr Nixon defeated Mr Hubert Humphrey by nearly half a million votes in the November General Election, under the Constitution the President is not officially selected until the members of the Electoral College meet in their respective state capitals and cast their votes. The ballots are then mailed to Washington Where Congress will meet in joint session on January 6 to count the vote and declare a winner. The 538 electors from the 50 states and the District of Columbia are free agents under the Constitution to vote for anyone they please, but the custom is to follow the lead of the popular vote in their own state. With only a few exceptions this is the case this year. Assuming Mr Nixon gets all the electoral votes of the 32 States he won, his total is 302 electoral votes. He needed 270 to win. Mr Humphrey won 13 states plus the District of Columbia, which totals

191 electoral votes, while Mr Wallace’s victory in five states gives him 45. The closeness of the November voting, which threatened to throw the election into the House of Representatives for the first time in 144 years has set off demands for electoral reform. Under the Constitution now, if no candidate gets the required majority in the Electoral College, the House then picks the President on the basis of one vote for each state’s delegation. This last happened in 1824 when the Electoral College could not select a President from John Quincy Adams, Andrew Jackson, William Crawford and Henry Clay. The House chose Adams although Jackson led in both the popular and electoral vote. Current reforms include a direct national popular election and a plan which would involve splitting each state's electoral vote according to| the proportion of votes cast? for the Presidential candidates.