Presidential Lottery by James A. Michener Read Free Book Online Page B

College. Of the twenty-nine Democrats elected to the membership, six had already phoned in to report that they were not going to make it to Harrisburg. That meant that we had to round up six substitutes, and this had been done by scanning the lists of men and women who held political jobs in Harrisburg, but no sooner had we adjusted the schedule so as to qualify these substitutes than a messenger arrived from Democratic headquarters with the news that two more were not going to make it. So we extended our list of substitutes to eight, choosing anyone who came to mind.
    This arbitrary procedure did not surprise me, for on November 26 I had received a letter asking if I was going to bother to show up: “We have been advised by some of the Electors of their inability to serve. If you, for any reason, find you are unable to do so, we will appreciate hearing from you. A replacement will be made but this cannot be done before the time of the meeting of the Electoral College.”
    Of the twenty-nine Democrats who had been elected to serve in Pennsylvania, only twenty-one would be with us. Absenteeism is an occupational disease in the Electoral College. In some states criers go up and down the halls asking if anyone wants to be a Presidential elector, and those who respond are sworn on the spot and by this accident attain a critical power. In Pennsylvania we managed a little more decorum. We did have a list of names, but no one had voted on them, no one had approved them, and from this list we picked people to select a President.
    In 1948, when it came time for the Republican electors of Michigan to convene in Lansing, only thirteen of the nineteen bothered to show. According to custom, officials scurried through the capitol looking for anyone who would serve, and they came upon a Mr. J. J. Levy of Royal Oak, who was duly sworn. But when it came time to vote they had much trouble with Levy, because he insisted upon casting his ballot not for Dewey and Warren, who had carried Michigan, but for Truman and Barkley, who had lost by 35,000 votes. Argued Levy, “I thought we had to vote for the winners.”
    I had little time to worry about the eight missing electors, for I was now handed the list of forty-nine separate steps through which we would move on Monday. I reproduce this archaic formula as Appendix E because I want the reader to appreciate the panoply that surrounds the Electoral College and to experience the emotions I did when directing the Pennsylvania electors through the ritual.
    At first glance I was staggered by the complexity. Then I saw Step 22 and laughed. Then I saw Steps 38 through 41and realized what a wealth of history and near-tragedy they summarized. Then I read the whole again, and said to myself, “What a confused set of rules contrived by men trying to control a function that is left completely without control,” because not one of these forty-nine ingenious rules would in even the slightest way have prevented Governor Wallace from disrupting the larger College of which we were a part, or kept me from combating him in my own arbitrary way. Finally, I felt that deep sense of respect which any historian must feel when he comes into contact with the ritual by which a self-governing nation endeavors to safeguard its legitimacy. Complicated and foolish though these procedures may have seemed, they were the tradition of our nation and I intended supervising them with dignity, for if this was the procedure our nation had chosen, I would do what I could to ensure its respectful performance. But that night I went to bed more convinced than ever that this dangerous College, this time bomb lodged near the heart of the nation, must be abolished.
    Any apprehensions I might have had about the propriety of my serving as president of the Electoral College were dissipated the next morning by an extraordinary conversation I had with one of the delegates. When I entered the capitol I heard the mellifluous voice of a giant Texan