A New York Times remembrance of Senator Birch Bayh draws attention to a cause near and dear to his heart: Elimination of the Electoral College.
Between 1966 and 1970, Senator Bayh led a vigorous national campaign to abolish the Electoral College and elect the president by a direct popular vote.
He was far from the first to try. Our system of presidential electors — an antidemocratic relic of the late 18th century — has been targeted for reform or abolition roughly 700 times, more than any other part of the Constitution. No one has ever come as close to eliminating it as Mr. Bayh.
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In a remarkable speech on May 18, 1966, Mr. Bayh said the hearings had convinced him that the Electoral College was no longer compatible with the values of American democracy, if it had ever been. The founders who created it excluded everyone other than landowning white men from voting. But virtually every development in the two centuries since — giving the vote to African-Americans and women, switching to popular elections of senators and the establishment of the one-person-one-vote principle, to name a few — had moved the country in the opposite direction.
The author James Michener served as an elector in 1968, the year that George Wallace hoped to use the Electoral College as a lever to protect segregation, and ended the experience convinced that it was a hidden mousetrap in the Constitution — and that someday it would trip. He wrote a book all about it.
In 2016 it did, because the Electors refused to do what the Electors are supposed to do — protect the Republic from a cheap demagogue skilled in exploiting the resentments of the struggling.
The most important business before the country is putting Donald Trump out of office, and the second most important job before us is correct the Constitution so that an anachronistic provision within it can’t be exploited to undermine it.