05 September 2008

A Day in the Life of an Elector

Timothy Willard spent his one day on the job as a presidential elector at the Delaware State Capitol in Dover.

Timothy Willard, one of the 538 presidential electors from 2004, recounts his experience. His candidate lost.

Bruce Odessey is the managing editor of this edition of eJournal USA.

By Bruce Odessey

One day in December 2004, Timothy G. Willard took a few hours off from his law practice in Georgetown, Delaware, and traveled to the state capital, Dover, to vote for president of the United States.

A lot of people probably believed that the citizens of Delaware had voted for president a month earlier, but actually they had voted for three electors pledged to vote for either Republican George W. Bush or Democrat John F. Kerry in the Electoral College.

Willard was a state Democratic Party stalwart, a former county party chairman who had served as a delegate to the national party’s 2000 nominating convention and worked on the state party’s 2004 political platform.

Delaware, one of the smallest states in the Union, had only three electoral votes in 2004. (California, the biggest state, had 55.) Delaware coincidentally has only three counties, and the state Democratic Party chairman appointed one person from each county, including Willard from Sussex County, to serve as a presidential elector if Kerry won the popular vote in Delaware.

The Day in Dover

Kerry did win in Delaware, with 53 percent of the popular vote. In fact Democratic presidential candidates have won every election in Delaware since 1988. And so Willard got the chance to go to Dover to vote in the Electoral College on December 13, the first Monday after the second Wednesday in December, as the U.S. Constitution requires for electors in all the states and the District of Columbia (the national capital, Washington).

 

Willard’s candidate, Democrat John Kerry (right), won in Delaware in 2004 but lost to President George W. Bush in both the popular vote and the Electoral College.

Democrat John Kerry (right), won in Delaware but lost to President George W. Bush in both the popular vote and the Electoral College.

At 10 a.m., Willard and his two colleagues sat in the ornate chamber of the Delaware House of Representatives, selected one of them as chairperson, and then carried out their duties.

They received the November election official results from the state Department of Elections and signed a group of papers certifying the results: three electoral votes for Kerry as president, three electoral votes for Kerry’s running mate, John Edwards, as vice president. They sent the papers to the Delaware secretary of state for delivery to the National Archives in Washington. A few weeks later, the U.S. Congress officially counted the electoral votes for president and vice president, including Willard’s.

But as everyone already knew, Bush beat Kerry 286 to 252.

Ceremonial Task

Presidential electors don’t have the same kind of independent power that the Founding Fathers seemed to have imagined for them when crafting the Constitution in 1787. By 1796, emerging political parties were already changing the dynamics of the Electoral College.

For Willard, the job was ceremonial. He probably didn’t even think about voting for anyone else besides John Kerry. In fact, Delaware state law prohibited him from voting for anyone else. (No one knows if the law is constitutionally enforceable, but so-called faithless electors are exceedingly rare in history anyway.)

“The actual event didn’t get too much attention from the media or press or the public,” Willard said. “I just remember being in the House of Representatives, and the gallery was not filled.”

Even so, he was proud to serve a formal part of governing that needed to be done. “It was a great honor to be a part of a process, which, I think, a lot of people don’t understand,” he said.

Yet he also said that Americans should probably be exploring alternative systems to electing the president, systems that do not elect a candidate with fewer nationwide popular votes than another candidate, as has occurred sometimes with the Electoral College.

“I think we need to explore alternatives that are more understandable and simpler,” Willard said. “I’m just saying ... I don’t think it’s a good thing if people don’t understand it or have doubts about it or are cynical about it.”