Presidential Electors and the Electoral College: An Examination ...

Although the 2000 election was the first misfire in nearly one hundred years, the 2004 campaign nearly met with the same fate—with a Republican gaining more popular votes and a Democrat gaining more electoral votes. President Bush landed nearly 3 million more votes than his challenger, John Kerry. Yet Bush’s Electoral College margin of victory hinged upon his winning the state of Ohio. He carried the state by only 118,000 votes (50.81 percent to 48.71 percent). Given that up to 4 percent of Americans change their minds on election day (Blais 2004) and that typically 1–3 percent of votes cast go uncounted (Ansolabehere and Stewart 2005, 378), Bush’s 2 percent margin of victory in this single state shows how very close the 2004 election came to becoming a second consecutive misfire. Even though this did not happen, its possibility cannot be overstated.

In this context, when Barack Obama achieved just under 53 percent of the popular vote in 2008, it appeared that he had ascended to the presidency by a comfortable margin of victory. This margin was magnified in his Electoral College win of 365 votes (to his opponent’s 173 votes), or 67 percent of the electoral vote. This magnification is more often the rule in presidential contests rather than the exception. Yet Obama’s apparent Electoral College landslide was challenged in the days following the election—in a stealth Electoral College lobbying campaign. Little attention has been devoted to them, but campaigns to lobby presidential electors have occurred in a number of recent campaigns.

America’s Second Presidential Campaign

The flurry of legal challenges witnessed in 2000 produced the expectation that the 2004 election would play out in much the same way. In the days preceding the election, a great deal was made of the role legal teams from both the Bush and Kerry campaigns would play in the days following the election. The expectation then was that just as citizens did not know the outcome of the presidential race on the evening of the 2000 election, the same scenario was likely to unfold in the 2004 race. Although several legal challenges gained attention in the wake of the 2004 election, the anticipated repeat of the previous election drama