Fairness is the loser in US politics

Theodore White won a Pulitzer Prize for The Making Of The President 1960, and in that book he romanticised the presidential election night. "The power passes invisibly in the night as election day ends," he wrote. "The national vigil includes all citizens; and when consensus is reached, the successful candidate must accept the decision in the same rough, ragged and turbulent fashion in which he has conducted the campaign that has brought him to power."

John Kennedy had gone to bed at four o'clock on election night in Hyannisport after waking his wife to tell her it seemed all right. At 5.45 a.m., after Kennedy had won a majority of the electoral college votes, the Secret Service moved on to the Kennedy family compound to establish security for the president-elect.

Later that morning, - at around 10 o'clock - Kennedy came out after breakfast. With that wonderment that characterised much of the reporting of John Kennedy at the time, White wrote that Kennedy was "suntanned, windblown, smiling, a bit more tired than he had looked six months before. He was leading his daughter, Caroline, by the hand, he piggybacked her for a few minutes at her insistent pleading, then invited his younger brother, Edward, to go for a walk along the beach."

At 7.15 on the evening of election day, with the polls right across the country still open, CBS had predicted that Richard Nixon would win the presidency. The Herald Tribune of New York had headlined its first edition with the news of Nixon's victory. The president of CBS news and the editor of the Herald Tribune were fired.

Kennedy received more votes than his opponent, Richard Nixon, by 112,881 out of the almost 69 million votes cast. However he won decisively in the electoral college by 303 votes to 219 and would still have won had Illinois gone for Nixon - a myth has grown up that skulduggery in Cooke County, Illinois, won the election for Kennedy. Not true.

The inside stories of the Bush and Gore campaigns will tell very different stories of election night 2000, stories of elation and dejection rising and falling alternately throughout the night, and then the prolonged wait to determine which of them should be president.

There have been previous presidential elections in the US even more chaotic than the present one and those all arose form the peculiarities of the electoral college system. The whole point of the electoral college was to give preference to white southern males. The idea of a directly elected president was rejected precisely because that would result invariably in a northerner being elected, since the majority of the white population lived in the northern states and northerners were presumed to be anti-slavery.

So the electoral college was created and the southern states, in computing the number of electors each was to have, were allowed to take into account the number of slaves in each state, although at a two-fifths discount - slaves of course had no votes for themselves. Initially, each elector was allowed two votes. The presidential candidate that got most electoral college votes became president and the candidate who came second became vice-president. In the event that no one won an absolute majority in the electoral college, the US House of Representatives chose the president from the top five contenders.

The system was changed 200 years ago when the election of 1800 resulted in two candidates getting the same number of electoral college votes. The impasse then was broken by the House of Representatives, but only after it had made 36 attempts to resolve it. Thomas Jefferson became president.

But because of the chicanery that led to his election, a constitutional amendment was passed whereby each elector cast one vote for president and one vote for vice-president, and so it remains (it means that now the president and the vice-president are from the same party.)

There have been a number of bizarre outcomes long before last Tuesday's shambles. In 1876, for example, in the midst of a deep depression and scandal, there was a chaotic election resulting in three states delivering to the House of Representatives two sets of electoral votes - one set for the Democratic candidate, Samuel Tilden, and the other for the Republican candidate, Rutherford B. Hayes. Congress established a special commission to determine which set of electoral votes should be accepted. After a great deal of partisan intrigue, the commission declared in favour of Hayes and he became president, although it was widely believed that Tilden had won a majority of the votes in each of the three states.

The winner-takes-all system (the candidate who wins a plurality of the votes in any state wins all the electoral college votes) and the funnelling of the electoral system through the electoral college has made it virtually impossible for third parties to emerge. Minorities are thereby excluded from the US political system.

But there is an even more formidable barrier to fairness in US politics: the influence of money. Far more significant than the impasse over the Florida result is the reality that far more money was spent in the recent federal, presidential and congressional elections than ever before, indeed more than 50 per cent more, the previous costliest election being four years ago. An estimated $3 billion has been spent in the federal elections and still more on the state elections.

In addition, to this $3 billion, a further $1 billion has been spent on what is known as soft money expenditures. This $1 billion "soft money" has come almost entirely from large corporations and wealthy individuals and it represents a way around legislation designed to prevent the influence of money on elections. A great deal of it is illegal.

Nobody seems to bother.