Southern Fried Electors

Too little vituperation has been heard recently about the Southern plot to undo what the electorate fashioned (albeit inconclusively) on November 8. For Republicans in Illinois and Texas to seek through investigation to uncover frauds is one, perfectly legitimate thing. But for Ross Barnett and his henchmen to seek through persuasion and even intimidation to make pledged electors break their pledges is another, entirely reprehensible matter.

Nothing in the Constitution forbids the use of unpledged electors or prevents an individual elector from exercising his personal judgment in voting. In fact, such individual discretion was clearly the intention of the framers, for whatever that is worth. But, as the electoral system has evolved toward universal suffrage, the pledged elector has necessarily become the rule rather than the exception.

Of course, none of this stuff about universal suffrage applies too rigorously to the South. Yet the Southern electorate, such as it is, in every state but two chose electors pledged to one or the other of the major Presidential candidates. In Mississippi, a Barnett slate of unpledged electors defeated both Kennedy and Nixon; in Alabama, a hybrid group composed of both unpledged and Kennedy electors won easily in the absence of a "pure" slate of either kind. In Louisiana, the unpledged electors were defeated by Kennedy.

Ross Barnett and his boys are not most people's idea of what the framers had in mind when they conceived of Presidential electors making a free, conscientious choice. And, as the electoral system currently works, when Southern dissidents present unpledged electors rather than a specific third candidate they ask the people to abdicate their role as electorate in favor of a none too savory bunch of politicians. Nonetheless, the people of Mississippi and Alabama have made their abdication, and they (and the Electoral College) must live with it.

The people of the other Southern states, on the other hand, have also made their choice, and Governor Barnett and his allies had better learn to live with that. The voters of Georgia, Louisiana and Texas (the three states where the Barnett efforts have been concentrated) selected electors pledged publicly to the Kennedy-Johnson ticket. Although no law compels these electors to honor their pledge, the nature of this pledge and of the electoral system as it exists today must force them to vote as they said they would vote last month. The effort of Barnett and that notably playful Louisiana legislature to persuade or command the electors to do otherwise constitutes a grave (though hopefully fruitless) threat to democratic government in this country.