The Elector Defector.(Roger Lea MacBride)(Brief Article)

The Electoral College has shut down for another four years. Gore-y fantasies of "faithless electors" escaping their ironclad lockboxes and bolting from Bush to Prince Albert have come to naught. Apparently the Republicans have learned something about vetting electors since 1972, when a GOP elector deserted--and did so quite predictably. For the '72 renegade, Roger Lea MacBride, had written a book 20 years earlier in which he praised the conscience-driven elector as a vital, if all too rare, feature of the Electoral College. Sometimes authors mean what they write.

As a lad of 16, Roger MacBride, a Coke-bottle spectacled son of a Reader's Digest editor, fell under the spell of a family friend, Rose Wilder Lane, daughter of Laura Ingalls Wilder of Little House on the Prairie fame. Rose, a libertarian globetrotter and popular journalist who once rejected a marriage proposal from King Zog of Albania, had become a cause celebre when she refused to accept a Social Security number. ("I will have nothing to do with that Ponzi fraud because it is treason; it will wreck this country as it wrecked Germany. I won't have it; you can't make me," she declared.)

The childless Lane made MacBride her "adopted grandson," a winning lottery ticket if ever there were one. He became heir to the Little House fortune, which is ample enough to build big houses from one end of South Dakota to the other.

As a young lawyer, MacBride wrote a little book titled The American Electoral College (1953) in which he proposed a "district system" similar to that now in use in Nebraska and Maine; electors would be awarded by congressional district, with two bonus electors given to the winner of the state. "The district mode was mostly, if not exclusively, in view when the Constitution was framed and adopted," explained James Madison, but largely abandoned as states sought to maximize their relative influence by delivering their electors as a bloc to the victor.

MacBride deplored deviations from the Founders' intent, for instance the fact that "Electors almost never exercis[e] independent judgment" They had become mere "mechanical men," drones who in some states are forbidden by law from voting their conscience.

MacBride urged an "attempt to restore to the members of the Electoral College some of the function of independent thinking and action assigned to them by the Federal ...