What Were they Thinking? The History of the Electoral College.

 

You think you’re unhappy with the Electoral College. Alexander Hamilton was its original champion, he participated in the resulting ugly House of Representatives' selection of the President in 1800, had his version of meaningful reform via the Twelfth Amendment shot down and then he himself was shot and killed in a duel precipitated largely by the election of 1800. There was a rather good play about it. Maybe you've heard of it.

Part II, How it Started.

Under the original Constitution, the House of Representatives was to be the only part of the federal government directly elected by the “people.” The quote marks are there because the only people who could vote were almost exclusively white males over 21 who owned property. The framers of the Constitution considered, and quickly rejected, the idea that the President could be chosen by even this exclusive group.  The United States was, both before and after the adoption of the Constitution in 1789, a collection of powerful and independent minded states. Daniel Webster’s famous and politically groundbreaking speech where he declared that he spoke “not as a Massachusetts man, nor as a Northern man, but as an American and a member of the Senate of the United States” was still more than 60 years away.

The framers fully expected voters to vote only for a candidate from their own state. Aside from George Washington, the public was largely only aware of leaders in their own state and had access only to local news.  The fear was that Virginia and New York which held the largest populations would always have the top vote getting candidates in any national popular vote. The Electoral College they worked out called for each state legislature to choose, in any way they wanted, individual electors.  The number of electors they could choose would be equal to the number of Senators and member of the House of Representatives that state had.  This gave a minimum of three electors to the smallest states, somewhat boosting their prospects.

Electors could not be holders of a federal office. Each elector would have two votes for President.  One of those votes had to be for a person not from their state.  The winner of a majority of votes would become president and second place would become Vice President.  If no person wins a majority of the vote or there is a tie, the House of Representatives holds a vote with each state having a single vote. Alexander Hamilton explained the thinking behind this system in an anonymously published article in New York newspapers that became Federalist Paper No. 68. This is what he expected:

1. Choice of the president should reflect the "sense of the people" at a particular time, not the dictates of a faction in a "pre-established body" such as Congress or the State legislatures, and independent of the influence of "foreign powers".^[32]
2. The choice would be made decisively with a "full and fair expression of the public will" but also maintaining "as little opportunity as possible to tumult and disorder".^[33]
3. Individual electors would be elected by citizens on a district-by-district basis. Voting for president would include the widest electorate allowed in each state.^[34]
4. Each presidential elector would exercise independent judgment when voting, deliberating with the most complete information available in a system that over time, tended to bring about a good administration of the laws passed by Congress.^[32]
5. Candidates would not pair together on the same ticket with assumed placements toward each office of president and vice president.
6. The system as designed would rarely produce a winner, thus sending the presidential election to the House of Representatives.

Footnotes are references to the Wikipedia entry. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Electoral_College

In hindsight, this was all very naïve and the reality of its flaws became immediately evident after George Washington, the only candidate every to receive 100% of the possible electoral votes, announced he would not run for a third term.

Disenfranchisement is Baked into the System

The original system has built into it this aspect that allows states to move all of their electoral votes to one candidate, no matter how divided the popular vote. Even though Hamilton had this expectation that states would apportion or assign electors by district, that was not spelled out for a reason. The disenfranchisement of certain people was quite intentional.  Those people were slaves. In order to balance the power between the Southern slave holding states and the Northern states, slaves were counted for the purpose of apportioning members of the House of Representatives.  Counted, but reduced to 3/5^ths of their actual number.  Slaves were not allowed to vote, but their numbers gave greater power to the slave holding states, including greater electoral votes.  The original Electoral College fully intended for Slave holding states to use their electoral votes allotted because of the slave population to reflect the will of the slave holders.  In this way, we still have the legacy of 48 out of 50 states that can assign electoral votes not by district, but statewide against a large portion of the actual popular vote up to and including a majority of it.

The Election of1800!

The failure of the original Electoral College was that it did not anticipate the way political parties would work. The Federalists nominated John Adams, the incumbent and the Democratic-Republicans formally chose Thomas Jefferson as their Presidential Candidate and Aaron Burr to be the Vic President. North Carolina and Pennsylvania were the only states that split or apportioned electoral votes. John Adams received 65 votes and Jefferson received 73.  Technically every candidate ran for President. In order for a party to choose both their President and Vice President meant that they had to follow a plan to vote at least one less electoral vote for the VP. Each elector had two votes, but somehow Aaron Burr also wound up with73 votes. Some say the party messed up the execution of their plan, but other speculate that Burr hatched a scheme. As a result, the decision went to the House of Representative to decide. The first house vote ended in a tie, as did the next 34 votes.  Hamilton had become a fierce rival of Burr and waged a strong campaign among the House delegation in favor of Jefferson, the nominee of the opposing party. On the 36^th ballot Jefferson won.

Amendment XII

The political maneuverings of the House vote were thought to be unacceptable and unbecoming for the national body to be seen as openly grasping for power. Hamilton in particular had already seen the Electoral College as failing to achieve its intended purpose and began to work toward amending the Constitution before the next election. Hamilton proposed dividing each state into district, roughly proportional to congressional districts and having each district select one elector. Unfortunately, that proposal was rejected.

What the Twelfth Amendment actually did was to have each elector chosen as in the original Constitution but allotted one vote for President and one vote for Vice President. The elector no longer picks more than one party and the idea that the electors deliberate to choose a candidate is abandoned. Moreover, it reinforces the concept that there will only be two major parties. If a candidate fails to receive a majority of electoral votes, only the top three candidates are to be considered by the House. The idea of a runoff is not even possible from the national level. States, it assumes, will implement a system they feel best finds the majority approved candidate. Like the original thinking behind the Electoral College, this does not occur in many states, every election.

The House votes by state, and not proportionally to the population. The Vice President is chosen by the Senate, again, without regard to popular support.

Currently 33 states require electors to vote for the candidate they pledged to support prior to election day. These laws were recently upheld by the Supreme Court. The parties and/or candidates select their electors for their faithfulness thus completely flipping the original idea of the Electoral College on it’s head.  The College is not a body that chooses the President, it is merely a convoluted formula for reworking the popular vote. 

Since 1900 only twice have third party candidates received any electoral votes. In 1912 Theodore Roosevelt left the Republican Party to form the Progressive Party but was still soundly defeated by Woodrow Wilson and George Wallace ran on American Independent Party ticket as a segregationist.

Efforts to change the Electoral College have occurred frequently and despite popular opinion to makes changes, no effort has succeeded since the Twelfth Amendment. Twice proposed amendments have passed in one chamber of Congress only to fail in the other. Today several proposal have gained popularity including reforms that do no need to amend the Constitution. Those ideas will be in Part III.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Electoral_College

UPDATING THE ELECTORAL COLLEGE: THE NATIONAL POPULAR VOTE LEGISLATION  http://archive.fairvote.org/media/documents/chang.pdf

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1800_United_States_presidential_election

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Article_Two_of_the_United_States_Constitution#Clause_3:_Electors

The Federalist Papers : No. 68 https://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/fed68.asp