The Electoral College
Excerpt from an original publication: Kimberling, William C. (1992). Essays in Elections The Electoral College. Washington: National Clearinghouse on Election Administration, Federal Election Commission.
by William C. Kimberling, Deputy Director FEC National Clearinghouse on Election Administration
In order to appreciate the reasons for the
Electoral College, it is essential to understand its historical context and the problem
that the Founding Fathers were trying to solve. They faced the difficult question of how
to elect a president in a nation that:
●was composed of thirteen large and small
States jealous of their own rights and powers and suspicious of any central national
government
●contained only 4,000,000 people spread up and
down a thousand miles of Atlantic seaboard barely connected by transportation or
communication (so that national campaigns were impractical even if they had been thought
desirable)
●believed, under the influence of such British
political thinkers as Henry St. John Bolingbroke, that political parties were mischievous
if not downright evil, and
●felt that gentlemen should not campaign for
public office (The saying was "The office should seek the man, the man should not
seek the office.").
How, then, to choose a president without
political parties, without national campaigns, and without upsetting the carefully
designed balance between the presidency and the Congress on one hand and between the
States and the federal government on the other?
Origins of the Electoral College
The Constitutional Convention considered
several possible methods of selecting a president.
One idea was to have the Congress choose the president. This idea was rejected, however,
because some felt that making such a choice would be too divisive an issue and leave too
many hard feelings in the Congress. Others felt that such a procedure would invite
unseemly political bargaining, corruption, and perhaps even interference from foreign
powers. Still others felt that such an arrangement would upset the balance of power
between the legislative and executive branches of the federal government.
A second idea was to have the State legislatures select the president. This idea, too, was
rejected out of fears that a president so beholden to the State legislatures might permit
them to erode federal authority and thus undermine the whole idea of a federation.
A third idea was to have the president elected by a direct popular vote. Direct election
was rejected not because the Framers of the Constitution doubted public intelligence but
rather because they feared that without sufficient information about candidates from
outside their State, people would naturally vote for a "favorite son" from their
own State or region. At worst, no president would emerge with a popular majority
sufficient to govern the whole country. At best, the choice of president would always be
decided by the largest, most populous States with little regard for the smaller ones.
Finally, a so-called "Committee of Eleven" in the Constitutional Convention
proposed an indirect election of the president through a College of Electors.
The function of the College of Electors in choosing the president can be likened to that
in the Roman Catholic Church of the College of Cardinals selecting the Pope. The original
idea was for the most knowledgeable and informed individuals from each State to select the
president based solely on merit and without regard to State of origin or political party.
The structure of the Electoral College can be traced to the Centurial Assembly system of
the Roman Republic. Under that system, the adult male citizens of Rome were divided,
according to their wealth, into groups of 100 (called Centuries). Each group of 100 was
entitled to cast only one vote either in favor or against proposals submitted to them by
the Roman Senate. In the Electoral College system, the States serve as the Centurial
groups (though they are not, of course, based on wealth), and the number of votes per
State is determined by the size of each State's Congressional delegation. Still, the two
systems are similar in design and share many of the same advantages and disadvantages.
The similarities between the Electoral College and classical institutions are not
accidental. Many of the Founding Fathers were well schooled in ancient history and its
lessons.
The First Design
In the first design of the Electoral College
(described in Article II, Section 1 of the Constitution):
●Each State was allocated a number of Electors
equal to the number of its U.S. Senators (always 2) plus the number of its U.S.
Representative (which may change each decade according to the size of each State's
population as determined in the decennial census). This arrangement built upon an earlier
compromise in the design of the Congress itself and thus satisfied both large and small
States.
●The manner of choosing the Electors was left
to the individual State legislatures, thereby pacifying States suspicious of a central
national government.
●Members of Congress and employees of the
federal government were specifically prohibited from serving as an Elector in order to
maintain the balance between the legislative and executive branches of the federal
government.
●Each State's Electors were required to meet in
their respective States rather than all together in one great meeting. This arrangement,
it was thought, would prevent bribery, corruption, secret dealing, and foreign influence.
●In order to prevent Electors from voting only
for a "favorite son" of their own State, each Elector was required to cast two
votes for president, at least one of which had to be for someone outside their home
State. The idea, presumably, was that the winner would likely be everyone's second
favorite choice.
●The electoral votes were to be sealed and
transmitted from each of the States to the President of the Senate who would then open
them before both houses of the Congress and read the results.
●The person with the most electoral votes,
provided that it was an absolute majority (at least one over half of the total), became
president. Whoever obtained the next greatest number of electoral votes became vice
president - an office which they seem to have invented for the occasion since it had not
been mentioned previously in the Constitutional Convention.
●In the event that no one obtained an absolute
majority in the Electoral College or in the event of a tie vote, the U.S. House of
Representatives, as the chamber closest to the people, would choose the president from
among the top five contenders. They would do this (as a further concession to the small
States) by allowing each State to cast only one vote with an absolute majority of the
States being required to elect a president. The vice presidency would go to whatever
remaining contender had the greatest number of electoral votes. If that, too, was tied,
the U.S. Senate would break the tie by deciding between the two.
In all, this was quite an elaborate design.
But it was also a very clever one when you consider that the whole operation was supposed
to work without political parties and without national campaigns
while maintaining the balances and satisfying
the fears in play at the time. Indeed, it is probably because the Electoral College was
originally designed to operate in an environment so totally different from our own that
many people think it is anachronistic and fail to appreciate the new purposes it now
serves. But of that, more later.
The Second Design
The first design of the Electoral College
lasted through only four presidential elections. For in the meantime, political parties
had emerged in the United States. The very people who had been condemning parties publicly
had nevertheless been building them privately. And too, the idea of political parties had
gained respectability through the persuasive writings of such political philosophers as
Edmund Burke and James Madison.
One of the accidental results of the development of political parties was that in the
presidential election of 1800, the Electors of the Democratic-Republican Party gave Thomas
Jefferson and Aaron Burr (both of that party) an equal number of electoral votes. The tie
was resolved by the House of Representatives in Jefferson's favor - but only after 36
tries and some serious political dealings which were considered unseemly at the time.
Since this sort of bargaining over the presidency was the very thing the Electoral College
was supposed to prevent, the Congress and the States hastily adopted the Twelfth Amendment
to the Constitution by September of 1804.
To prevent tie votes in the Electoral College which were made probable, if not inevitable,
by the rise of political parties (and no doubt to facilitate the election of a president
and vice president of the same party), the 12th Amendment requires that each
Elector cast one vote for president and a separate vote for vice
president rather than casting two votes for president with the runner-up being made vice
president. The Amendment also stipulates that if no one receives an absolute majority of
electoral votes for president, then the U.S. House of Representatives will select the
president from among the top three contenders with each State casting only one vote and an
absolute majority being required to elect. By the same token, if no one receives an
absolute majority for vice president, then the U.S. Senate will select the vice president
from among the top two contenders for that office. All other features of the Electoral
College remained the same including the requirements that, in order to prevent Electors
from voting only for "favorite sons", either the presidential or vice
presidential candidate has to be from a State other than that of the Electors.
In short, political party loyalties had, by 1800, begun to cut across State loyalties
thereby creating new and different problems in the selection of a president. By making
seemingly slight changes, the 12th Amendment fundamentally altered the design
of the Electoral College and, in one stroke, accommodated political parties as a fact of
life in American presidential elections.
It is noteworthy in passing that the idea of electing the president by direct popular vote
was not widely promoted as an alternative to redesigning the Electoral College. This may
be because the physical and demographic circumstances of the country had not changed that
much in a dozen or so years. Or it may be because the excesses of the recent French
revolution (and its fairly rapid degeneration into dictatorship) had given the populists
some pause to reflect on the wisdom of too direct a democracy.
For more on the Electoral College
http://www.archives.gov/federal_register/electoral_college/electoral_college.html
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