Origins of the Electoral College: A Compromise for Electing the President
September 18, 2024
With less than 50 days remaining in the 2024 presidential election, citizens are turning their attention to the “Electoral College Map,” fully aware that the next president will be the candidate who captures 270 electoral votes, rather than the winner of the popular vote. This is true even though most Americans continue to prefer a direct, nationwide election, one they view as more consistent with democratic principles, and wonder why the Framers of the Constitution chose such a peculiar method for electing the nation’s highest official.
What concerns and circumstances drove the Framers to invent the Electoral College? The delegates’ creation of a unique and cumbersome method of selecting the president, one not used to elect any other governmental official, was born of complex considerations. James Wilson, second in importance to James Madison as the chief architect of the Constitution, and a future Supreme Court Justice, noted the challenging, winding road that the Framers traveled in creating the Electoral College. On September 4, just two weeks before the Convention adjourned, Wilson observed: “This subject . . . is in truth the most difficult of all on which we have had to decide.” Indeed, delegates voted on the subject some 30 times over the course of 22 days.
The complexity surrounding the Framers’ decision to create the Electoral College stemmed from their commitment to implementing the doctrine of separation of powers, which precluded election of the president by the national legislature, a primary feature of the parliamentary scheme practiced in England and one with which they were intimately familiar. The English Prime Minister, chosen by the House of Commons and subjected to removal by that body with a “no confidence” vote, left the nation’s chief executive with little formal independence. The Framers, by contrast, prized executive independence from the legislature, consistent with the separation of powers, and recognized the incompatibility of the two systems, which necessitated a search for another method of selecting the president. Delegates focused, immediately, on the direct election of the president by American voters.
On July 17, Gouverneur Morris, whose elegant penmanship led his colleagues to task him with writing the final, and official, draft of the Constitution, proposed that the president should be elected by voters, noting that this direct method—selection by a nationwide electorate—would avoid the “intrigue and cabal” of “designing men” who could manipulate Congress. As it turned out, Morris spoke for several heavyweights in the Convention, including James Madison, Rufus King, Benjamin Franklin, and John Dickinson. Madison embraced the essentially democratic character of this plan, as he told colleagues in the Virginia ratifying convention, because the president should be “the choice of the people at large.”
While numerous delegates supported a direct popular vote, others, also sympathetic to it, nonetheless pointed out what became the clear and most important objection to such a plan. Roger Sherman of Connecticut, author of the Connecticut Compromise that bridged crucial differences among delegates, objected on grounds that the voters would not be well enough informed about the leading candidates to make a wise choice and that they would generally vote for someone from their own state. Wilson countered with the argument that voter parochialism would still “restrain the choice to a good nomination.” Others observed that voters would know the leading candidates well enough and that the people would not be easily misled by a few men in a large country.
The Framers did not reject popular election of the president out of fear of a democratic mob. Antimajoritarianism was not a motivating factor. Only a very few—George Mason, Elbridge Gerry, and Pierce Butler—objected in principle to direct election of the executive. Rather, the lack of communication and transportation and the size of the country represented factors that undermined, at least in 1787, the concept of popular selection of the president. As scholars have demonstrated, the collection of statements from Framers who explained and defended the Constitution after the Convention adjourned reflect a desire for the election of the president to be grounded on the wishes of voters. As Madison said in Virginia, it was only because of the difficulties surrounding a direct popular vote posed by a nation as large as America that the Electoral College was proposed, but the people would elect the electors.
We turn next week to the Framers’ deliberations that led to that plan.
-David Adler