By now, most American voters have probably realized that we technically do not choose our presidents. Instead, we vote for members of an “electoral college,” who choose on our behalf. Because of this, candidates can win the presidency even when most voters reject them.
In recent years, this system has been controversial.
Some Americans defend the electoral college because they believe it was designed to give rural areas and small states a voice. Others claim the electoral college was designed to limit democracy, allowing an elite to choose the president. Others argue the electoral college was designed to protect slavery, and is therefore illegitimate.1
The truth is, the electoral college has never worked as intended by its creators. This is partly because they did not make clear what their intention was.
For several humid summer months in 1787, the Constitutional Convention could not agree on a good way to choose a president. James Madison’s notes show they debated the issue off and on from June to September, going in circles until, near the convention’s end, they came up with a way to leave the problem half-solved.2
Crucially, they did not decide whether to hold popular elections. In fact, the Constitution still does not guarantee us a right to vote for the president. Article II, Section 2 of the Constitution merely says the electoral college’s members are chosen in each state “in such manner as the legislature thereof may direct.”
Thus, when George Washington was chosen as president in 1789, only six states held a popular vote, while elsewhere state legislators picked their electoral college members.3 It took decades to establish a firm nationwide custom of allowing ordinary citizens to vote in presidential elections.
Making things more complicated, the framers also set up a system for letting the House of Representatives pick the president when no candidate received an electoral-college majority. This has not happened often, but some scholars think the framers of the Constitution actually expected most elections to end that way.4
So who actually gets to pick the president—state legislators, voters, or Congress? The men who wrote the Constitution in 1787 considered and rejected each of those options, before choosing a combination of all three.
Writing later, Alexander Hamilton—who originally wanted the president to serve for life like an elected king5—published a rationale for this. In number 68 of The Federalist, Hamilton claimed the framers had come up with a clever way to balance different principles.
First, Hamilton wrote, “the people of America” obviously should get a direct say in choosing the president. But asking all the citizens across the nation to debate together would result in “tumult and disorder,” so the actual decision was entrusted to smaller groups of people elected by the people in each state. If no clear winner emerged from that group’s deliberation, then the House of Representatives would make sure the final choice had nationwide public support.6
Many Americans have since treated Hamilton’s claim as a description of how the electoral college was originally intended to work. Yet notice that the electoral college has never—not once—worked that way. Even in the first presidential elections, contrary to Hamilton’s description (and what some framers apparently hoped), citizens in many states were excluded from participating.7
Soon there were other changes, too. “For all practical purposes,” writes the historian Jack Rakove, “the electoral scheme of 1787 was obsolete in 1800.” Ideologically opposed political parties formed, and presidential elections could no longer be the nonpartisan discussions the framers had hoped for. The original scheme for awarding the vice presidency to the presidential runner-up had to be amended, since that now meant awarding the vice presidency to the president’s political rival.8
Thanks to these and other changes, when the electoral college meets today, its decision is a technicality. In fact, it is illegal for electors in many states to vote against their party. The electoral college which exists now is a make-believe version of what the Constitution originally described.
Fundamentally, the electoral college failed to work as designed because its design was contradictory in the first place.
And why was it so contradictory? James Madison hinted at an explanation in a letter he wrote to Thomas Jefferson, who was in France when the Constitutional Convention met in Philadelphia. Madison related the convention’s “tedious and reiterated discussions” over how the president would be chosen:
“The modes of appointment proposed were various, as by the people at large—by electors chosen by the people—by the [governors] of the states—by the Congress, some preferring a joint ballot of the two houses—some a separate concurrent ballot allowing to each a negative on the other house—some a nomination of several candidates by one house, out of whom a choice should be made by the other. Several other modifications were started. The expedient at length adopted seemed to give pretty general satisfaction to the members.”9
The historian Richard Beeman puts it more bluntly: by the time the Constitutional Convention wrapped up the debate, “the two things that most occupied the delegates’ minds were that they were tired and they wanted to go home.”10
Fletcher W. Hewes and Henry Gannett, Scribner’s Statistical Atlas of the United States (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1883), courtesy David Rumsey Map Collection.
- The design of the electoral college did help keep slaveholding states disproportionately powerful, though this was not its primary purpose. David Waldstreicher, Slavery’s Constitution: From Revolution to Ratification (New York: Hill and Wang, 2009), 7, 89.
- Max Farrand, ed., The Records of the Federal Convention of 1787, rev. ed. (4 vols.; New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1937), excerpted in “Article 2, Section 1, Clauses 2 and 3: Records of the Federal Convention,” The Founders’ Constitution, ed. Philip B. Kurland and Ralph Lerner, online ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000). For an account of the Constitutional Convention’s debate over the electoral college, see Richard Beeman, Plain, Honest Men: The Making of the American Constitution (New York: Random House, 2009), 299–307; and Jack N. Rakove, Original Meanings: Politics and Ideas in the Making of the Constitution (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996), 264–68.
- The 1788–89 election returns for New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, and Virginia can be found at A New Nation Votes: American Election Returns, 1787–1825, Tufts University Digital Collections and Archives.
- Robert M. Alexander, Representation and the Electoral College (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019), 53–55.
- Max Farrand, ed., The Records of the Federal Convention of 1787 (3 vols.; New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1911), 1:282–93; Alexander Hamilton, “Constitutional Convention. Plan of Government,” in Harold C. Syrett, ed., The Papers of Alexander Hamilton, vol. 4, January 1787–May 1788 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1962), 207–11, online at Founders Online, National Archives.
- Alexander Hamilton, “The Federalist No. 68,” in Syrett, ed., Papers of Alexander Hamilton, vol. 4, 586–90, online at Founders Online.
- For example, James Wilson told the Pennsylvania ratifying convention in the fall of 1787 that the electoral college would be chosen by ordinary citizens. This was also what James Madison and George Nichols told skeptics at Virginia’s ratifying convention the next year. Pauline Maier, Ratification: The People Debate the Constitution, 1787–1788 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2010), 114, 286.
- Jack N. Rakove, “Presidential Selection: Electoral Fallacies,” Political Science Quarterly 119 (spring 2004): 26; Bruce Ackerman, The Failure of the Founding Fathers: Jefferson, Marshall, and the Rise of Presidential Democracy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), 16–35.
- James Madison to Thomas Jefferson, Oct. 24, 1787, in Julian P. Boyd, ed., The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, vol. 12, 7 August 1787–31 March 1788 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1955), 270–86, online at Founders Online.
- Beeman, Plain, Honest Men, 307.
