|
| |
In 2000, for the first time in 112 years, the candidate who |
| |
won the popular vote did not become president. This event |
| |
underscored a curious fact about our political system. Strictly |
| Line |
speaking, American voters do not elect their president. A group |
| (5) |
of people collectively referred to as the Electoral College |
| |
elects the president on behalf of the American people. How did |
| |
this strange institution come to be? |
| |
Two critical and interlocking concerns shaped how the |
| |
founders structured the Electoral College. First, the founders |
| (10) |
wanted to put a check on the popular will. The United States was |
| |
to be a republic, not a democracy. To the founders, “democracy” |
| |
meant mob rule. The founders had been horrified by Shays’ |
| |
rebellion in Massachusetts, in which impoverished farmers took up |
| |
arms against their creditors. By preventing direct popular |
| (15) |
election of the chief executive, the framers hoped to prevent an |
| |
American Caesar from destroying the republic by playing on the |
| |
easily swayed will of the ignorant and unpropertied masses. |
| |
Second, the Electoral College was intended to balance the |
| |
power of large and small states to choose the chief executive. |
| (20) |
Such a balance had been struck in the legislative branch: the |
| |
Senate had equal state representation, whereas the House of |
| |
Representatives featured proportional state representation. Large |
| |
states had more influence in the House, but all states had equal |
| |
influence in the Senate. Analogously, the framers empowered state |
| (25) |
legislatures to appoint or select several |
| |
electors, the number of which was to equal the sum of that |
| |
state’s representatives and two senators. On a day decreed by |
| |
Congress, all electors were to meet in their respective states |
| |
and cast ballots for the presidency. A list recording all votes |
| (30) |
was to be signed, certified, sealed, and delivered to the |
| |
president of the Senate (i.e., the vice president of the United |
| |
States). In a joint session of Congress, the president of the |
| |
Senate was to unseal and count the votes from all the states. |
| |
Whichever candidate garnered the most votes became the |
| (35) |
president-elect, as long as he had a majority of all votes cast. |
| |
The runner-up became the vice president-elect. |
| |
These rules forced the Constitution’s framers to take some |
| |
special cases into account. In the event that two candidates |
| |
split the Electoral College evenly, both would have a majority, |
| (40) |
but neither would have the most votes. The election would then go |
| |
to the House, where each state’s delegation would cast a single |
| |
vote for president. In the event that no candidate carried a |
| |
majority, the House’s state delegations would choose from among |
| |
the top five vote-getters. In either case, the runner-up in the |
| (45) |
House election would become vice president. (In the case of a tie |
| |
for second place, the Senate would vote for one of the two |
| |
candidates.) The rules by which these contingencies were to be |
| |
adjudicated demonstrate the founders’ desire to balance the power |
| |
of large and small states. The founders expected that large |
| (50) |
states would in effect determine who the “candidates” for |
| |
president were, but small and large states would have an equal |
| |
say in which candidate ultimately became president. |
| |
For all their concern to account for state loyalty, the |
| |
founders failed to take party loyalty into account. Political |
| (55) |
parties arose almost immediately after the Constitution was |
| |
ratified. Problems with the Electoral College quickly followed. |
| |
In 1796, John Adams, a Federalist, won the most electoral votes |
| |
and became president. Thomas Jefferson, a Democratic-Republican, |
| |
was runner-up to Adams; he became the vice president. Thus, the |
| (60) |
two top executives were bitter political rivals, an unhappy and |
| |
unintended state of affairs. In 1804, the Twelfth Amendment |
| |
stipulated that the Electoral College choose presidents and vice |
| |
presidents separately. |
| |
A more fundamental structural problem with the Electoral |
| (65) |
College lay in the founders’ anti-democratic intentions. As the |
| |
nineteenth century progressed, a wave of democratic reform swept |
| |
Europe and the United States. States began adopting direct |
| |
popular election of a slate of electors. Political parties began |
| |
sponsoring their own slate of electors, each of whom pledged to |
| (70) |
vote for their party’s candidate in the Electoral College. The |
| |
result of each state’s popular election began determining which |
| |
party’s slate would take part in the Electoral College. This |
| |
democratization of the Electoral College had some unintended |
| |
consequences. First, since presidential elections were still |
| (75) |
determined state-by-state by winner-take-all electoral votes, |
| |
rather than by the aggregate popular votes of all states, a |
| |
candidate could lose the national popular vote and still carry |
| |
the Electoral College. Second, as party divisions increased and |
| |
the cost of presidential campaigns skyrocketed, campaigns became |
| (80) |
increasingly focused on a few contested states, in effect turning |
| |
a national presidential election into a linked cluster of local |
| |
elections in which the interests of a few swing states determine |
| |
national policy decisions. Thus, the Electoral College has failed |
| |
to fairly balance state interests, as the founders had hoped, |
| (85) |
while remaining as undemocratic as ever. |
