Info Brief: The Compromise Over the Electoral College

The Electoral College

• Some framers – like James Wilson, Alexander Hamilton, and John Dickinson – favored a strong executive branch led by a single president. For these framers and their allies, a single, strong president would promote good governance, serve as America’s voice on the world stage, check Congress when it went astray, and remain accountable to the American people.
• However, other key framers like Roger Sherman disagreed. For Sherman, the national government’s new executive should serve as “nothing more than an institution for carrying the will of the Legislature into effect.” For Sherman, Congress should take the lead in the new national government, not the executive branch.

• How long the president should serve
• Whether the president should be able to run for reelection (and, if so, how many times)
• How to remove a president that abuses his power
• And, finally, how to elect a president.

• For many framers, election by Congress was the best solution. This method left the selection of the president to some of the nation’s most respected and knowledgeable leaders. However, this solution was far from perfect. Some framers feared that this approach would lead to self-dealing by the nation’s elite. For instance, Gouverneur Morris feared that congressional election of the president might devolve into the “work of intrigue, of cabal, and of faction.” Rather than serving as an independent check on Congress, the president would instead become a mere tool of his supporters in Congress.
• James Wilson proposed election of the president by popular vote. This method had the obvious advantage of rooting the president’s legitimacy in popular sovereignty. However, Wilson’s proposal wasn’t popular with the delegates at the Convention.

• For some framers, their opposition to the popular election of the president was driven by sheer elitism. They feared that the American people didn’t have the wisdom to choose the best president and that, instead, they might be seduced into supporting demagogues. However, that wasn’t the only – or even the most widely held – critique of Wilson’s proposal.

• Many other framers didn’t so much fear the wisdom of the American people as the practical challenge of ordinary Americans selecting a single president from such a large nation in the late 1700s. At the founding, few Americans left their own local communities – let alone their states. They knew very little about what was happening outside of their communities or, at most, their own states. How could the framers expect the average American voter to know anything about an out-of-state candidate’s record – and, especially, his character? Sure, the framers could trust them to elect the nation’s first president. Everyone knew (and loved) George Washington. But in the future, these critics feared that there wouldn’t be many—or any—other Washingtons. Instead, the American people would be forced to choose between candidates largely unknown to them. For these delegates, the main problem with Wilson’s proposal wasn’t one of popular wisdom, but instead one of public information. The framers were attempting to create the largest republic in world history. Many Americans lived on the frontier, and few lived within dense, urban areas. Information about the nation’s politics – and key national leaders – spread slowly, if at all, especially outside of cities. Therefore, for these delegates, the core concern was that the American people would rely on bad information when voting on a president.

• The third—and final—key idea was the Electoral College. This method had the advantage of bolstering the president’s role as an independent check on Congress. Unlike congressional election of the president, the Electoral College would provide the president with his own independent base of support outside of Congress – a base of support that would gather to vote for president and then disappear once that task was done. On the flip side, some framers worried about the logistics and expenses associated with arranging for the electors to get together to vote. Others wondered about the quality of the potential electors, fearing that the Electoral College wouldn’t be able to secure electors “of the 1st or even the 2nd grade in the States.”

• For James Wilson—who supported the popular election of the president—the Electoral College was a second (or third) best option. The Electoral College would leave the method for selecting the electors to the state legislatures of each state. He predicted that the state legislatures would use this power to make the presidential election process more democratic over time. He was right, and the American people would play an important role in the selection of electors – and, therefore, the president – from the very beginning of the new national government.
• For those framers who had some sympathy for Wilson’s support for the popular election of the president, but also shared some of the concerns of Wilson’s critics, the Electoral College offered a nice balance – combining a mix of popular and elite input with the principle of federalism.
• For those framers who supported congressional election of the president, the Electoral College still reserved a potentially large role for Congress in presidential selection. If no candidate managed to secure a majority of the votes in the Electoral College, the Constitution left the selection of the president in the hands of the U.S. House—voting by state, not by individual members, from among the top vote-getters. Importantly, many delegates predicted that—after Washington—not many candidates would have the national reputation necessary to secure an Electoral College majority. As a result, many elections would go to the House. In fact, George Mason predicted that the House would select the president “nineteen times in twenty.”
• For some slaveholding delegates, the Electoral College boosted their states' political power over the presidency. Because of the Three-Fifths Compromise, the Constitution counted enslaved people as three-fifths of a person for purposes of congressional representation. This compromise, in turn, boosted the voting power of slaveholders in the Electoral College. (More on the Three-Fifths Clause in the next Lesson.)
• And, finally, for elitist critics of James Wilson’s proposal like Alexander Hamilton, the Electoral College provided a way of safeguarding the republic from dangerous demagogues. Instead of relying on the popular vote (as Wilson suggested), the Electoral College placed the election of the president in the hands of a group of elites serving in the Electoral College. This theory had its roots, in part, in experiences like Shays’ Rebellion. Hamilton in Federalist, No. 68 offered an elitist defense of the Electoral College, explaining, “Men chosen by the people for the special purpose” of selecting the president “will be most likely to possess the information and discernment requisite to such complicated investigations.”