The History of the Electoral College

Kelly Therese Pollock  0:00  
This is Unsung Hhistory, the podcast where we discuss people and events in American history that haven't always received a lot of attention. I'm your host, Kelly Therese Pollock. I'll start each episode with a brief introduction to the topic, and then talk to someone who knows a lot more than I do. Be sure to subscribe to Unsung History on your favorite podcasting app, so you never miss an episode, and please, tell your friends, family, neighbors, colleagues, maybe even strangers, to listen too. On May 14, 1787, when the Constitutional Convention was scheduled to begin in Philadelphia, only the Pennsylvania and Virginia delegations had arrived in the city. It was perhaps a sign of how slow and frustrating the process would be. The United States, still a new country, already had a system of government, the Articles of Confederation, which had been ratified just six years earlier, in February, 1781. Having just fought a revolution to throw off monarchical rule, the founders of the United States were understandably wary of anything resembling a monarchy, and The Articles of Confederation created a deliberately weak central government. Essentially, the United States of America was more a collection of allied states than a country, and there was no executive branch. It was quickly apparent, though that a new system was needed. With no central monetary system or ability to levy taxes, the United States still owed huge Revolutionary War era debts, and the central government couldn't even put down the Shays's Rebellion, a tax protest by farmers in western Massachusetts. They had to instead rely on a privately sponsored state militia to do so. The delegates to the Constitutional Convention in 1787, from 12 of the 13 states, all but Rhode Island, were originally supposed to be amending the Articles of Confederation, but that proved inadequate to their needs. Over the course of four months, the delegates debated, and at times argued, over a number of different issues. One of the easier decisions was to create the now familiar three branches of government, legislative, executive, and judicial. The delegations compromised over the legislative branch with the seats in the Upper House allocated equally to each state, and in the Lower House proportionally by population, albeit with the odious three fifths compromise, wherein three fifths of each state's enslaved population counted toward the total population for the purpose of apportioning in the House of Representatives, despite, of course, the enslaved population having no voting rights, among other things. The first time the convention discussed how to select a chief executive, only a single delegate proposed direct popular election by the people. A system of electors was also unpopular. Election by the Congress, though seen as problematic in a system designed with checks and balances in mind, was favored, with nine states voting yes, and only Pennsylvania voting no. As the weeks and months dragged on, and as they wrestled with many other issues, the delegates kept coming back to the issue of choosing the president. They debated and voted again and again, changing their minds several times, never satisfied with the outcome. Governor Morris, a delegate from New York, was troubled by the possibility of corruption inherent in any plan where the legislature would elect the president. But all of the other plans were repeatedly defeated by the small states and the slave states, who wanted to keep the advantage they had in the system of congressional representation. At the end of August, Morris, once again proposed election by a system of electors, something that had been voted down four times before. It was voted down a fifth time, but this time by a single vote. As it stood on the last day of August, 1787, the President of the United States would be elected by the legislature. Morris moved that the method of selecting the President be referred to the Committee on Unfinished Parts to resolve. And so it was that the delegates of the nine states still in Philadelphia at the end of August, agreed to let the 11 members of the Committee on Unfinished Parts finish the business of deciding how to select what would someday be the most powerful office in the world. A compromise plan drafted by future President James Madison and cleaned up by the Committee of Style, became Article Two, Section One of the Constitution, reading, "Each state shall appoint, in such manner as the legislature thereof may direct, a number of electors equal to the whole number of senators and representatives to which the state may be entitled in the Congress, but no senator or representative or person holding an office of trust or profit under The United States shall be appointed an elector." Thus, the committee answered the concerns of the small states and the slave states, but also, theoretically at least, avoided the corruption that Morris worried about. And in a time when it was still difficult to travel the length of the country and most newspapers were local, the chosen electors were considered more likely than the average voter to know something about the people running for president. As originally ratified, the electors chose two candidates from two different states. The one with the most electoral votes was president, and the second most was vice president. However, when the election of 1800 ended in an electoral vote tie between Thomas Jefferson and his intended vice president, Aaron Burr, the decision then went to the House of Representatives, as outlined in the Constitution. After 35 tied ballots, Jefferson won on the 36th ballot in the House. To avoid that outcome in the future, the 12th Amendment to the Constitution, the only amendment dealing with the Electoral College, was ratified in 1804. That amendment outlines that the electors should vote separately for a president and a vice president, "one of whom, at least, shall not be an inhabitant of the same state with themselves." You may have noted by now that nothing outlined in the Constitution or in the 12th Amendment says that the entirety of the electoral votes from a state must go to the same candidate. Even today, in 2024, there are two states, Maine and Nebraska, that apportion their electoral votes by congressional district. The Constitution itself leaves the selection and method of selection of electors up to the states. And it was not until 1824 that the majority of states used the winner take all method. States saw the advantage of the system in competing with each other, though, and within 12 years, in 1836, all but one state, South Carolina, were using the winner take all method based on the statewide popular vote to choose its electors. There have been many attempts over the years since to change the system of how electors are appointed, and even to do away with the Electoral College altogether, but none have been successfully implemented. Joining me in this episode is Dr. Carolyn Renee Dupont, Professor of History at Eastern Kentucky University and author of, "Distorting Democracy: The Forgotten History of the Electoral College, and Why It Matters Today." First though, here is my son, Teddy, reading excerpts from Federalist Number 68 the mode of electing the president, published on Friday, March 14, 1788, written under a pen name by Alexander Hamilton in an attempt to convince his fellow New Yorkers to support ratification of the Constitution.

Teddy  10:59  
The mode of appointment of the chief magistrate of the United States is almost the only part of the system of any consequence which has escaped without severe censure or which has received the slightest mark of approbation from its opponents. I venture somewhat further and hesitate not to affirm, that if the matter of it be not perfect, is at least excellent. It unites in an eminent degree, all the advantages the union of which was to be wished for. The process of election affords a moral certainty that the office of president will never fall to the lot of any man who has had an eminent degree endowed with the requisite qualifications, talents for low intrigue and the little arts of popularity may alone suffice to elevate a man to the first honors in a single state, but it will require other talents and a different kind of merit to establish him in the esteem and confidence of the whole union, or so considerable a portion of it as would be necessary to make him a successful candidate for the distinguished office of President of the United States. It will not be too strong to say that there will be a constant probability of seeing the station filled with characters preeminent for ability and virtue, and this will be thought no inconsiderable recommendation of the Constitution by those who are able to estimate the share which the executive in every government must necessarily have in its good or ill administration. Though we cannot acquiesce in the political heresy of the poetry says for forms of government, what fools contest that which is administered is best. Yet we may safely pronounce that the true test of a good government is its aptitude and tendency to produce a good administration. 

Kelly Therese Pollock  13:07  
Hi, Carolyn, thanks so much for joining me today.

Dr. Carolyn Dupont  13:10  
I am so glad to be here with you. Thank you

Kelly Therese Pollock  13:12  
Yes, I am really excited to talk about the history of the Electoral College. I want to start by asking you, this is very different than your first book. So how did you decide to write this story?

Dr. Carolyn Dupont  13:27  
Well, mainly, I, well, two things, really, I got curious, kind of I'd always thought there was a bigger story there. There was more complicated story there. And then I was also hearing things that I just was pretty sure weren't true, things like, well, the framers created the Electoral College to mitigate the tyranny of the majority, even the idea that it had some, some real purpose behind it, some high minded principle. And then, of course, you hear those people who want to say that, well, it's all because of slavery. And I thought, well, that, you know, sometimes that's kind of imprecise. Maybe that's not, maybe it was a factor, but not the real reason. So I just got curious and started researching. And it's kind of like almost before I knew it, I was writing this book. But you're right, it is quite different from American religious history, what is, which is what I typically work on.

Kelly Therese Pollock  14:22  
I want to set the stage a little bit, as the framers are writing the Constitution, of course, what they are coming from? They are coming from the Articles of Confederation. Like this is a very imperfect system. So it's not like they are sitting down to, like write an opus and thinking, this will be the most perfect system ever and it will never be changed. So can you just sort of set the stage here a little bit? 

Dr. Carolyn Dupont  14:52  
Yeah. So the Articles of Confederation, of course, they created sort of 13 republics that had a firm league of friendship. And so there really was only one, one institution of national authority, and that was Congress. There was no executive, no federal judiciary. I think the the biggest problem that all of this created was that the Articles of Confederation gave the federal government no authority to tax. And so this created all kinds of horrible financial problems. And of course, financial problems create social and civil unrest. And so I think the important part of that background is that when the framers go to Philadelphia, they're really, they're really there because of sort of a desperation, and periodically, over the course of the four months that they're there to write the constitution, it comes out just that they're really afraid if we don't make a change, we're going to splinter into three different confederacies. We may have civil war, we may be taken over by a foreign power. And I think it's really important because it underscores that notion that the Constitution is is imperfect, and that's not to rag on the Constitution. It's just to accept the humanity of the men who wrote it, and also to understand that they, many of them, were willing to accept a lot of things that were not their preferences, because they understood that they needed to create something that they could unite the country behind.

Kelly Therese Pollock  16:33  
And as they sat down to do this, they they knew they were making history, right? So we have a lot of sources. We know a lot about what they were thinking, what was going on. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Dr. Carolyn Dupont  16:44  
It's really, the sources are really rich. We have James Madison's notes, and, you know, those are available online. All of Max Farrand's records from the Constitutional Convention are available online. I like the hard copy, but it's, you know, it's 600 pages alone. And Madison took detailed notes. In fact, you know, he says he wasn't absent for it more than an hour of the entire Constitutional Convention, which, you know, I found, I find astounding, because it's six days a week, six hours a day. It's not always productive conversation. And you know, I find myself irritated in a two hour faculty meeting, but you know, the patience and the stamina and the commitment with which they sat there and and created this, so we have those sources. We also have letters that are written, most of them after the fact, because they were forbidden from talking about it at the time. We have notes from other framers. We have the official journal of the Constitutional Convention, which is quite incomplete. And then, of course, we have, you know, over the years, the decades, really, Madison lives, what, almost 50 years afterward, and they look back and talk about what it was they had in mind. So it's really a rich source space. And then, of course, I'd be remiss if I didn't add the records from the ratification conversation, the ratification contest. So the Constitution could not go into effect until nine states, until the people of nine states had ratified it. So there's a series of conventions in every state, except Rhode Island just puts it to a referendum. But these conventions sometimes are a month long, in which a specially chosen body, not the regular state legislature, debates the merits of the Constitution. And we have all of those records, which are many, many volumes, and that's not to mention also the Federalist Papers and the anti Federalists. So yes, there's a lot of sources.

Kelly Therese Pollock  18:50  
Okay. And so they didn't just like walk in the door of the convention and say, "This is the way we are going to choose a president, electoral college, that's it." Can you talk a little bit about the yes, many, many discussions that went on to come to this outcome?

Dr. Carolyn Dupont  19:04  
Yes, and you know, I think this is really important, because there are people out there trying to act as if this is some, some institution or device that they had this great principled commitment to, and there's just nothing in the records that bear out that depiction. So they do begin to consider an electoral college early on, but they reject it something like five times over the course of this four months. They approve it near the end of July, but then five days later, change their mind and reject it again. So they actually take something like 30 votes over the course of this four months on methods of choosing the president, so several different electoral college plans, two votes on direct popular vote, and then a series of votes on Congress choosing the president. And it's so interesting, because we want to depict this as a contest between, well, you know, popular vote and the Electoral College. That wasn't the contest that they were having. Theirs was Congress choosing the President or anything else, because that seemed a natural way to choose the president, because they believed that members of the legislature would have the knowledge of people's character, and that ordinary people simply wouldn't have that knowledge. And of course, you know, we've got about 100 newspapers in 1787, so there's not really a good means for people living in rural era areas, which is most people, to to know anything about national figures or who could be a strong leader. And so Congress choosing the president seemed natural, but then they wanted separation of powers, and everyone also understood that if Congress chose the president, Congress would own him, in a sense, and that this could lead to corruption and intrigue and even foreign intervention. And so it's it's almost comical to to read their debates and they say, oh, Congress choosing the president is the worst possible method. And they all agree, and then they turn around and vote for it, and you just scratch your head and say, what's going on? They actually wrote a draft constitution about not quite two thirds of the way through, and in that draft, Congress was going to choose the president, and there it sat until the end of August, when they so by this time, they've been there three months, and they're all of a sudden, you can just feel the impatience in the room, and they're starting to say, well, let's let a committee work this detail and this detail and, oh yes, let's let a committee figure out how to choose the President as well. And a Committee of 11 people run upstairs to the to an upper room in the Philadelphia State House, the Pennsylvania State House, and that's where they sketch out the Electoral College, as is written in the Constitution.

Kelly Therese Pollock  22:14  
This is, like the worst group project of all time. 

Dr. Carolyn Dupont  22:16  
Well,it is. And, you know, I think that one of the things that we could say about it, you know, is they were, none of them really endorsed it very wholeheartedly. You know, Madison in the Virginia ratifying convention says that mode which was considered most expedient was adopted until a better one could be found. Or, you know, I'm not getting the quote exactly right, but something like this, you know, seems kind of half hearted. George Mason, who was there the entire time, and just to remind listeners, he's the author of the Virginia Declaration of Rights, George Mason refuses to sign the Constitution first off, but cites the Electoral College as a deception. He says it's a deception thrown out to make the people think that they're electing the president. So you know the only, the only full throated endorsement of it that we really have is from Alexander Hamilton. And your more astute listeners will remember Federalist 68, which is the one Federalist essay that deals with the Electoral College, and there Hamilton called it, "excellent, not perfect, excellent." But what's interesting about that is that, several things, one, he describes a different system than what we have today. In that very essay, he also talked about, in that essay, talked about the Electoral College being one that could not be tampered where the electors couldn't be tampered with beforehand. But I don't think he believed what he was selling, because he's tampering with electors within a year of writing that, and he tampers with every single presidential election in some pretty egregious ways, until Aaron Burr shoots him in 1804, so, you know. And I just should also remind listeners that the Federalist was written, you know, as a as a those were essays to try to encourage voters to choose pro constitution delegates to their ratifying convention. It's not a piece that's absent a political agenda. 

Kelly Therese Pollock  24:36  
Of course, when the Constitution is ratified, this is before there are really political parties, but they're very quickly forming. That makes a very big difference in the way all sorts of things work, but especially the selection of presidents. So can you talk some about that and the way that starts to work in 1796 and then especially in 1800?

Dr. Carolyn Dupont  25:03  
Yeah. So of course, they it's not that they didn't think that people would naturally set separate themselves into factions, but they didn't envision that within, you know, five years of the Constitution's ratification, there would be two pretty rigid political parties emerging, and actually one of the big differences between those parties was how to interpret what they had just written, interpret the Constitution. But, you know, I think it's so interesting because it does have a lot of resonances with the rigidity and the the sense that so much is at stake that we have in our political parties today. They had the the absolute same sense. And so capturing the presidency just becomes this very important goal. And if you must, at all costs, capture the presidency, you're quite willing to manipulate the operations of the Electoral College to capture it for your man. And what happens within a few cycles, and then there, of course, changes that continue well into the 19th century, it was a proxy election where the where either the people or the state legislatures, are choosing electors who are not instructed. You know, they're supposed to go into this hermetically sealed environment, and out of their wisdom, they're supposed to make a choice. Hamilton speaks about it that way in Federalist 68, and they're supposed to put that choice in in a they're supposed to seal it and send it to Congress so that no one can pressure them to vote a certain way. Well, that just doesn't really last very long at all, and very quickly, electors are pledging in advance to whom they will vote. The legislatures are switching methods of choosing electors. So sometimes, when when the election is really competitive, the legislature just take that choice even sometimes take it away from the people and and just choose the electors themselves. One of the big shifts that happens slowly over the first decades of the 19th century is the swit, the shift to winner take all, because everyone recognizes that you can capture all the electors from your state for your party under a winner take all system, as opposed to one that would allocate those electors proportionally to how people actually voted. And so those are the ways that it gets manipulated. And I think it's really important for listeners to understand that the framers themselves watched this happening. They sometimes participated in it, but even as they participated in it, they also complained about it and said this wasn't what we had in mind. And I think, you know, perhaps the most direct the time anyone said this, although they said it indirectly and in a lot of other ways, but was Rufus King. Now most Americans today don't know who Rufus King was, but in 1816 he's a US senator from New York. But in 1787 he had been a member of the Constitutional Convention, and he had also served on the committee that created the Electoral College, and he is talking in the Senate in 1816 about a constitutional amendment that would alter the operations of the Electoral College to stop some of what I've just described. And he says, "The election of a president is no longer that process which the Constitution contemplated." And you know that that sentiment was echoed by jurists, by Justices of the Supreme Court, constitutional commentaries, authors of constitutional commentaries, who understood that these changes had really taken the system or create, made this system into something that wasn't what was originally intended.

Kelly Therese Pollock  29:18  
So the only amendment that we have right that deals with this is the 12th amendment. So that's after the election of 1800 and so that is specifying, then that you have to say which one is going to be president, which one is going to be vice president. So you don't have this Thomas Jefferson/Aaron Burr situation that we had in 1800. But as you note in the book, there are many, many, many, many times that people, over the years, over the centuries, have tried to add amendments to the Constitution. Could you talk some about the many times that has happened? And in some cases, it's gotten pretty far.

Dr. Carolyn Dupont  29:59  
Yeah, it really has. So I'll just say that the total number of amendments that have passed one house of Congress or the other to either alter or abolish the electoral college is seven over the course of our history. And five of those passed the Senate and to the house. And now they were not all to abolish the Electoral College. Five of them happened before 1822, and they were to create proportional election systems. It really like we elect our congressman, so we would elect our electors in districts. And interestingly enough, Alexander Hamilton proposed one of these after the election of 1800 and so that just underscores the fact that he really didn't believe the Electoral College was so excellent. And he even noted, you know, that he thought that the Electoral College as it was then operating, had a great degree of chaos and dysfunction in it. So, so, so there's that one, but then there are four that would have also created a proportional or district election system in the between 1813 and 1822. There are many, many others proposed over the years. So this is just something that Americans and and our leaders have understood has really not worked well for us. There was one senator, Thomas Hart Benton, in Missouri, that introduced an amendment to alter the Electoral College every session of Congress for 20 years. There were a number of amendment proposals during Reconstruction, while we were remaking our government and remaking the electorate. So this is something Americans have sought to do over and over again. But the the time we came the closest, and I think this is really quite a story, was in 1969 and 1970, when the House of Representatives passed a constitutional amendment that would have abolished the Electoral College, and it passed it with 83% of members voting for it. And I think it's important to note that the reason that amendment didn't ever make it to the states is because it was filibustered in the Senate, by a trio of segregationists who understood that, you know, in 1970 of course, the Voting Rights Act is only five years old. There's just been a vote to renew the Voting Rights Act, and they understood that they could no longer prevent their Black citizens from voting, but they were going to keep them from having an influence in presidential elections, which is what the popular vote would have allowed.

Dr. Carolyn Dupont  32:54  
Some of these amendments, they would solve some of the problem, right, like they if we did it by districts, if we got rid of the the winner take all system, that would change some of what is unfair about the current system, but we would still have the disproportional representation of voters in some states versus other states. Could you talk a little bit about that? 

Dr. Carolyn Dupont  33:20  
Yes. And so, you know, and there are many people who say, "Well, it'd be too hard to abolish the Electoral College. People are sort of attached to it, so let's do something like proportional, a proportional system." And so you're right that it does keep the disproportionate allocation of electors. And so it's interesting what people perceive are the distortions of the Electoral College, because people widely believe that it advantages the small states. And if you look at how the states are represented according to population, it does advantage the small states. The small states are over represented. They get the smallest ones get about one elector for every 190,000 residents, whereas the largest state, California, which has 54 electors, gets one for about every 700,000 so you know that the small states are represented in that way about about three and a half times. But in fact, it actually magnifies the power of voters in the large states. Now that seems counterintuitive, and how can it do both? Well, let me explain it this way, that each California voter will vote for 54 electors. So, you know, we, we don't have the consciousness that we actually vote for electors because they're not on our ballots. But that's, that's how this is calculated, and it's important to understand that it's every California voter will get the chance to vote for 54 electors and and those that are successful, and meaning those whose candidate wins the state, it'll be Democrats. We know that. That will put that candidate 20% of the way to winning the Electoral College. That's a huge lead. Now, if we had a popular vote, the 6 million California Republicans who, you know, we're led to believe don't exist. And I just want to say that the 6 million Trump voters in California, at least that was the 2020 figure, that's more votes than he got in any other state, but yet, they could not help their candidate at all, because there were no electors that represented their choice. If we did it by popular vote, at least on 2020 figures, Biden would have come out of that state with 14% of what he needed to win. Trump would have come out with almost 8% of what he needed to win, which means that the gap between them would have been six percentage points. So the Electoral College gave the Democrat a 20% win, where the popular vote would have given the Democrat a 6% win from California. So I think you can see how it actually magnifies the power of the large state. And proportional voting wouldn't really well, the problem is that the house has been capped, and so the large states cannot get an increase in members of the House of Representatives proportional to their population. And of course, the electoral college is based on Congress, the numbers of electors that that that a state gets. And so the the only way to do this where every vote is equal is a national popular vote. And you know, I think that what's really important about that is that we would never tolerate the kinds of distortions that the Electoral College does in any other election. And we, you know, we profess to hate inequality, but this is an institutionalized unequal system, and to praise it as something, you know, some high minded, profound thing that the founders created and that we must therefore protect, and to say it does all these good things, is really kind of, you know, it's kind of like the emperor with no clothes. It's, it's, it's creating inequality. And I think that Americans want a system that's based on some deeply held value, and equal value, equal power at the ballot box, I think everyone could get behind.

Dr. Carolyn Dupont  36:18  
And the framers did not intend for it to be so difficult to change the constitution, right?

Dr. Carolyn Dupont  37:54  
Well, yes and no. So let's remember that the Articles of Confederation required a unanimous vote to amend, and so when they said, well, two thirds of Congress and three fourths of the states, that seemed like they were making it much easier. But in fact, it's just proven really, really difficult. And we do have one of the more difficult constitutions to amend, and I understand and appreciate that, because the Constitution is, you know, it's our our foundation, our foundational compact, it shouldn't be changed willy nilly. It just, I think it bothers me that this system has only grown in its inequities and its damage, and yet it's been so persistently hard to change it. And of course, one of the reasons is that there's always somebody who believes they have an interest in in maintaining it. Most of the time they don't, because I think I can demonstrate that the Electoral College hurts Republicans and Democrats alike. 

Kelly Therese Pollock  39:02  
Yeah, well, and it's, it's really easy to imagine a future in four or eight years where the Democrats could win Texas, for instance. And there you go, sudden that becomes an insurmountable lead, at least for, you know, some number of cycles that that Republicans can't possibly win the electoral college.

Dr. Carolyn Dupont  39:22  
Well, so to that point, Texas is not so far out of reach for Democrats. And if Texas flipped, between California, Texas and New York, three of the four largest states, Democrats would have 45% of the electoral college just with those three states. And in fact, you know, contrary to this notion that it helps the small states, you can win the electoral college with 12 states and the other 38 just don't matter at all. So.

Kelly Therese Pollock  39:55  
Well, this is a fascinating book. I love this history. And you've got interesting charts about things like the the 12 states you would need to win. Can you tell listeners how they can get a copy?

Dr. Carolyn Dupont  40:07  
Yes, well, amazon.com. The the book is called, "Distorting Democracy: The Forgotten History of the Electoral College and Why It Matters Today."

Kelly Therese Pollock  40:19  
Is there anything else you want to make sure we talk about?

Dr. Carolyn Dupont  40:23  
No, I think that you've asked great questions, and I really enjoyed the opportunity just to explore this history. And I hope people, I hope people will get the book and and, you know, I think there's a lot in there, just for a broad education about American history generally, that will surprise readers in a lot of ways. 

Kelly Therese Pollock  40:42  
Carolyn, thank you so much for joining me.

Dr. Carolyn Dupont  40:45  
Thank you. 

Teddy  41:04  
Thanks for listening to Unsung History. Please subscribe to Unsung History on your favorite podcasting app. You can find the sources used for this episode and a full episode transcript @unsunghistorypodcast.com. To the best of our knowledge, all audio and images used by Unsung History are in the public domain or are used with permission. You can find us on Twitter or Instagram @Unsung__History or on Facebook @UnsungHistorypodcast. To contact us with questions, corrections, praise, or episode suggestions, please email kelly@unsunghistorypodcast.com. If you enjoyed this podcast, please rate, review, and tell everyone you know. Bye!

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