A closer look

Origins of the Electoral College

Why don’t American voters directly elect their president and vice president?

by Evan Rothman, PhD Candidate, The Graduate Center CUNY

In late November 2016, just weeks removed from his upset victory in the U.S. presidential election, Donald Trump took to Twitter for a victory lap. The president-elect had won the electoral college but lost the national popular vote. On social media, Trump erroneously boasted that he won the popular vote as well—despite the fact that the popular vote has no bearing on a presidential election’s outcome. Why would a candidate falsely claim popular-vote victory when that does not determine who wins the presidency? And why does the United States presidential election system make it possible for the winner to receive fewer votes than the loser? Since the writing of the U.S. Constitution, questions like these have fueled political movements from rural taverns to the halls of Congress.

Constitutional Debates and Street Politics

In the summer of 1787, delegates from the thirteen American states gathered in Philadelphia for a Constitutional Convention to rewrite a national government framework. The delegates reached agreements on many issues, like the separation of powers and counting each enslaved African American as three-fifths of a person. But the question of the presidential election process frustrated quick compromise. For delegates, the practical scope of Revolutionary ideals was in question. In a democracy, who was qualified to elect the president? Could the masses be trusted with this consequential decision?

The “out-of-doors” sort—those who engaged in the kind of popular, extra-parliamentary political activity like rioting and street speaking that had helped fuel the Revolution—found no place inside Philadelphia’s convention hall, but their actions hung over the proceedings. Between the Revolution’s conclusion in 1783 and the Constitutional Convention in 1787, protests in rural areas had bubbled up across the thirteen states. This included an uprising led by western Massachusetts farmer and Revolutionary War veteran Daniel Shays, who joined with several thousand fellow farmers in open, armed rebellion against that state’s attempts to collect taxes and seize property from farmers in debt.

From South Carolina to New Hampshire, other groups mobilized to aid their indebted and heavily taxed brethren. In some places, when the property of indebted farmers was being auctioned off, their communities agreed not to bid up the price and threatened retaliation against anyone who stepped out of line, allowing the farmers to buy back their property cheaply. When sheriffs tried to confiscate debtors’ property, armed, self-organized militias drove them away. In several states, debtors and taxpayers vandalized and occasionally burned down county courthouses, the seats of local power.

Debating Presidential Election Methods

Against this background, Constitutional Convention delegates sought to balance giving the federal government more power, including taxation, and insulating it from popular demands, while also adhering to the Revolution’s democratic creed (at least in appearance).

James Madison of Virginia, among the most influential delegates to the convention, argued for direct elections. Instead of having a legislature appoint the president, Madison argued that the executive branch’s independence from the legislature would best be achieved when the president would secure his mandate from a dispersed, non-officeholding constituency. Madison could not convince a majority of his colleagues to support this method, however. Southern delegates worried that their states’ restriction of the franchise would disempower them relative to Northern states, which offered more generous suffrage to white men—in other words, Southern states wished to avoid any negative political consequences of disenfranchising a comparatively larger proportion of their populations. Delegates of less populated states worried that states with larger populations would wield too much power under a national popular vote for president. Furthermore, the delegates—most of whom were wealthy white male landowners, merchants, or lawyers—worried that a popular vote for the presidency would be tantamount to mob rule.

Throughout the summer, delegates returned to the idea that Congress should elect the president. This method had obvious attractions. First, it would leave the choice of president in the hands of representatives and senators, who tended to be drawn from the upper crust. Second, more practically, it would leave the balance of states’ power—between enslaved-labor and wage-labor systems, large and small populations—undisturbed by managing presidential elections through a body already subject to the three-fifths compromise and the apportionment of two senators per state. Still, this proposal did not satisfy Madison’s conviction that the executive branch should derive its governing mandate from a process independent of the legislature.

Constitutional Compromise

Ultimately, the delegates settled on an unusual solution. Rather than the Congress electing the president, a parallel body would do so. Each state’s representation would be apportioned identically to its congressional representation—so, for example, a state with two senators and eight representatives would receive ten presidential electors. These electors would be chosen as each state saw fit—typically appointed by the state legislature, not directly elected by voters. The sole purpose of this parallel body, which we now know as the Electoral College, would be to select a president and vice president, after which it would cease to exist until a new Electoral College was convened in four years’ time.

The proposal carefully balanced delegates’ competing preferences for a national presidential popular vote and congressional selection. The presidential elector system did not give enfranchised Americans a direct say in presidential elections, but it also ensured a separation of powers. And by existing as a mirror image of the Congress, it tread lightly on the compromises already reached. Undeniably, the agreed-upon presidential election system bore more resemblance to indirect congressional selection than direct national vote. While the Electoral College offered some degree of popular participation, the system ultimately concentrated power in the hands of the few.

Attempts at Electoral College Reform

Since the Constitution’s ratification in 1788, politicians and activists have recurrently sought to reform or eliminate the electoral college. From the nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth century, one of the most popular proposed reforms was to allocate electoral college votes based on voting at the congressional district–level rather than statewide—the system used by Maine and Nebraska today. Electoral college reform also became a civil rights issue. After Reconstruction, white governments in Southern states succeeded in preventing almost all African Americans from voting. This gave white voters in those states disproportionate influence on presidential elections, since their electoral college votes were allocated based on total population, though not everyone was allowed to vote. In the twentieth century, reformers began advocating for a proportional system, in which a candidate’s share of a state’s popular vote determined their electoral vote share. Another proposed approach was to abolish the Electoral College altogether and elect the president by a national popular vote. In each moment, however, the difficulty of passing a constitutional amendment (which requires approval by at least two-thirds of each branch of Congress and ratification by three-fourths of the states), and the existing system’s defenders, have kept the Electoral College in place. Like former President Trump’s 2016 tweet erroneously claiming a popular vote victory, historic defenders of the Electoral College betrayed an ambivalence toward popular democracy, and the decisions a fully empowered electorate might make.

Reflection Questions

How did rural protests over debt and tax collection influence the drafting of the Constitution?

Why did delegates to the Constitutional Convention consider giving the legislature the power to select the president but ultimately decide against it?

How have Americans proposed changing the Electoral College system of electing the president?

Additional Reading

Woody Holton, Unruly Americans and the Origins of the Constitution (New York: Hill and Wang, 2007).

Alex Keyssar, Why Do We Still Have the Electoral College? (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2020).

Related Chapters

Revolution, Constitution, and the People, 1776-1815