Why Does the United States have an Electoral College?

It was time to go home. The delegates to the 1787 Constitutional Convention had sweated through more than a hundred days of a Philadelphia summer. Away from their families and friends for months, most of them were eager to wrap things up. But to do so, they would need to return to a question that they had postponed again and again.

How should the President be elected?

James Madison later remembered that the decisions about electing the president occurred “in the latter stage of the Session,” which caused “a degree of the hurrying influence produced by fatigue and impatience.” The decision to create an Electoral College was never obvious. It was a compromise of compromises, a mishmash of solutions for an unsolvable set of problems. Every election process they considered seemed vulnerable to domestic demagogues or foreign tyrants. According to Pennsylvania delegate James Wilson, it was the “most difficult” question “of all on which we have had to decide.”¹ So why did they decide to create the Electoral College?

The Virginia delegation initially proposed that the national legislature choose the president.² Connecticut’s Roger Sherman agreed, since he viewed the executive branch “as nothing more than an institution for carrying the will of the Legislature into effect.”³

But the Framers were suspicious of popular assemblies. Their conflict with the British Parliament during the 1770s suggested, as Jefferson once observed, “that bodies of men as well as individuals are susceptible of the spirit of tyranny.” More recently, many leaders had come to doubt the wisdom of state legislatures, which were pursuing populist economic policies.⁴

During the Convention, many delegates called for an independent, far-sighted executive as a counterweight to the passions that sometimes gripped popular assemblies.⁵ Many of the Framers feared that if a legislature chose the president, it would conspire to choose someone it could influence. Gouverneur Morris of New York, who favored a popular vote, reasoned that legislative election of a president would be a “work of intrigue, of cabal, and of faction: it will be like the election of a pope by a conclave of cardinals.”⁶

The Constitutional Convention repeatedly considered the possibility of electing the President through a national popular vote. On June 2, Wilson suggested that allowing voters to directly decide “would produce more confidence among the people” in the president.⁷ John Dickinson explained on July 25 that the people were “the best and purest source” for the president’s election.⁸

But many delegates objected. Ordinary people, they claimed, would not be able to personally judge the capabilities of leaders from other states. Massachusetts delegate Elbridge Gerry explained that the people shouldn’t be involved, since they would be “too little informed of personal characters in large districts, and liable to deceptions.”⁹ Charles C. Pinckney of South Carolina agreed that ordinary voters would be misled by “designing men.” He also feared that a popular vote would allow the larger states to dominate the presidency.¹⁰

The popular vote was unpopular among many southern delegates for another reason. After tense deliberations, the convention had agreed to include enslaved people in the new nation’s calculations for congressional representation. This decision, known as the Three-Fifths Compromise, increased the south’s influence on the House of Representatives. If the president was elected by popular vote, the South lost this advantage. Madison believed that a popular vote was the best option, but recognized that other southerners would object since there were more white voters in northern states. Under a popular vote, he wrote, the “Southern States . . . could have no influence in the election on the score of the Negroes.”¹¹ North Carolina’s Hugh Williamson noted that a popular vote would be a blow for Virginia’s hopes to dominate the presidential contest since “Her slaves will have no suffrage.”¹²

Nearing the end of their deliberations, the delegates appointed a committee to deal with the sections of the Constitution that had been postponed. According to his account written years later, the Pennsylvania delegate John Dickinson returned from illness to find the committee on the verge of suggesting, once again, that the national legislature elect the president. But Dickinson reminded the meeting that if the people were to accept a president who was so powerful, they would need to be involved in his election. The convention ignored this at their peril. If they excluded the people from a role in electing the president, they might not ratify the Constitution. At Dickinson’s urging, the committee sat down and devised the beginnings of the Electoral College.¹³

The system they developed granted presidential electors to each state, according to the system of representation they had devised for Congress. Each elector would cast two votes. Anyone who received a majority would become president. The second-place finisher would become vice president. The Framers expected that states would cast electoral votes for local leaders. As a result, they believed Presidential candidates would struggle to secure a majority of votes. George Mason predicted that no candidate would win a majority “nineteen times in twenty.”¹⁴ When no candidate secured a majority of electoral votes, the national legislature would choose between the leading candidates in a second round vote. Initially, the committee report indicated that the second-round vote would be decided in the Senate. But to avoid giving the Senate too much power, the delegates eventually decided to allow the House of Representatives, voting as state delegations, to decide the presidency in such cases.

This system was designed to please many of the convention’s vocal interest groups. Large states had more influence in the first round of voting, while small states received more power in the potential second round, where the House of Representatives would vote as state delegations. States with significant enslaved populations would be given electors according to the Three-Fifths Compromise. In these ways, the Electoral College was built on the foundation of the convention’s earlier compromises.¹⁵ Perhaps for that reason, as much as any else, the Convention accepted the committee’s electoral model with relatively little debate.

Critics of the proposed Constitution questioned the legitimacy of a president who had not been directly elected by the people. One newspaper essayist suggested that the Electoral College was an “aristocratic junto” which would exclude the “voice of the people” from choosing the president.¹⁶ A Connecticut physician named Benjamin Gale argued that the people’s will would be so “fettered and muzzled” by the Electoral College system that he would rather flip a coin to choose a leader rather than “pretend to elect” someone.¹⁷ Opponents in Virginia pointed out that the Electoral College system could allow the seven smallest states to choose the president, despite representing only a fraction of the population.¹⁸

Alexander Hamilton wrote the most thorough defense of the Electoral College in one of the “Federalist” essays first published in New York newspapers. According to Hamilton, the decentralized electoral system would prevent cabals and conspiracies from electing their puppets. A separate electoral body also made the executive stronger and independent of every other branch of government, except for the people. The electors would “possess the information and discernment,” which ordinary voters lacked, to select a good president. Indeed, Hamilton predicted that the Constitution’s election process created “a moral certainty” that unfit men would never be chosen. A lying demagogue skilled in “the little arts of popularity” might earn the support of their town or state, but without genuine merit, they could never gain the “confidence of the whole Union.”¹⁹

The Electoral College was partly designed to thwart conspirators from seizing the presidency. The Constitution’s Framers did not expect that national political parties would soon openly conspire across state boundaries to elect their candidates. By the middle of the 1790s, in part driven by competition for the presidency, American politics had divided into two national political parties: the Federalists and the Democratic-Republicans.²⁰

Problems quickly arose. The Electoral College system was not designed for a world of party politics. In 1796, Federalist electors provided enough votes to elevate John Adams to the presidency, but failed to unite behind a vice-presidential candidate. As a result, the runner-up Thomas Jefferson became vice president despite belonging to a different party from Adams. Both parties solved this problem by meeting in closed party caucuses among congressional leaders to decide on candidates ahead of time—just the sort of shadowy process the Electoral College was meant to prevent.

Having learned the importance of party discipline, perhaps too well, in 1800 Democratic-Republican electors accidentally voted in equal numbers for Jefferson and vice-presidential nominee Aaron Burr. This tie vote sent the election to a second round in the Federalist-led House of Representatives, creating a political crisis. Following this fiasco, Americans accepted the reality of party politics by adopting the Twelfth Amendment to the Constitution in 1804. This amendment created separate votes for the presidency and vice presidency, allowing electors to vote for their party’s candidates without risking the uncomfortable results of 1796 and 1800.

In the early stages of debate during the Constitutional Convention, delegate Caleb Strong of Massachusetts objected to the idea of a system of electors, claiming it would “make the Govt. too complex.”²¹ Yet when they debated simpler methods for electing a president, the delegates could not agree on them. Instead, through series of exhausted compromises, they devised a system that remains one of the least-understood parts of the U.S. Constitution.²²

The system’s complexity has produced many unexpected outcomes. On five occasions, in 1824, 1876, 1888, 2000, and 2016, the winner of the Electoral College failed to win the national popular vote. In the first of these, John Quincy Adams secured victory in the House of Representatives despite losing both the popular and electoral votes. The system used to elect the American president has sparked controversy and fierce opposition since its beginning. Whatever you may think of it, the Electoral College has become one of the most important political institutions in American history.