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Delegates in Philadelphia agreed, in the summer of 1787, that the new country they were creating would not have a king but an elected executive. But they did not agree on how to elect that president.
Pennsylvania delegate James Wilson called the problem of electing a president “truly one of the most difficult of all that we have to decide.” Other delegates, when later recounting the group’s effort, said that “this very issue embarrasses them more than any other – that various systems were proposed, debated and rejected.”
Howard Chandler Christy / Capitol Architect
The delegates to the Constitutional Convention had to invent a new form of government.
They ran the risk of ending their meetings without finding a way to choose a leader. In fact, this was the last thing to be written in the final draft. If no agreement had been reached, the delegates would not have approved the Constitution.
I’m a civic educator who has also led Purdue University’s Constitution Day celebration for 15 years, and one lesson I keep coming back to is the degree to which the founders had to compromise to ensure ratification. Selecting the president was one of those commitments.
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Three approaches were debated during the Constitutional Convention: election by Congress, selection by state legislatures, and a popular election, although the right to vote was generally restricted to landed white men.
Should Congress elect the president?
Some delegates at the Constitutional Convention thought that allowing Congress to elect the president would provide a buffer from what Thomas Jefferson called “well-intentioned but uninformed people” who, in a nation the size of the United States, “might not have knowledge of characters. eminent and qualifications and the actual selection decision. “
Others were concerned that this approach threatened the separation of powers created in the first three articles of the Constitution: Congress could elect a weak executive to prevent the president from exercising veto power, reducing the effectiveness of one of the checks and balances. of the system. Also, the president may feel indebted to Congress and give up some power to the legislature.
Virginia delegate James Madison was concerned that giving Congress the power to select the president “would make him an executor and a legislator; and then … tyrannical laws can be made to be tyrannically enforced. “
That point of view persuaded fellow Virginian George Mason to reverse his earlier support for the election of the president in Congress and then conclude that he saw “making the Executive the mere creature of the Legislature as a violation of the fundamental principle of good government.” .
US National Archives / Supplied
The Journal of the Federal Convention records the formal proposal for the creation of the Electoral College.
Let state legislators choose
Some delegates thought that getting the states directly involved in choosing the leader of the national government was a good approach for the new federal system.
But others, including Alexander Hamilton, were concerned that states would select a weak executive to increase their own power. Hamilton also observed that legislators often move more slowly than might be expected of top leaders: “In the legislature, speedy decisions are more of an evil than a benefit.”
It may not be as concise as the musical, but the point is clear: don’t trust state legislatures.
Power to the people?
The last approach debated was that of popular election. Some delegates, like the delegate from New York, Gouverneur Morris, saw the president as the “guardian of the people,” whom the public should directly elect.
The southern states objected, arguing that they would be at a disadvantage in a popular election in proportion to their actual populations due to the large number of enslaved people in those states who could not vote. This was ultimately resolved, in one of those many compromises, by counting each enslaved person as three-fifths of a free person for the purposes of representation.
George Mason, a delegate from Virginia, shared Jefferson’s skepticism about regular Americans, saying that it would be “unnatural to refer the choice of a suitable character for chief magistrate to the people, as it would be to refer a color test to a blind man.” . The extension of the Country makes it impossible for the people to have the necessary capacity to judge the respective claims of the Candidates ”.
11 left to make the decision
Delegates appointed an 11-member committee, one from each state at the Constitutional Convention, to resolve this and other tricky issues, which they called the “Grand Committee on Postponed Issues” and tasked with settling “outstanding issues, including how to choose the President”.
At first, six of the 11 members preferred the national popular elections. But they realized that they could not ratify the Constitution with that provision: the southern states simply would not accept it.
Between August 31 and September 4, 1787, the committee struggled to produce an acceptable compromise. The committee’s third report to the Convention proposed the adoption of an elector system, through which both the people and the states would help elect the president. It is unclear which delegate came up with the idea, what was a partly national and partly federal solution, and that it reflected other structures of the Constitution.
Popularity and protection
Hamilton and the other founders were assured that with this compromise system, neither public ignorance nor outside influence would affect the election of a nation’s leader. They believed that voters would ensure that only a qualified person became president. And they thought that the Electoral College would serve as a checkpoint for a public that could easily be fooled, especially by foreign governments.
But the original system, in which the winner of the Electoral College would become president and the second vice president, fell apart almost immediately. By the elections of 1800, political parties had emerged. Because the electoral votes for president and vice president were not included on separate ballots, Democratic-Republican candidates Thomas Jefferson and Aaron Burr tied for the Electoral College, sending the race to the House of Representatives. The House ultimately elected Jefferson as the third president, leaving Burr as vice president, not John Adams, who had topped the list of the opposing federalist party.
The problem was solved in 1804 when the 12th Amendment was ratified, allowing voters to cast separate votes for president and vice president. It has been that way ever since. 
Phillip J VanFossen is the JF Ackerman Professor of Social Studies Education; Director of the Ackerman Center and Associate Director of the Purdue Center for Economic Education at Purdue University.
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
