Been Selected by House of Representatives Instead of Electoral
Five times in history, presidential candidates have won the pop vote just lost the Electoral College. This has led some to question why Americans utilize this organisation to elect their presidents in the commencement identify.
Among the many thorny questions debated by the delegates to the 1787 Constitutional Convention, one of the hardest to resolve was how to elect the president. The Founding Fathers debated for months, with some arguing that Congress should option the president and others insistent on a democratic popular vote.
Their compromise is known as the Electoral College.
What Is the Electoral College?
The system calls for the creation, every 4 years, of a temporary group of electors equal to the total number of representatives in Congress. Technically, it is these electors, and not the American people, who vote for the president. In modern elections, the showtime candidate to go 270 of the 538 total electoral votes wins the White House.
The Electoral College was never intended to be the "perfect" system for picking the president, says George Edwards III, emeritus political scientific discipline professor at Texas A&M University.
"It wasn't like the Founders said, 'Hey, what a great idea! This is the preferred fashion to select the primary executive, period,'" says Edwards. "They were tired, impatient, frustrated. They cobbled together this program considering they couldn't concord on anything else."
READ More than: How Are Electoral College Electors Called?
Electoral College: A Organisation Born of Compromise
At the time of the Philadelphia convention, no other country in the world directly elected its chief executive, so the delegates were wading into uncharted territory. Further complicating the task was a deep-rooted distrust of executive power. Afterward all, the fledgling nation had just fought its way out from nether a tyrannical king and overreaching colonial governors. They didn't desire another despot on their hands.
One group of delegates felt strongly that Congress shouldn't have anything to exercise with picking the president. Too much opportunity for chummy abuse betwixt the executive and legislative branches.
Roger Sherman and Oliver Ellsworth in 1787 drafting The Great Compromise, a plan for representation in Congress.
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Some other military camp was dead set against letting the people elect the president by a straight popular vote. Get-go, they thought 18th-century voters lacked the resources to be fully informed about the candidates, especially in rural outposts. 2nd, they feared a headstrong "autonomous mob" steering the country off-target. And third, a populist president appealing straight to the people could command dangerous amounts of power.
Out of those fatigued-out debates came a compromise based on the idea of balloter intermediaries. These intermediaries wouldn't be picked by Congress or elected past the people. Instead, united states of america would each appoint independent "electors" who would cast the actual ballots for the presidency.
READ More: How the Great Compromise Affects Politics Today
Slavery and the Three-Fifths Compromise
But determining exactly how many electors to assign to each land was another sticking point. Here the divide was between slave-owning and non-slave-owning states. It was the same result that plagued the distribution of seats in the House of Representatives: should or shouldn't the Founders include slaves in counting a state's population?
In 1787, roughly 40 percent of people living in the Southern states were enslaved Black people, who couldn't vote. James Madison from Virginia—where enslaved people deemed for 60 percent of the population—knew that either a direct presidential election, or 1 with electors divvied upward according to free white residents only, wouldn't fly in the South.
"The right of suffrage was much more deviating [i.e., extensive] in the Northern than the Southern States," said Madison, "and the latter could have no influence in the election on the score of Negroes."
The result was the controversial "three-fifths compromise," in which three-fifths of the enslaved Black population would be counted toward allocating representatives and electors and calculating federal taxes. The compromise ensured that Southern states would ratify the Constitution and gave Virginia, dwelling to more than 200,000 slaves, a quarter (12) of the full electoral votes required to win the presidency (46).
READ More than: 8 Founding Fathers and How They Helped Shape the Nation
Not only was the creation of the Balloter College in part a political workaround for the persistence of slavery in the U.s.a., but almost none of the Founding Fathers' assumptions well-nigh the electoral system proved true.
The signing of the Constitution of the Us at the Ramble Convention of 1787.
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For starters, in that location were no political parties in 1787. The drafters of the Constitution assumed that electors would vote co-ordinate to their individual discretion, not the dictates of a state or national party. Today, most electors are jump to vote for their party'southward candidate.
And fifty-fifty more important, the Constitution says nothing nearly how the states should allot their electoral votes. The assumption was that each elector's vote would be counted. Merely over time, all but ii states (Maine and Nebraska) passed laws to requite all of their electoral votes to the candidate who wins the country'south popular vote count. Whatever semblance of elector independence has been fully wiped out.
The Founders also assumed that most elections would ultimately be decided past neither the people nor the electors, simply by the House of Representatives. According to the Constitution, if no single candidate wins a bulk of the electoral votes, the decision goes to the House, where each state gets ane vote.
After the unanimous election of George Washington every bit the nation's first president, the Founders figured that consequent elections would characteristic tons of candidates who would divide up the electoral pie into tiny chunks, giving Congress a gamble to pick the winner. Only as shortly as national political parties formed, the number of presidential candidates shrank. Only two U.S. elections have been decided past the House and the last 1 was in 1824.
Why We Still Employ the Electoral College
Senator Charles Schumer (D-NY, left) shakes hands with Senator Bob Bennett (R-UT) afterwards the electoral votes from the 2008 presidential elections were counted and certified in the House Bedchamber in the U.South. Capitol January 8, 2009.
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So why does the Electoral College notwithstanding exist, despite its contentious origins and awkward fit with modern politics? The party in power typically benefits from the existence of the Electoral College, says Edwards, and the minority political party has trivial chance of changing the arrangement because a constitutional amendment requires a 2-thirds supermajority in Congress plus ratification by three-fourths of the states.
Plus the old-schoolhouse balloter arrangement has its benefits. With the Electoral College, for instance, there's no risk of a run-off election or a protracted national recount. Columnist George Will shudders to think of what would have happened in the 1960 election if in that location had been no Electoral College.
"John F. Kennedy's popular vote margin over Richard M. Nixon was merely 118,574," writes Will. "If all 68,838,219 popular votes had been poured into a single national bucket, there would have been powerful incentives to challenge the results in many of the nation's 170,000 precincts."
READ MORE: Presidents Who Lost the Popular Vote But Won the Ballot
Source: https://www.history.com/news/electoral-college-founding-fathers-constitutional-convention
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