02 September 2008

Broad Appeal, National Stature

The Electoral College encourages presidential candidates with broad national appeal and discourages third political parties.

The U.S. presidential election system was established by the country’s Founding Fathers more than 220 years ago. This system has not only withstood the test of time, but has also shaped U.S. politics throughout history.

John C. Fortier is a research fellow at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington and the author of a book about the Electoral College, After the People Vote.

By John C. Fortier

Many Americans do not understand every nuance about their presidential selection system, and particularly about what is known as the Electoral College, which determines which individuals become their country’s president and vice president. But they do understand the big picture. Namely, each U.S. state is assigned a number of electors, with the most heavily populated states having the most electors and the least populated states the fewest. Each citizen votes in his or her home state, and the winner of the popular vote in all but two of the states receives all the votes of its state’s electors. The presidential candidate who receives a majority of the electoral votes becomes the president of the United States, and his running mate the vice president.

Of course, there are some additional complexities of the presidential selection system. If the electoral votes are split among many candidates or if two candidates end up with the same number of electoral votes, the House of Representatives selects the president. It is also possible that the national popular vote could favor one candidate and the Electoral College another. But these scenarios are very unlikely. In almost every recent election, the winning candidate has won the popular vote, a majority of states, and the required majority in the Electoral College.

The Electoral College is unpopular with a majority of Americans. Polls show that most Americans would prefer a direct national popular vote because they believe that system would be more democratic.

However, the framers of the U.S. Constitution, who established the Electoral College, did not view it as an elite institution designed to skirt public opinion. They believed that their system of choosing a president rested on the sentiments of the people.

In designing a presidential selection system based on the will of the people, the framers also addressed two other concerns. First, they intended to keep the presidency independent of the legislature and of the states. Second, they sought to ensure the election of a national figure to the presidency.

In addition to these two intended consequences, the Electoral College today has taken on another role not envisioned by the framers, as a bulwark supporting the two-party system in the United States.

Promoting an Independent President

At the Constitutional Convention in 1787, America’s Founding Fathers debated many alternative ways to elect a president. They settled on the Electoral College system only near the end of their deliberations. Their choice of a system for presidential selection was related to the powers and composition of the legislative branch of government, the Congress. Only after the founders agreed on the shape of Congress did they begin serious consideration of how to choose a president.

A compromise as to the form of the Congress very much affected the look of the Electoral College. The great issue of the day was a debate between small states and large states as to how each would be represented in the legislature. The compromise was to have two houses in the legislature -- the House of Representatives and the Senate. In the House of Representatives, states would receive representation based on population, and each state’s representatives would be elected directly by the people, albeit with a significantly more limited franchise than we have today. In the Senate, each state would have equal representation. The small state of Delaware and the large state of Virginia would each have two senators, and these senators would be elected by each state’s legislature. Under a later constitutional amendment, senators are now elected directly by the people.

Once a compromise over Congress had been brokered, the framers of the Constitution sought to ensure that the president would have sufficient powers and stature to be independent of Congress. The framers’ ideas were directly opposite to the thinking that informs parliamentary systems. In the American system, the president would not come out of Congress or be the leader of a congressional party. The framers believed in a separation of powers. If Congress were to select the president, the president would be beholden to Congress, especially if the president had to seek re-election before the Congress. The framers worried that a president elected by Congress would so curry favor with the electing institution that he would be a mere puppet of the legislature rather than an independent voice.

Similarly, the framers did not allow the states to choose the president directly. Instead, they devised a system -- the Electoral College -- in which electors would be appointed from each state. The state legislatures would have a say in how the electors were chosen. In the earliest presidential elections, some states provided that the people would elect the electors; some prescribed popular elections in districts, which could result in a state splitting its electors among several candidates; and some state legislatures appointed the electors directly, without a popular election. In the first 40 years of the republic, most states moved to give the people the right to elect their electors, and they moved to a system whereby the winner of the popular vote in each state would win all of the electoral votes from the state.

One other feature of the electors bears noting. The electors from each state meet to cast their votes for president, but all the state electors never meet together as one single national body.

The allocation of electors to the states mirrored the compromise in Congress, with each state assigned a number of electors based on the number of members in the House of Representatives and the number of senators. Thus, each of the smallest states would have three electors, one for its representative in the House of Representatives plus two for its two senators. Today, the most populous U.S. state, California, has 55 electors -- 53 for its representatives in the House of Representatives and two for its two senators. The final allocation is broadly proportional to population, with the largest states having more electors than the smallest, although small states are somewhat overrepresented in the Electoral College due to the principle of state equality in the Senate.

Electing a National Figure

The worst-kept secret among the framers of the Constitution was that George Washington would be the first president of the United States. He was a consensus national hero, and he ran successfully for president twice with no opposition.

George Washington, depicted taking the oath of office as the first president, was the only president who faced no election opposition.

But the framers worried that after Washington there were few men of national stature who would attract the votes of states that were isolated by poor transportation systems and parochial attachments. The original Electoral College was designed to encourage the selection of a national figure. Under the original Electoral College, electors could each cast two votes, but only one of these votes could go to a candidate from their home state. The candidate with the most votes would become president, and the candidate with the second greatest number would become vice president.

The framers believed that electors might cast one vote for a “favorite son” from their state, but that they would have to consider a widely known national candidate for the other vote.

In addition to this feature, the original Electoral College presumed that there would be no political parties or political tickets of a president and vice president. The person with the second-highest number of votes might come from a different region or faction than the president. In today’s terms, it would be the equivalent of electing Republican George W. Bush president in 2004 and making the runner-up, Democrat John Kerry, the vice president.

The system did work to encourage presidential electors to vote for national figures. John Adams and Thomas Jefferson emerged as nationally known rivals within George Washington’s administration.

But the framers’ conception of a government without political parties broke down quickly. John Adams and Alexander Hamilton became identified as Federalists, and Thomas Jefferson and James Madison as Democratic Republicans (the forerunner of today’s Democratic Party). The original Electoral College, in which each elector cast two votes, did not work well with such a party system.

In the election of 1800, Thomas Jefferson ran as president for the Democratic Republican Party, and Aaron Burr ran as his vice president. This political ticket beat the Federalist incumbent president, John Adams, and his running mate, Charles Pinckney. But all of the electors who voted once for Jefferson also voted for Burr. While the intention of everyone was for Jefferson to be president and Burr vice president, the two ended up in a tie. The House of Representatives, still in the control of the Federalists, then had to decide the election. This led to machinations by the Federalist Party in Congress and by Burr, and there was a period of uncertainty as to who would become president. Ultimately, cooler heads prevailed, and Jefferson was elected president by the House. But the experience led to the 12th Amendment to the Constitution, which provides that each elector casts one vote for president and the other for vice president.

Two-Party System

The framers did not conceive of a political party system and certainly did not design the Electoral College to promote one. But over time, the Electoral College has strengthened the two-party system of Democrats and Republicans.

First, states moved to make their elections winner-take-all. In a winner-take-all system, a party must be strong enough to win the popular vote in a state, not just get a noticeable percentage.

Second, Electoral College makes it necessary for parties to win states in multiple regions of the country. One could not gain a majority by winning just the South or the Northeast. And in fact, almost every recent successful presidential candidate has won a majority of the states.

After the 1800 election when the Electoral College was changed, only once has the presidential election failed to produce a winner with a majority of the electors, thereby sending the election to the House of Representatives for a decision. That was in 1824, when the early party system was evolving.

In 1860, Republican Abraham Lincoln won election with a plurality of the popular vote, less than 40 percent, benefiting from a Democratic Party split and multiple candidates, but he still received a majority of the electors.

From time to time, third-party candidates, such as former President Theodore Roosevelt in 1912 running against his protégé, President William Howard Taft, won states and electoral votes. But those third-party candidates have never won the presidency, and the parties tended to die out quickly as they were not able to sustain the national effort needed to win the presidency or to win significant seats in Congress.

Since 1972, no third-party candidate has won a majority in a single state. Even candidate Ross Perot, who won nearly 20 percent of the popular vote in 1992, was not strong enough to win a plurality of votes in any single state.

The Test of Time

There have been many movements to change the Electoral College and to adopt a straight national popular vote. Since its creation, the Electoral College has been changed formally by constitutional amendment and informally as various party systems that interact with it have come and gone. The framers of the Constitution would recognize today’s Electoral College as an institution that is consistent with the separation of powers, with the president elected independently of Congress and the states.

The framers did not foresee the rise of political parties, but they wanted national figures in the office of president, and one consequence of the Electoral College has been to make it hard for third parties, regional factions, or lesser figures to gain the presidency.

All in all, the basic thrust of the Electoral College to elect a president with broad popular appeal, not dependent on Congress, and with national stature still operates today.

The opinions expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect the views or policies of the U.S. government.