Introduction

Why has the Electoral College endured— despite the hundreds of

proposed amend-ments, scores of congressional hearings, thousands of
books and articles, and a growing handful of disputed and unpop u lar
election outcomes? Why has this institution remained unchanged since
the early nineteenth century despite its awkward fit with democratic values,
the weight of modern public opinion, and its failure to ever function in
the deliberative manner envi-sioned by the framers of the Constitution?
These are historical questions, yet they are prompted not only by
curiosity about the past but also by con-temporary voices, the voices of
countless American citizens who straight-forwardly ask every four years:
Why do we elect our presidents this way? Such questions, remarkably,
have received very little attention from histo-rians, perhaps because they
invert the historian’s customary intellectual burden. What begs for
explanation here is not change, but its absence, over the course of two
centuries.22
Framing the inquiry in this way, of course, implicitly suggests that the
reasons for the survival of the Electoral College are not self-evident—that
it is not the case, for example, that the institution is still with us because it
is undeniably the best way to elect a president or because the claims made
. 6 .
 Introduction

in its support have always been more compelling than the arguments for
reform or abolition. This study does not directly join contemporary debates
about the merits and flaws of the Electoral College—there would be little
to add to the work of previous writers—but it does proceed from the judg-
ment that the flaws have been sufficiently salient that the institution’s sur-
vival requires explanation. Although there are, and always have been,
defenders of the Electoral College, few have maintained that the institu-
tion was unproblematic; and even a cursory glance at the historical record
makes plain that the system has not survived because of the shattering
brilliance of the arguments made in its behalf.23
Nor can the survival of the Electoral College be explained by a simple
proposition that has circulated as conventional wisdom in recent decades:
that small states have stood as an effective, even impenetrable, roadblock
against change because the Electoral College enhances their political in-
fluence (by granting them more electoral votes per capita than large states).
That argument is plausible but historically untrue, as the chapters that
follow will demonstrate. For one thing, most proposals for reform, from
the early 1800s into the 1950s, would not have eliminated the small-state
advantage: they aimed to abolish winner-take-all and / or the apparatus of
having electors, but they would not have altered the allocation of electoral
votes to the states. Among the common reform proposals, only a national
popular vote would have terminated the per capita advantage in electoral
votes that accrues to the small states.24
Members of Congress from small states, moreover, have not been pre-
dictable or reliable opponents of a national popular vote. Senator John Pas-
tore of Rhode Island, for example, was a staunch advocate of precisely
such a reform in the 1950s and 1960s. “I want to do away with the Elec-
toral College,” Pastore declared. “I say that when the people go to the polls
the man who receives the greatest number of votes should be elected Presi-
dent of the people. . . . It makes no difference to me how many electoral
votes the people of Rhode Island have.”25 The evidence is more than an-
ecdotal: analyses of roll call votes on national popular vote proposals in
the 1960s and 1970s make clear that there was no small-state bloc, that
representatives of the smallest states were divided on the issue in both the
House and the Senate.26 Public opinion polls also indicate that residents
of small states have generally favored abolition of the Electoral College.27
. 7 .
 Introduction

Indeed, for key periods of our history, the prevailing view—put forward
by politicians and commentators alike—has been that large states, not
small states, have been the primary beneficiaries of the Electoral College.
In 1956 Senator Price Daniel of Texas insisted in congressional debate that
it was large states like New York and Ohio that “have undue weight . . .
under our present system.”28
The reasons for the failure of Electoral College reform are, in fact,
complex, and most of them have varied in significance over time. The one
important historical constant has been the difficulty of amending the U.S.
Constitution. Changing the nation’s fundamental law requires the sup-
port of two-thirds of each branch of Congress, followed by the approval
of three-quarters of the states. These are high procedural hurdles, and it is
possible, perhaps likely, that some reform proposals would have cleared
even slightly lower barriers. (A prime example is the 1969–1970 proposal
for a national popular vote that sailed through the House but fell short of
the two-thirds threshold in the Senate.) Still, the difficulty of the process
cannot, in itself, account for the long track record of failure. Despite the
challenge of attaining supermajorities, Congress and the states have, in
fact, passed ten amendments that altered electoral processes and proce-
dures. Some of these addressed relatively minor procedural matters (such
as the date on which the winner of a presidential election assumes office);
but six have dealt with consequential issues of voting rights, and the Sev-
enteenth Amendment mandated the direct election of senators. The
amendment process has been an impediment, but not an insuperable ob-
stacle, to the reform of electoral institutions.29
Presidential election reform has also been hindered by the simple, if
often unrecognized, fact that the Electoral College is not a stand-alone
institution. In its design and operation, the Electoral College is intertwined
with other facets and features of the nation’s political structure and organ-
ization, complicating efforts at reform and sometimes sparking resistance
that had little to do with ideas about electoral systems. The Electoral College
has always, for example, been embedded in the web, and thus the tensions,
of federalism. Although the presidency is a national office, the electoral
blueprint drawn up by the framers called for the president to be chosen
through procedures largely determined by the states. According to Article
II, section 1, Congress has the power to determine the date on which elec-
. 8 .
 Introduction

tors will be chosen and the date on which they “shall give their votes,” but
everything else was left to the states—including the breadth of the fran-
chise, the rules governing the allocation of electoral votes among candi-
dates, how candidates got on the ballot, and whether there would even be
a popular election to choose electors. The autonomy of the states in these
matters, their control over the electoral process, would almost inevitably
be diminished by federal reform. “Abolition of the electoral college would
mean the taking over of presidential elections by the national government,”
observed the Washington Post in 1916 in response to a surge of sentiment
in favor of a national popular election. As the editors of the Post knew well,
states had long been reluctant to cede any of their powers to the federal
government, and that reluctance has often surfaced during debates over
electoral reform.30
Other sources of resistance have been more fluid, shifting over time as
political contexts have evolved. Proposals to choose electors by congres-
sional district, for example, have long had a straightforward appeal, but they
seemed more problematic in eras—like the late nineteenth century or the
early twenty-first—when gerrymandering has been particularly rampant.31
Prior to a series of critical Supreme Court decisions in the early 1960s,
moreover, congressional districts did not reliably conform to the principle
of “one person, one vote,” and many states, particularly in the first half of
the twentieth century, drew district boundaries that heavily favored
rural areas. As a result, urban members of Congress sometimes displayed
little sympathy for this alternative, whatever their views of the Electoral
College.32
Efforts to replace the Electoral College with a national popular vote
have run up against a more troubling obstacle: slavery and its legacy. Be-
fore the Civil War, as is well known, the “three-fifths clause” gave the slave
states of the South congressional seats, and therefore electoral votes, in pro-
portion to their white populations plus three-fifths of their slaves (who, of
course, could not vote). This arrangement effectively gave southern whites
influence in presidential elections disproportionate to their numbers, an
advantage they would have surrendered with a national popular vote. In the
late nineteenth century, after the “redemption” of the South barred free
African-Americans from the ballot box, this pattern reemerged in stronger
form. From the 1890s into the 1960s, an undeclared “five-fifths clause” (with
. 9 .
 Introduction

African-Americans counting fully for representation but still unable to

vote) permitted southern whites to wield far more power through the Elec-
toral College than they would have in a national popular election. As
Washington Post columnist Drew Pearson observed in 1944, the “Southern
States now have 25.2 percent of the nation’s vote in the Electoral College”
while casting “only 12 percent of the popular vote.” This was an advantage
that white southerners welcomed and fought to keep; they also knew that
a national vote would create pressures to broaden the franchise in their
states. The design of the Electoral College was such that states did not
lose any influence in presidential elections by imposing restrictions on the
right to vote.33

. 10 .