The sordid history of the Electoral College (final part of a three-part series)

(You may also want to read Part I and Part II of this series.)

I'm going to tell two competing stories about the history of the US Electoral College. One of these stories was written in 1992 by William C. Kimberling, who was then the deputy director of the Federal Election Commission's Office of Election Administration. The other story was written by brothers Akhil Reed Amar and Vikram David Amar for the FindLaw web site.

In Kimberling's rather quaint version of the story, we have a much smaller nation than today--just 4 million people, spread out along the Atlantic seaboard, residing in "thirteen large and small States jealous of their own rights and suspicious of any central government" They believed that "political parties were mischievous if not downright evil," and "felt that gentlemen should not campaign for public office."

The framers of the Constitution considered having Congress choose the president, but rejected that idea because it would break down the separation of powers between the executive and legislative branches of government. They considered having state legislatures select the president, but feared that this would erode federal authority.

Having a direct popular election of the president was also rejected. Writes Kimberling:

Direct election was rejected not because the Framers of the Constitution doubted public intelligence but rather because they feared that without sufficient information about candidat es from outside their State, people would naturally vote for a "favorite son" from their own State or region. At worst, no president would emerge with a popular majority sufficient to govern the whole country. At best, the choice of president would always be decided by the largest, most populous States with little regard for the smaller ones.

In contrast, the Electoral College would be made up of "the most knowledgeable and informed individuals from each State to select the president based solely on merit and without regard to State of origin or political party."

According to the Amar brothers, the real motivation behind this scheme was much less noble:

The biggest flaw in standard civics accounts of the electoral college is that they never mention the real demon dooming direct national election in 1787 and 1803: slavery.

At the Philadelphia convention, the visionary Pennsylvanian James Wilson proposed direct national election of the President. But in a key speech on July 19, the savvy Virginian James Madison suggested that such a system would prove unacceptable to the South: "The right of suffrage was much more diffusive in the Northern than the Southern States; and the latter could have no influence in the election on the score of Negroes."

In other words, in a direct election system, the North would outnumber the South, whose many slaves (more than half a million in all) of course could not vote. But the electoral college-a prototype of which Madison proposed in this same speech-instead let each southern state count its slaves, albeit with a two-fifths discount, in computing its share of the overall electoral college.

The Amars add that the electoral college system also discouraged states from granting women the right to vote. Under a system of direct popular elections, the more voters a state had, the more its citizens would influence national elections. With the electoral college, what mattered was how many people lived in each state, not how many of those people could vote.

Kimberling and the Amar brothers agree that the method of conducting presidential elections outlined in the original constitution was transformed by the Twelfth Amendment . Originally, each elector cast two votes for president. The man with the most votes became president, and the runner-up became vice president. When there were no political parties, this system was workable.

But in the election of 1800, two rudimentary political parties--the Federalists led by John Adams and the Democratic-Republicans led by Thomas--squared off against each other. The Democratic-Republicans came out on top. As the Amar brothers note, "without the extra electoral college votes generated by slavery, the mostly southern states that supported Jefferson would not have sufficed to give him a majority...Thomas Jefferson metaphorically rode into the executive mansion on the backs of slaves."

But there was at least one serious glitch in the process. Thomas Jefferson and Aaron Burr, both representing the Democratic-Republicans, came out with the same number of electoral votes. Kimberling points out that "The tie was resolved by the House of Representatives in Jefferson's favor -- but only after 36 tries and some serious political dealings which were considered unseemly at the time."

The Twelfth Amendment was written to keep such a thing from happening again. It left the South's unfair electoral advantage in place. But it accommodated political parties by changing the system so that electors each cast one vote for president and one vote for vice president.

With the establishment of nationwide political parties, presidential candidates began to run nationwide campaigns for direct voter approval. Given this situation, the Amar brothers say,

Americans must ask themselves whether we want to maintain this peculiar institution in the twenty-first century.

After all, most millennial Americans no longer believe in slavery or sexism. We do not believe that voters lack proper information about national candidates. We do not believe that a national figure claiming a national mandate is unacceptably dangerous. What we do believe is that each American is an equal citizen. We celebrate the idea of one person, one vote-an idea undermined by the electoral college.

Well, maybe not quite everyone celebrates the idea of one person, one vote. Republican operatives are prone to using a variety of shady tactics to suppress voter turnout. Over at Truthdig, Bill Boyarsky argues that efforts to intimidate voters, challenge their eligibility, and subject them to long lines might prove decisive if the election is close. It seems to me that such tactics would be less effective if they had to be applied nationwide, in every precinct, rather than in a few swing states.

The Amar brothers provide more reasons for abolishing the Electoral College and a practical plan for making it happen. As someone who would like to promote democracy and resist the rule of manipulative elites, moving toward direct popular election of the president seems like a good step to take.